Peter Goodman, New York Times European economics correspondent (and proud purveyor of left-wing economic nostrums under the guise of objective reporting) is not letting the coronavirus crisis go to waste, issuing two articles calling for a socialist response.
In “The Nordic Way to Economic Rescue: Government-Issued Paychecks for All,” Goodman cited an amorphous blob of “many economists" that conveniently agreed.
What is needed, say many economists, is not a spur to economic activity, but a comprehensive rescue for people harmed while normal life is frozen: The government should step in and issue paychecks directly to prevent a disastrous wave of joblessness.
“Many economists” stands in for “what Peter Goodman thinks.” Read on, remembering this is a “news” story.
But having the government nationalize American payrolls is the sort of idea that may seem as practical as sprinkling the landscape with fairy dust. It would cost untold trillions of dollars, yielding substantially larger budget deficits. In a country that tends to find cash for tax cuts and military spending while pleading insolvency to everything else, that makes it politically unimaginable.
....
The emergency threatening the global economy has reached such a magnitude that it demands a radical departure from the traditional policy playbook, assert many economists.
It's uncanny how “many economists” agree with Goodman.
But the alarming moment at hand should change the calculus, say these economists....
Two days earlier, Goodman wrote “Putting Austerity on Hold, European Leaders Fight Pandemic With Cash.”
The coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe with lethal and wealth-destroying consequences has proved so jarring to the powers-that-be on the European side of the Atlantic that they have discarded deep-set taboos to forge atypically swift and pragmatic responses.
In Goodman’s eyes, a “pragmatic response” means transforming free-market leaning countries into full-blown socialist welfare states.
During the last crisis, the global financial catastrophe of 2008, the authorities protected corporate interests above those of ordinary people, many economists assert. Britain and the European Union bailed out financial institutions, then recovered the costs by hacking away at public services, effectively punishing laborers and taxpayers for the sins of wealthy bankers.
Only a dozen years later, Europe and Britain are again dispensing enormous sums of public money to rescue large businesses from economic devastation. Will the authorities condition their aid on requirements that companies avoid layoffs? Will governments permanently banish austerity, concluding that excessive budget-cutting has left national health systems especially vulnerable to the virus?
....As right-wing populist parties surged in Italy, France, Sweden and Germany --often while attacking the European Union as an ossified vessel of the elite -- pundits wondered whether this might finally end the punishment of austerity. It was not to be.
Any rational limit on government spending and involvement in economic life is smeared as dangerous “austerity.”
The pandemic has exposed the consequences of austerity, forcing Italian doctors to make anguished choices about who lives and who dies in the face of a shortage of respirators....
