{"id":575,"date":"2009-02-16T19:45:35","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T00:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=575"},"modified":"2009-02-16T23:14:15","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T04:14:15","slug":"575","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2009\/02\/16\/575\/","title":{"rendered":"New Deal, No Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

A topic of contention in my courses is whether the U.S. government is beginning its gradual decline into Socialism with the passage and imminent signing of a massive stimulus bill. John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney have a thought provoking article<\/a> at Monthly Review where they assess the prospects for a “New New Deal.” While the article is worth a read in its own right, they provide some very useful charts on American domestic spending over time and in comparison to other countries.<\/p>\n

The crux of their argument is that federal “consumption” has maxed our at around 15% of GDP since the New Deal era. Even during the 1930’s, domestic spending was restricted to what they call “ad hoc salvage,” not massive public works. This graph traces the U.S. government’s domestic consumption\/spending since the 1930’s. <\/p>\n

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Their argument is that this 15% cap is held in place by monopoly capital<\/a>, a term used by Economist Paul Sweezy in a 1966 book of the same title. The theory is that entrenched elite oligarchs have little desire for government to spend beyond a basic level of domestic investment and thus collude to keep domestic spending down. <\/p>\n

They suggest that weak labor unions and an excessively pro-private capital political culture is to blame for our underinvestment. As evidence, they provide comparative info on government spending as a percentage of GDP. And they advocate for increased government expenditure and call for a major restructuring of our political economy to make it happen (after all this is published in Monthly Review).<\/p>\n

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While I’m not big a big believer of the coordinative abilities of a superstructure to ensure a 15% “cap,” it does provide food for thought. I’m more disposed to believe that a path dependent<\/em> process exists where Congress and the president, for political reasons, look askance at raising or lowering domestic public spending much beyond the previous year’s levels (at least until the last administration). <\/p>\n

At the very least, it provides ammunition for those semi-heated classroom discussions on the perceived U.S. slide into socialism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A topic of contention in my courses is whether the U.S. government is beginning its gradual decline into Socialism with the passage and imminent signing of a massive stimulus bill. John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney have a thought provoking article at Monthly Review where they assess the prospects for a “New New Deal.” While […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":579,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions\/579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}