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Big Government Is Back—Big Time
U.S. policymakers reconsider the relationship between government
and the private sector.
By Michael Freedman | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Feb 16, 2009
Have you noticed that Barack Obama sounds more like the president
of France every day? When Obama said in his Inaugural Address that
it was time to get past stale arguments over whether government is
big or small, he was echoing the eclectic philosophy of Nicolas
Sarkozy, who champions markets one day and state industrial
"champions" the next. When Obama called Wall Street "shameful" and
greedy, he was articulating what the French have always thought,
and endorsing Sarkozy's recent dismissal of the "crazy" idea that
markets are always right. In endorsing the "Buy American" rules
that would steer the billions in U.S. stimulus spending toward
domestic manufacturers, members of the Obama administration were
seconding the old French culture of "economic patriotism." And when
Obama moved to cap the pay of executives at financial firms in line
for the federal bailout at $500,000, he was forcing on them a
massive pay cut that Sarkozy had already coaxed from French bank
leaders when he gathered them together last month and got them to
agree, publicly, that they would forgo bonuses.
It was with a distinctly continental sniff that Obama said top
bank brass had shown "bad taste" by taking their bonuses despite
massive losses.
Obama's rhetoric and actions reflect how quickly the debate has
changed over the past several months. Until the financial crisis
began last year, this kind of business bashing and protectionism
was largely relegated to the far left, and it seemed axiomatic in
the United States that the business of America was business. But
with an urgency not seen since Ronald Reagan declared that
government was in fact the problem, policymakers are now
reconsidering the relationship between government and the private
sector. At its most basic level, the nearly $1 trillion U.S.
stimulus package now being dissected on Capitol Hill is a fight
over how great a role the federal government will play in what had
been, for decades, private economic life. And while it's impossible
to know just what the day after the crisis will look like, the
broad contours of the new economic world are becoming visible.
One of the more lasting effects will be a steady drift toward
what could be called a European model of governance, regulation and
paternalism. Already, big government is on the rise—projected
public-spending figures show the United States will move ever
closer to European averages over the next two years. More
specifically, in the absence of a robust private sector (or at
least public confidence in business) the U.S. government will be
forced to fill the gap, firmly directing businesses in all sorts of
ways—regulating some industries (particularly banking and the
automotive sector) with big-brother vigilance, favoring others like
clean energy with grants and loans, and turning still others—health
care, pensions—into virtual wards of the state. Harvard economist
Ken Rogoff predicts the United States will move toward "a more
centralized, redistributional health-care system, as Europe already
has," with a greater emphasis on the environment, higher regulation
and increased protectionism. "I take the 2008 U.S. elections as
marking a turn toward continental Europe," he says.
This is all likely to prove very popular if the conventional
wisdom is right. Many economists think this is going to be a long,
perhaps very long, recession. In this case, the banks would largely
stabilize, thanks to the help of the federal government, but the
stimulus package would be too small and insufficiently "timely,
targeted and temporary," as Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers
has frequently suggested it needs to be. Rather than a speedy
V-shaped recovery, in which the economy quickly rebounds, the U.S.
would face a Japan-style L-shaped recovery, which is to say
extraordinarily slow growth over a decade or more. As in Europe,
slow or no growth is likely to generate greater demand for publicly
funded social services in the years to come.
Slow growth could kill rugged American individualism, too.
Health care in the U.S. is for the most part tied to employment, so
if job numbers continue to look dismal, or get even worse, an
ever-greater number of people will start looking to the government
for support. Moreover, if the New York Stock Exchange goes the way
of Tokyo, still down by more than half from its level 20 years ago,
the cultural impact will be profound. Today, basic U.S. social
services are tied to private wealth generated by the stock market:
retirement is funded through 401(k)s, for instance, and college
tuition through 529 plans and endowments that help defray costs. As
of last week the S&P 500 was down 41 percent from
its 52-week high, and if it continues to bump along at that level,
pressure will only grow on the Obama administration to step in and
take over more and more public services. Think about it, and it's
very easy to imagine a chorus of former American individualists
demanding cushy French-style pensions and free British-style health
care if their private stock funds fail to recover and unemployment
inches upward toward 10 percent and remains there.
Obama's populist rhetoric will likely subside, but already U.S.
government spending is expected to increase, approaching European
levels. A decade ago, total government spending in the United
States constituted 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent
in the euro zone—roughly a 14-point gap, according to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That gap has
declined dramatically, and by 2010, U.S. spending is expected to be
39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a
gap of just 7.2 points. To be fair, much of the big increases in
spending took place in the Bush era (in large part thanks to two
wars), but a prolonged period of low growth and greater demands on
the public sector will likely mean a further narrowing, as well as
a seismic shift in spending priorities, away, perhaps, from defense
and toward social programs. The baby boomers, meantime, will be
putting an increased demand on Medicare and Social Security.
The public seems to want the government to fill in where the
private sector cannot. Recent Gallup polls say trust in financial
institutions is lower than at any point since it started asking
that question in 1985, and 68 percent of Americans want major
corporations to have less influence than they do now—up from 52
percent in 2001. Another poll shows a 12-point jump between 1994
and 2007, to 69 percent, in the number of Americans who believe
government should do more for people who cannot care for
themselves. So aside from expanding the social safety net, the
government will have to take a greater role in guiding business
toward ends the state deems healthy for the overall economy.
This differs from European-style statism, in which governments
have been known to take a firm hand in directing individual
businesses. But the difference is only a matter of degree. The
bailout of Detroit's Big Three automakers was essentially a
protectionist measure at the expense of foreign auto manufacturers,
and is not much different from Sarkozy's controversial 2004 support
as finance minister for state intervention to protect French
manufacturing giant Alstom. Stephen Roach, a top economist at
Morgan Stanley, says a prolonged downturn will mean even further
"public-sector engineering of our economy," particularly in the
form of protectionism. "America is not France," he says. "We will
do it our way. But big government is definitely on the
ascendancy."
Going forward, the Obama administration has announced plans to
spark growth and job creation by investing in green technology, and
on the table as well is a wholesale transformation of health care.
Whether that means the United States will one day have a free,
public national health service like Great Britain's, or provide
universal insurance through a mix of public and private means, is
still a very open question. But sentiment is moving toward some
form of universal health care and will only grow if unemployment
remains high. "You can count on the fact that there will be
nationalized health care of some sort," says Peter Schwartz, head
of the Global Business Network, a San Francisco consultancy that
advises big corporations on long-term trends and strategy.
"Business is just not going to be able to carry the load."
Too much government interference can lead to the same kind of
slow growth that Europe has suffered for years. Just how to come
out from the inevitable mountain of debt is another concern. Now
one of the big debates in the U.S. is how to bridge the gap between
business and government in a way that avoids stagnation while still
satisfying the intense demand for financial and social services. In
other words, can America adopt a more European model, only with a
faster rate of growth? There may be ways. Andrew Jakabovics,
associate director of the economic-mobility program at the Center
for American Progress, a think tank that has incubated a number of
administration advisers, argues that one role for the government
could be to spur competition in lending by creating a public entity
that would guarantee certain kinds of loans—say a standard 30-year,
fixed-rate mortgage—and then allow the private sector to compete at
a standard set by the federal government. Such a mechanism would
protect consumers by ensuring their ability to get loans while also
raising the level of competition.
Another way government can take a larger role, particularly in
easing the burden created by low stock-market returns, is by
introducing programs that forgive some or all college-tuition debt
in exchange for public service, something Obama promised to do on
the campaign trail. Such a move would be broadly similar to a
French program in which students at the école Normale Supérieure,
one of the world's top universities, pay no tuition (and are
actually paid a monthly stipend of €1,500) in exchange for their
agreement to spend 10 years in public service.
The crisis is also likely to spur policymakers into reforming
public pension systems like Social Security, which is expected to
be unable to provide retirees with full benefits starting in 2041.
If nothing else, the collapse of trust in the markets has probably
killed for good the Bush-era idea of privatizing Social Security.
Obama proposes to expand retirement-savings programs with
government matches and raising Social Security taxes by 2 to 4
percent for those making more than $250,000. But a rattled nation
may push the government to take an even bigger role. "Confidence
has been shattered," says William Galston, a former policy adviser
to President Bill Clinton. "It's going to take a very long time for
the average American to accept anything like the 401(k)."
This crisis-driven debate on the proper role of government is
not confined to America. At the recent World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Wen Jiabao
each took shots at U.S.-style free-market capitalism, implicitly
promoting their respective countries' brands of state-controlled
capitalism. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has more than once
spoken of the need for "free markets" but not "value-free markets,"
and last week Japan's economics minister told Parliament that the
country should create a new brand of "tenderhearted capitalism."
But none of this means a revival of socialist models with a capital
S. As British journalist Stephen Pollard recently noted, even when
Britain's Labour government decided to effectively nationalize the
banking system in October, "it did so not to replace capitalism but
to save it."
The same, in a way, could be said for the United States.
Bailouts, protectionism, talk of bank nationalization and a nearly
$1 trillion stimulus package are not a socialist conspiracy, as
some right-wing U.S. pundits and talk-show hosts insist. Even if
the U.S. banks or automakers were nationalized, it would almost
certainly be temporary, with no likelihood that the United States
would have the kinds of national champions one sees in Europe. Even
if the Obama government is the only American employer still hiring,
it will remain generally easier to hire and fire workers, and start
and close down businesses, in America's rougher form of
capitalism.
Nonetheless, it is clear that a "centrist rebalancing" is taking
place even in America, says Sunder Katwala, head of Britain's
center-left Fabian Society, and that a prolonged period of slow
growth will force the United States to become something more like
Europe. But if Obama can somehow forge a middle path that builds
upon the best of the European safety net while also encouraging the
kind of dynamism and innovation that has helped the United States
prosper, it will represent a major shift, and provide evidence that
government, pace Reagan, can actually be part of the solution.
With Tracy McNicoll in Paris
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