Joe Conason: The French are right (again)

[babylonsister]

The French are right (again)

The Europeans spend more money on social programs than we do -- and get great results, in everything from universal childcare to tuition-free higher education.

By Joe Conason


President Barack Obama of the U.S. addresses a news conference at the G20 summit at the ExCel centre, in east London April 2, 2009. World leaders agreed a trillion-dollar deal on Thursday to combat the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression.


April 3, 2009 | If the world is no longer enthralled by the “old Washington consensus” of privatization, deregulation and weak government, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proclaimed at the London G-20 summit, then now it is surely time to reconsider what that consensus has meant for us over the past three decades. We could begin by looking across the Atlantic at the “social market” nations of Europe -- where support for families and children is less rhetorical and more real than here.

Most coverage of the summit failed to observe the stinging irony of the debate over stimulus spending that brought the United States into conflict with France and Germany. Today’s American demand that the French and Germans (along with the rest of wealthy Europe) should spend much more on government programs and infrastructure contrasts rather starkly with the traditional American criticism of Europeans for spending too much.

Not that the Obama administration’s complaint about the French and the Germans is necessarily wrong; the Europeans and especially France and Germany should overcome their fear of inflation and spend more to help relieve the global recession. But then we almost always have some complaint against the French -- and the French often turn out to be right, as they were when they objected to the invasion of Iraq.

So when the French and other Europeans note pointedly that their societies routinely spend much more than ours to protect workers, women, the young, the elderly, and the poor from economic trouble, they’re merely making a factual observation. (France spends as much as 1.5 percent of GDP annually on childcare and maternity benefits alone.) Different as we are in culture and history, we might even learn something from their example, now that the blinding ideology of the past has been swept away.

By now, most Americans ought to know that Europeans treat healthcare as a public good and a human right, which means that they spend billions of tax dollars annually to insure everyone (although they spend less overall on the medical sector than we do). What most Americans probably still don’t know is that those European medical systems are highly varied, with private medicine and insurance playing different roles in different countries. Expensive as universal quality care has inevitably become, as technology improves and populations age, the Europeans broadly believe in their social security systems -- because they provide competitive advantage as well as moral superiority.

From Europe’s perspective, the same can be said of the support its governments provide to families, from the entitlements available to pregnant women and new mothers and fathers, to universal child care and tuition-free higher education, to the special benefits that assist single parents. The challenges that working families face in a globalizing world where both parents work are mitigated by policies designed to encourage balance between home and workplace and adequate attention to children.

These “socialist” measures to protect families are far more effective, of course, than all of the Sunday shouting from American pulpits about the Biblical way of life. Perhaps the leadership of the religious right, still obsessed with stigmatizing gay couples, should take note.

more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/04/03/g20/

[polichick]

1. I don't understand the American fear of becoming more like Europe...

I'd love it if we became as civilized as Europe.

[county worker]

3. We can if enough of us want it.

[polichick]

4. The U.S. would have to shake it's insane clinging to guns, religion & money.

[DonCoquixote]

6. There is good and bad

I would love to see European social policies, such as healthcare, transplanted here, but when you read a paper like let's say, the Guardian, you read where the European states have gone to extremes like trying to ban kitchen knives, or have people check to see how much food waste in in your garbage. What we want is a medium, one that sees our rights are protected, from the state, and from the corporations that have taken control of the state.

[burning rain]

8. Many Americans are untravelled and ignorant.

For all a lot of our fellow citizens know, Europeans don't have indoor plumbing or electricity, due to the "evil socialism."

[county worker]

2. I learned in an economics course that our system is one of shareholder's

wealth maximization and that Europe's system was one of stakeholder's wealth maximization. The stakeholders where owners, workers, and neighbors of the business.

Of course I was taught that our system was superior.

[bemildred]

7. The CEOs seem to be doing much better than mere shareholders lately.

Not that I disagree with you as to the theory here. And I do agree that businesses ought to consider the interests of all stakeholders. The notion that managers have the relationship of feudal lords to the employees, and that the interests of management and employees are or ought to be opposed to each other is wrong and inefficient.

[Tutankhamun]

5. The fact that we're now having this dialogue is a good thing.

The GOP types will still shout "socialist!", but they are already shouting that ayway. If you yell the same thing often and indiscriminately enough it loses its power. Let them yell.

[MasonJar]

9. All one needs to do is see Michael Moore's film "Sicko" to know how superior

Europe's and Canada's (and the list goes on) healthcare is. We spend so much on the military and the Defense Dept. that there is not much left. We spend more than the rest of the world combined on war agenda and protocol. Enough killing! Save lives! Universal healthcare now. Stop protecting the insurance companies. Government health coverage for all NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!