Why are democratic countries so pathetic when it comes to managing their money sustainably?

The following is a short excerpt from Betting with Trillions  - Prison of Debt Paralyzes West, By Cordt Schnibben at Spiegel Online:

[snip]

Can all of this be blamed on some sort of human debt gene? Is it wastefulness, stupidity or an error in the system? There are two views on how the government should use its budgets to influence the economy: the theory of demand, established by Keynes, advocates creating debt-financed government demand, which in turn generates private demand and produces government revenues. In other words, building a road provides construction workers with wages. They pay taxes, and they also use their wages to buy furniture, which in turn provides furniture makers with income, and so on.

The other view, supply-side economics, is based on the assumption that economic growth is determined by the underlying conditions for companies, whose investment activity depends on high earnings, low wages and low taxes. According to this theory, the government encourages growth through lower tax rates. In the last few decades, the frequent transitions of power in Western countries between politicians who support supply-side economics (conservatives, libertarians and now some center-left social democrats) and those who advocate Keynesian economics (social democrats) has driven up government debt. When some politicians came into power, they reduced government revenues, and when they were replaced by those of the opposite persuasion, spending went up. Some did both.

When the debts of companies and private households are added to the public debt, the sum of all debt has grown at twice the rate of economic output since 1985, and it is now three times the size of the gross world product. The developed economies apparently need credit-financed demand to continue to grow, and they need consumers, companies and governments that go into debt and put off the financing of their demand until some time in the future. Of its own accord, this economic system produces the compulsion to drive up the debt of public and private households.

Governments delegate power and creative force to the markets, in the hope of reaping growth and employment, thereby expanding the financial latitude of policymakers. Government budgets that were built on debt continued to create the illusion of power, until the markets exerted their power through interest.

Interest spending is now the third-largest item in Germany's federal budget, and one in three German municipalities is no longer able to amortize its debt on its own steam. In the United States, the national debt has grown in the last four years from $10 trillion to more than $16 trillion, as more and more municipalities file for bankruptcy. In Greece, Spain and Italy, the bond markets now indirectly affect pensions, positions provided for in budgets and wages.

A country isn't a business, even though there are politicians who like to treat their voters as if they were employees.

(Read it all here, hat tip Marcus Wilder)

 

 

Comments

[Bloviating Zeppelin]

Because voters intercede and enter the equation. When voters discover they can vote "largesse" and politicians determine this is the primary goal of the bulk of voters, politicians aim to provide voters with what they want, in order to retain their seats and their personal and collective power.

BZ