Artículo publicado por Vicenç Navarro en la revista COUNTERPUNCH, 8 de marzo de 2012
Este artículo publicado en la
revista Counterpunch, la revista progresista de mayor difusión de
Estados Unidos, analiza las consecuencias de las políticas de austeridad
en España, presentando políticas alternativas que podrían haberse
implementado si hubiera habido voluntad política para hacerlo. El
artículo es una adaptación para esta revista de otro artículo publicado
en Social Europe Journal.
There are some misconceptions that exist
about Spain among large sectors of the progressive community in the
United States. Partially this is a result of the very poor coverage
that exists about Europe in general and about Spain in particular in the
press in the U.S. Most economists in the US get the economic news
about Spain from the Financial Times and to a lesser degree, from The
Economist.
We have seen in the last few days
several events that are indicators of that limited knowledge. There,
for example, was President Obama congratulating Chancellor Angela Merkel
for the leadership she is providing in Europe, applauding at the same
time the policies of the new conservative government, presided over by
Mr. Rajoy in Spain, for the reforms that government has introduced in
Spain. Granted that to define Obama as a progressive requires a certain
effort, and his ability to disappoint progressives is limitless, but
someone should inform him that Chancellor Merkel has been one of the
more reactionary leaders Europe has ever had in democratic times and is
imposing extreme austerity in the most frontal attack the welfare state
has been under in all the countries of the Eurozone.
The devastating effects of those
policies are clearly seen in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.
Regarding the government of Rajoy, his party is a successor of the
nomenklatura of the fascist dictatorship. Its founder, Manuel Fraga, was
a leading figure in that state and defender to the very last day of the
repression carried out by the Franco dictatorship (120,000 people are
still ‘disappeared’). And that party has always been the political
instrument of the more reactionary forces in Spain, including banking
and the large corporations. His current minister of economy was the
Spanish director of Lehman Brothers at the time of its collapse. The
reforms that President Obama celebrated have been the most frontal
attack the working class has seen since democracy was born in Spain.
These “reforms” are responsible for the dismantling of the already
poorly funded Spanish welfare state.
More worrisome is the recent article by
Paul Krugman in the March 7 edition of the New York Times in which he
also applauds Mr. Rajoy’s statement that he cannot further reduce the
deficit as his friend, Chancellor Merkel, has instructed. I consider
Paul Krugman one of the clearer minds in the U.S., but he blew this one.
Mr. Rajoy and his government have dramatically increased the cuts that
were initiated by the previous Socialist government led by Mr.
Zapatero. Mr. Rajoy has made things much worse and the situation among
the young is devastating. The fact that Rajoy was willing to implement
the cuts slower than Merkel does not make him deserving of any praise
from any progressive voice. Needless to say, the right-wing media are
now using Krugman’s statements as political support for the policies of
the government. But another point that Krugman emphasizes is that there
is nothing Spain can do short of getting out of the Euro. That
alternative should indeed be considered, but his basic assumption is to
be questioned. I now offer a modified version of an article published
inSocial Europe Journal that addressed that point. I would hope it
could be widely distributed in the U.S.
A widely held belief in political
circles of the left is that a country like Spain cannot follow
expansionist policies on its own. It is said over and over again that
unless the entire EU or, at least, the Eurozone expands, one country
cannot do it alone. This was indeed the position of the Zapatero
government during these three years of crisis. The only thing the
government could do, according to Zapatero, was reduce the public
deficit by cutting public expenditures, including public social
expenditures, hoping these cuts would reassure the financial markets,
convincing them the Spanish government was fully committed to fiscal
responsibility, defining responsibility as “austerity”. His government
continued cutting and cutting, leading the country into a recession.
His major claim when he left office a few weeks ago was that he had
avoided direct intervention by the troika (European Central Bank,
European Commission and the IMF), as Portugal had been forced to accept.
Zapatero was defeated primarily because of the largest decline ever of
the electoral base of the Socialist Party. In a very short period of
time, four years, the Socialist Party has lost, besides the country’s
central governance, the majority of regional governments and the major
cities of the country, which explains why the conservative party (PP)
won big in the parliamentary elections even though its electoral support
barely increased.
It was not a victory of the PP, but
rather a spectacular defeat of the Socialist Party. The economic
policies of the PP government continue to focus on austerity policies.
As a consequence, the recession continues on its way to the Great
Depression (48 per cent of the young are unemployed) and Rajoy, the new
President of the PP government, has indicated he will apply the same
measures Portugal was forced to follow when the intervention in that
county took place. It seems, after all, that the Zapatero austerity
policies did not prevent Spain from enduring intervention. It is
log
There are not alternatives?
The data show there are alternatives,
unfortunately not considered by the Socialist Party, even now after its
recent Congress, where the absence of self criticism was the major
disappointing feature of the Congress. It is obvious that that party
should face stronger self-criticism than has so far occurred. It seems
the only alternatives being considered are to make the cuts less
rapidly and less intensely than the PP government is implementing. But
nowhere else is a 180 degree change calling for expansionist policies
being considered.
Which leads to the starting point of my
article. The argument made by the leadership of that party is that
unless there is some new Franklin Roosevelt on the European scene
calling for a New Deal, Spain cannot do it alone.
There is no question that a new Franklin
Roosevelt would help a lot, but that does not mean that Spain could not
follow expansionist policies if its government wished to do so. And
the data are there to prove it. These data show there are alternatives.
Zapatero cut pensions in an attempt to
save 1,200 million euros. But he could have realized even more
revenues for the state (2,100 million euros) if he had reinstated the
wealth taxes he eliminated in his first mandate (2004-2008) or by
reversing all cuts in the inheritance tax he implemented during the same
period, thereby getting an additional 2,552 million euros. Or he could
have reversed the tax cuts he granted to individuals making more than
120,000 euros per year, recovering 2,500 million euros. The data are
there for all to see. And indeed the population saw. The popular
classes (the working and middle classes), who used to vote for the
socialists, asked why the pensions had to be reduced while maintaining
tax cuts for the well-to-do. This is why they abandoned the Socialist
Party in the recent election.
But the list of alternatives is much
larger. Zapatero tried to save 6,000 million euros by reducing
expenditures in the National Health Services (which already has the
lowest public health expenditures per capita in the EU 15). He did it
indirectly by pressuring the regional governments, which actually run
the regional branches of the National Health Service, to reduce their
expenditures. Meanwhile, Zapatero did not reverse the tax cuts he had
granted to the large corporations which have more than 150 million euros
a year in sales (which represents less than 0.1 per cent of all
business in Spain). If he had done so, the Spanish state would have had
5,300 million euros more.
Zapatero also tried to cut education and
social services. These cuts plus the cuts in health should have led to
savings of 25,000 million euros but he could have obtained even larger
amounts (44,000 million euros) by correcting the fiscal fraud of large
fortunes, large corporations and the banks that, according to the
Internal Revenue Service of the Spanish state, represents 70 per cent of
all tax fraud.
Zapatero also tried to save 600 million
euros by cutting the highly popular home care services, a federal
program administered with the regional governments which he had
introduced in his first mandate. Instead of cutting them, however, he
could have obtained even larger revenues (800 million euros) by
eliminating the public subsidies to the Catholic Church for religious
teaching in public schools (which incidentally is unconstitutional in
Spain). He could also have cut some of the new military equipment
(Tiger helicopters and other machinery) from the defense budget. My
colleagues, Juan Torres, Professor of Economics in Seville, and Alberto
Garzon, another economist, and myself have written a book that sold like
hotcakes in Spanish bookstores calledThere Are Alternatives, a book the
banking industry tried to suppress by pressuring the major publisher of
Spain, Aguilar, to withdraw publication of the book (it was finally
published by a smaller publisher).
What is outrageous in all these policies
is that all the polls show that had the Spanish people been given a
voice on whether they prefer the cuts in public and social expenditures
or the reversal of the tax cuts that we show in our book, the
overwhelming majority would have preferred the second option rather than
the first one. But in spite of that, the policies carried out by the
socialist government relied on the first, rather than the second
alternative. It is therefore no surprise that the Zapatero government
had the lowest vote of all the socialist parties before it. People are
not only angry (Spain currently has the largest number of days lost due
to strikes in Europe after Greece) but profoundly disappointed with the
Socialist Party because they do not accept the message that there are no
alternatives. But there are.
The roots of the problem were already
expressed in the philosophy that Zapatero and his colleagues soon
articulated after his election as President of the country in 2004. He
indicated that cutting taxes was a left-wing policy and his economic
advisor, Jordi Sevilla, had written a book on the New Socialism in which
he discouraged raising taxes and expanding public expenditures (this in
a country in the EU-15 that has low taxation and low expenditures).
Zapaterismo was the Spanish version of the “Third Way”. Unfortunately,
it was not the only one in Europe. It has become the dominant form of
social democracy in Europe which is why social democracy is in deep
trouble. Unfortunately, I do not see the profound change that is
requird in their mentality.
Are expansionist policies possible?
If Spain had adopted the same fiscal
policies as Sweden and had invested in order to correct the enormous
deficits in the social infrastructure of the country over the past 10
years, facilitating, among other things, the integration of women in the
labor force, the Spanish state would be receiving 200,000 million more
euros than it is today. With these 200,000 million euros, the Spanish
state could have created 5 million jobs, which is the same number of
people who are unemployed in Spain. The creation of those jobs would
have eliminated unemployment and stimulated the economy. If the
underdeveloped welfare state of Spain had 1 adult person for every 4
working in the services of the welfare state, as in Sweden, rather than 1
out of every 10, Spain would create enough jobs to eliminate
unemployment.
These revenues would be obtained by
taxing all those groups that benefit most from the policies of tax cuts
followed during the pre-crisis period. Those tax increases would not
have dampened consumption if the revenues obtained had been invested in
job creation, particularly low and medium salary jobs.
This could have been done if the
political will would have been there. The problem is that the
Socialists did not dare enact the fiscal reforms, among others, that
would have antagonized very powerful forces in Spain. That is, as it
always is, the true issue.
