“After Years of Belt-Tightening, Weary England Is Feeling the Pinch,” announced a front-page, above-the-fold headline in the New York Times on May 28. It’s a lengthy article—more than 3,000 words—replete with stories about declining public services and attendant growth in social ills.
The message, of course, is one the average Times reader will have no trouble deciphering: Decreases in public spending, such as those advocated by fiscally conservative parties in Europe and North America, generate ruin and despair. But the story’s author, Peter Goodman, makes it explicit just to be sure: “For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. A wave of austerity has yielded a country that has grown accustomed to living with less, even as many measures of social well-being—crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness—point to a deteriorating quality of life.”
We confess we only made it halfway through Goodman’s story of woe. And so we never made it to the 65th paragraph. That, as Joseph Bishop-Henchman of the Tax Foundation pointed out, is where Goodman slipped in this little detail: “Britain spends roughly the same portion of its national income on public spending today as it did a decade ago, said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.”
Well, there’s that!
On closer inspection, the story is a pretty routine one. When Labour took power in 1997, Britain effected enormous increases in public spending. Those increases soon outstripped revenues by a wide margin. When the Conservatives took over in 2010, they were obliged to bring public expenditures back into line with revenues. Those spending cuts, necessary though they were, have generated some resentment.
If we live long enough to see our country’s Republicans mimic their British counterparts’ crazy insistence on aligning spending with revenue, we hope Peter Goodman will still be around to blame the GOP for all the crime and poverty and drug addiction brought about by “austerity.”
