By Luke Brinker
To hear Willard Mitt Romney tell it, voters face a stark choice in 2012. They can elect either President Barack Obama, whose support of a “European-style social welfare state” pursues “equality of outcome,” or Romney himself, the self-appointed guardian of the “opportunity society” in which people rise based on merit.
(Allow me to digress briefly, simply to point out that it’s awfully rich to have Romney, son of American Motor CEO, Michigan Governor, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Romney, to lecture Barack Obama, son of a single mother who used food stamps, about rising to the top through excellence and hard work. Digression complete.)
Romney’s characterization of Obama’s worldview and the European welfare state is woefully inaccurate. For one, Obama is not a European-style social democrat. His health care law enshrined the existing for-profit, private health insurance model, while most European countries have either single-payer health care (i.e., the dreaded “socialized medicine”) or not-for-profit health insurance companies (in Germany, for instance). Meanwhile, Obama supports raising the top federal income tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the Clinton-era rate. In France, the top income tax rate is 41 percent. It’s 45 percent in Germany, 52 percent in the Netherlands, 56.6 percent in Sweden, and 50 percent in the United Kingdom. (And yes, those nations still have rich people, contrary to Romney’s absurd claim that social welfare states seek “equality of outcome.”) Moreover, all European nations have some form of value-added tax (VAT), something that has yet to be seriously considered by Obama’s or any other administration.
But don’t generous social benefits lead inevitably to high levels of indebtedness, a la Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain? As Paul Krugman points out, if the welfare state-debt crisis linkage were what conservatives claim it is, we should expect to see debt crises in Germany, Scandinavia, and Canada, all of which have strong safety nets. They also all have robust regulation of financial services, and with the exception of Germany, were prudent enough not to join the shackling euro currency union.
Despite Romney’s willful blindness to facts about Europe and the welfare state, something positive may yet emerge from his line of attack. Though Obama is not a Scandinavian, he does see a vital role for government in allaying gaping social and economic inequalities. That’s what motivates the president’s support for public education, investment in job-creating stimulus programs, a more progressive tax policy, and increased health insurance coverage. A recent New York Times report on declining social mobility in the United States provides an excellent backdrop for the coming debate between Obama and Romney. While Willard and his fellow conservatives see a United States in which the playing field is level and there are no obstacles to individual success, the US stands out among developed countries for having the highest proportion of men (42 percent) staying in the bottom fifth of income after being born into it. It’s no coincidence that the decline in upward mobility occurred in tandem with diminishing political focus on alleviating poverty. Our increasingly money-soaked political culture ensures that the forces of privilege drown out the voices of the disadvantaged. (For more on this, read economist Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism.)
Heading into November, Obama has no choice but to mount a spirited defense of the social safety net. In spite of recent signs of economic progress, unemployment is likely to remain uncomfortably high in Election Day. It’s rare for a president to win re-election with jobless numbers as high as they are now, but it’s happened before. In 1936, amid a 16.9 percent unemployment rate, Franklin Roosevelt soundly defeated Alf Landon. Roosevelt presented voters with a choice between New Deal reform and Landon’s laissez-faire capitalism. He made unambiguous connections between Republican economic policy and the Great Depression in which the nation was mired. A latter-day defense of a strong government role would resemble the words of a Massachusetts politician not named Romney. Here’s CBS’s report on Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren:
Warren rejects the concept that it is possible for Americans to become wealthy in isolation.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Welfare state supporters are not foes of wealth. Unlike Romney, they may not glorify it as an end in itself or a sign of one’s supreme virtue, but they recognize that in a free society, some will accumulate more than others. It is not this immutable reality with which safety net supporters quibble. Instead, it is with the harsh realities of a society with increasing economic inequality, mass popular disenfranchisement, and decreasing social mobility. Romney has handed the Democrats a golden opportunity to highlight the necessity of a government that works to solve those problems.
