The great austerity war: what caused the US deficit crisis and who should pay to fix it?
认为美国赤字危机源于从战后新政模式转向新自由主义模式，导致增长缓慢、不平等加剧和赤字上升，主张通过提高富人和大公司税收、削减军费、采用全民医保来解决，而非削减公共支出。
Rapidly rising deficits at both the federal and state and local government levels, along with prospective long-term financing problems in the Social Security and Medicare programmes, have triggered a one-sided austerity-focused class war in the USA and around the globe. A coalition of the richest and most economically powerful segments of society, conservative politicians who represent their interests and right-wing populist groups like the Tea Party has demanded that deficits be eliminated by severe cuts at all levels of government in spending that either supports the poor and the middle class or funds crucial public investment. It also demands tax cuts for the rich and for business. These demands constitute a deliberate attempt to destroy the New Deal project, begun in the 1930s, whose goal was to subject capitalism to democratic control. In this paper I argue that our deficit crisis is the result of a shift from the New Deal-based economic model of the early postwar period to today's neoliberal, free-market model. The new model has generated slow growth, rising inequality and rising deficits. Rising deficits in turn created demands for austerity. After tracing the long-term evolution of our current deficit crisis, I show that this crisis should be resolved primarily by raising taxes on upper-income households and large corporations, cutting war spending and adopting a Canadian- or European-style health care system. Calls for massive government spending cuts should be seen as what they are--an attack by the rich and powerful against the basic interests of the American people. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.