America on a Diet

It’s not only in Michelle Obama’s White House that one is on a low-calorie diet. Across the entire country, belts are tightening. They close, they cut and they remove. Ten years ago, America couldn’t stop thinking bigger. Super size was the order of the day. Today, everything shrinks with the same suddenness. Cars, houses, governments . . .

Blame the deficits. In its most recent issue, Newsweek declared “America is back!” “America still leads the world at processing failure, at latching on to new innovations and building them to scale quickly and profitably,” cried the weekly, boasting of a faster recovery than anywhere else. That might be true on Wall Street but not at the state level. Federal aid, included in the February 2009 stimulus plan, is starting to run out. Several states, including New Jersey, have only masked deficits with accounting tricks. Some economists go as far as to raise the specter of Greece.

California has a deficit of 56 percent, and it consumes three times more energy than it produces (Analyst Gregor MacDonald remarked that the states that are the worst off are exactly those where the gap between energy produced and consumed was the widest). In Illinois, Barack Obama’s state, debt has reached 41 percent of the budget, largely due to health insurance and pensions for the elderly. Florida, which is one of the seven states without income taxes, is projecting a deficit of $2.6 billion for 2011. The governor, a moderate Republican, is on the verge of being knocked out of the race by an opponent who has been made a champion of the Tea Party movement.

The states most affected by the crisis are strangled by a fiscal corset that prevents them from raising taxes. In more prosperous times, anti-government activists had succeeded in forcing the passage of measures requiring the redistribution of surpluses. Now, governors are forced to struggle with local assemblies, knowing that raising taxes has become a form of electoral suicide. Oregon is one of the only states to have taken the plunge and adopt the crazy idea of making the rich pay. In January, voters approved a tax raise for high earners and big businesses. It was an urgent matter: hundreds of schools had reduced the week to four days. More money means more Monday classes.

America manages the crisis in its own way: stringent, but with much creativity. In Missouri, ambulances are taxed; in New York, it’s limousines. Arizona has mortgaged the governor’s residence. California has ordered businesses to pay their taxes in advance. Colorado’s House of Representatives passed an amendment abolishing the Senate (which used its veto, as one might have expected). In Denver, a group of citizens proposed to melt down the gold covering the Capitol building’s dome.

The solution to the crisis: reduced government. Public servants are expected to meet the obligatory 35 hours, of some kind, but unpaid. Here, the libraries close one day of the week. There, it’s the courts. In Vermont, the Supreme Court has declared a half-day of leisure per week.

In Oklahoma, 4,600 prison guards took twelve days of forced vacation. It is estimated that half of all local governments have already resorted to layoffs or “furloughs.” The number of layoffs is impressive all the same: close to 200,000 employees laid off since August 2008, at a time when their services have never been so sought after.

According to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, a research institute based in Washington, forty-five states have reduced social services since the start of the recession. No improvement is expected in 2011, considering the budgets that have recently been presented by the governors. Cuts are predicted for prison medical services, disadvantaged children, mentally ill peoples’ benefits, childcare subsidies, school transportation . . . “We will have to step back and find new business models for the services that we provide,”* summarizes Raymond Scheppach, director of the National Governors Association.

Education is the sector that has been suffering the most. The Secretary of Education estimates that between 100,000 to 300,000 professors are threatened with layoffs come September, if nothing is done. During the second week of April, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin proposed a $23 billion dollar rescue plan for schools, akin to the 2008 bank bailout. The name of the bill is “Keep Our Educators Working.”

In university cafeterias, meal trays are starting to be removed — no trays, no stacking of plates, less cleaning, less water, less calories, and less cost. More than a hundred universities have already taken this measure. Some of them have only gradually introduced it, a process that has led to, in the inimitable American fashion of communication, “Tray-less Tuesdays.” Come Wednesday, to hell with the deficits, we can binge again.

Editor’s Note: Quote could not be verified.