It has recently come to light that the theory of using austerity during economic lean times is bases on faulty assumptions and bad research. Safety nets and stimulus are what helps economies grow out of recessions and the like. Throwing people out of work and cutting their safety net not only creates more social, psychological, medical, and criminal problems, it actually increases debt and deficit in the end, cost nations far more than well-timed stimulus backed by the elimination of tax evasion tricks, effective education and health programs, and the regulatory enforcement to encourage responsible investment.
You don't encourage a tree to thrive and grow in relative droughts by cutting it off at the roots and trying to replant the the top. You end up with a stump and a Christmas Tree, good only for gaudy decoration. You save your tree by making sure the roots get the nutrients and water they need, more than a trickle from the top. You also make sure the entire tree gets enough sunlight and is effectively defended against parasites, diseases, and predators trying to get fat off the tree. Most of these are found in the top branches where the feeding is best. A tree that grows taller while its roots wither is doomed to topple.
The following three articles and related interviews deal with the disastrous delusion of austerity and its faulty foundations. The first two come from CBC's The Current. The third is from
is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.The picture of the book comes from Amazon.ca.
A protester holds a sign reading "Austerity
kills" during a march against austerity measures in Brussels in November
2012. (Reuters/Francois Lenoir)
A statistical study using data from the Great Depression of
the 30s ... to post-communist Russia ... to austerity in Greece suggests
there is a measurable human cost to severe government cutbacks. From
soaring rates of suicide ... to HIV ... to alcoholism. David Stuckler
and Sanjay Basu have documented the deadly effects of austerity and they
explain the politics of life and death.
Al Jazeera's report on a suicide a year ago in Athens is
disturbing. But the man's despair seems widespread. A rising suicide
rate is just one health problem some blame on the country's austerity
measures.
Malaria is making a comeback and there's been
a spike in HIV cases. We sent freelancer Maria Kagkelidou to an HIV
clinic in Athens. She spoke to a man named Nestoras, who is HIV
positive. She asked him if he thinks there's an AIDS epidemic in Greece.
"Are you joking? Of course there is and it's way too serious. It's beyond description. You cannot imagine."
Nestoras, HIV positive
Nestoras goes on to draw a connection
between HIV infection rates and the economy. He says some people have
deliberately tried to infect themselves as a means of getting cash.
It's been five years since an economic
meltdown shook the world's economies, and the austerity measures that
followed shook them again. Now, researchers believe they're discovering
the human cost of austerity.
David Stuckler
is a senior Research Leader at the University of Oxford and an Honorary
Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Sanjay Basu is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and an epidemiologist at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.
Their new book is called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills: Recessions, Budget Battles and the Politics of Life and Death.
David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu were both in New York City.
This segment was produced by The Current's Howard Goldenthal.
Harvard Professor and Economist Kenneth
Rogoff is the co-author of 'Growth in a Time of Debt' arguing national
economies slow once national debt reaches 90 percent of GDP.
(Reuters/Eduardo Munoz)
Kenneth Rogoff was one of two Harvard economists lauded for
their research paper affirming the need for deep government austerity
measures what he calls 'Significant Haircuts', an argument at the core
of the last Republican election platform. But then a graduate student
combed through the Harvard data and found errors that debunked their
findings. Today, we look at the myths in the math.
Political Economy Research Institute, Robert Pollin
Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart are
probably only household names in the homes of tight-fisted politicians.
But the Harvard professors wrote a paper that's extremely influential. Growth in a Time of Debt (PDF) argues that national economies slow once national debt reaches 90 percent of GDP.
Key U.S. politicians and governments cited
that specific work as an important justification for severe spending
cuts for austerity. But there appears to be a problem -- perhaps many
problems.
A graduate
economics student examining the paper didn't arrive at the same
conclusions as Reinhart and Rogoff. He found an error in the spreadsheet
program the professors used. Then he found another. And others believe
they have found more problems since. Belts have been tightened around
the world at least partly because of the work of Reinhart and Rogoff.
Entire societies have convulsed.
Robert Pollin is
a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy
Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is
also the co-author of Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. We reached Robert Pollin in Amherst.
We requested an interview with Kenneth Rogoff
and Carmen Reinhart. They declined, but did send a statement. It says
their research on debt and economic growth did not advocate any kind of
policy action. They also say they have made their data freely available
and that they have, quote -"answered countless e-mail inquires from
scholars and students over the past few years ... in as timely a manner
as the overwhelming demand permitted." - end quote.
Professor of International Political Economy, Mark Blyth
As Robert Pollin mentioned, Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart wrote an opinion piece published in The New York Times.
In it, they acknowledge a spreadsheet coding error which-quote-"led us
to miscalculate the growth rates of highly indebted countries." But they
dispute allegations that there were serious errors in their work due to
selective exclusion or unconventional weighting of statistics.
Mark Blyth
has done a lot of hard thinking about austerity. He is a professor of
International Political Economy at Brown University. His new book is Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Mark Blyth joined us from Boston.
Heritage Foundation, J.D. Foster
Not everyone is convinced the world's belts are tight enough. J.D. Foster
was the Associate Director for Economic Policy in the White House
Office of Management and Budget. He's now a Senior Fellow with the
Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C.
This segment was produced by The Current's Howard Goldenthal and Gord Westmacott.
David Stuckler,
co-author of the book,
The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death. He is a senior research leader at Oxford University.
Dr. Sanjay Basu,
co-author of the book,
The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death. He is an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiologist at Stanford University.
In their new book,
"The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills," economist David Stuckler and
physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the
globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional
suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe
and the United States since governments started introducing austerity
programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. For example, in
Greece, where spending on public health has been slashed by 40 percent, HIV
rates have jumped 200 percent, and the country has seen its first
malaria outbreak since the 1970s. An economist and public health
specialist, Stuckler is a senior research leader at Oxford University.
Dr. Basu is a physician and epidemiologist who teaches at Stanford
University. "Had austerity been organized like a clinical trial, it
would’ve been discontinued given evidence of its deadly side effects,"
Stuckler says. "There is an alternative choice that we found in the
historical data and through the present recessions: When we place people
and their health at the center of economic recovery, it can help get
our economy back on track faster and yield lasting dividends to our
society."
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN:
"Early last month, a triple suicide was reported in the seaside town of
Civitanova Marche, Italy. A married couple, Anna Maria Sopranzi, who
was 68, and Romeo Dionisi, [who was] 62, had been struggling to live on
her monthly pension of around 500 euros [around $650 a month], and had
fallen behind on rent.
"Because the Italian government’s austerity budget had raised the
retirement age, Mr. Dionisi, a former construction worker, became one of
Italy’s esodati (exiled ones)—older workers plunged into poverty
without a safety net. On April 5, he and his wife left a note on a
neighbor’s car asking for forgiveness, then hanged themselves in a
storage closet at home. When Ms. Sopranzi’s brother, Giuseppe [Sopranzi,
who was] 73, heard the news, he drowned himself in the Adriatic."
Those are the opening lines to a startling recent article in The New York Times
headlined "How Austerity Kills." The authors of the piece, David
Stuckler and Dr. Sanjay Basu, have just published a new book looking at
the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate
there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million
extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since
governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of
the economic crisis. In Greece, where spending on public health has been
slashed by 40 percent, HIV rates have jumped 200 percent, and Greece has seen its first outbreak in malaria since the 1970s.
David Stuckler is an economist and public health specialist. He’s a
senior research leader at Oxford University. Dr. Sanjay Basu is a
physician and epidemiologist. He teaches at Stanford University.
Together, they’ve written this new book, out today, called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I’m glad you could
both be together in one place, being at Stanford and being at Oxford.
David, let’s begin with you. Lay out the thesis of this book.
DAVID STUCKLER:
We’ve been studying how recessions affect people’s health over the past
decade, looking at the Great Depression through the East Asian
financial crisis, right through to the present Great Recession. And what
we found is that recessions hurt. Unemployment, job loss, foreclosure,
unpayable debt are risks to health. But what ultimately matters is how
politicians respond. And when they make large cuts to social supports,
social protections, they can turn recessions into severe epidemics.
AMY GOODMAN:
So, explain. Give us examples in countries. I mean, this horrific story
I just described of this triple suicide, the couple and then her
brother. Talk about what people—what happens when policies go one way or
the other.
DAVID STUCKLER:
Greece is in the middle of a public health disaster, as you mentioned.
To meet budget deficit reduction targets set by the so-called troika—the
International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and European
Commission—Greece has cut its health sector by more than 40 percent. At a
time when homelessness is escalating and austerity has further driven
up youth unemployment, we’ve seen HIV
infections jump, concentrated in injection drug users. The malaria
outbreak was linked to the cut in mosquito-spraying prevention programs,
creating an outbreak that’s much more costly to control than the
short-term money saved by reducing the budget. Healthcare access has
declined substantially. The majority of people who have lost access are
pensioners who have contributed to the system their entire lives. And
these are just a few of the many health effects seen in Greece, mirrored
in Spain, Italy and, to some extent, the U.K. and the U.S.
AMY GOODMAN:
We were just talking before the show about one of the suicides in Spain
that became very well known. I wanted to turn to a clip. At the time,
we were talking to a former
Democracy Now! producer,
María Carrión, about this case that occurred in Spain. The woman, David, was named?
DAVID STUCKLER:
Amaia Egaña. It was a case of Spain’s eviction suicides. Spain has a
system where when people’s homes are foreclosed, even if they default on
their home, they’re still liable to pay back the debt. So people are
plunged into poverty and arrears at the same time, without support.
We’ve seen this trigger large rises in suicides. Spain, Italy and Greece
are at the high end of increases in economic suicides
.
AMY GOODMAN:
So, Amaia Egaña was 53 years old. She jumped from a balcony to her
death as she was about to be evicted. María Carrión appeared on the show
to talk about Amaia’s suicide.
MARÍA CARRIÓN: Amaia is a former city council member
in a town—the town of Barakaldo in the Basque Country. And her case is
especially tragic because she actually didn’t share just how bad off the
situation was even with her husband. So, most people had no idea that
there was a whole—there had been a repossession and an eviction process.
She was so desperate and so ashamed of the situation that she jumped
out of her balcony, her fourth floor apartment, as court employees came
to evict her. This comes two weeks after police found a man dead in his
apartment as they went in to evict him from his home after repossession.
And—but, you know, the movement to stop these evictions and
repossessions has been working very hard on this for almost two years,
and this is just the watershed. This has been the one situation that has
actually forced government and the opposition and banks to come to the
table and talk about real reform. Before this, you had these evictions
taking place—500 orders every single day—silently. And thanks to the 15M
movement—this is—was the Occupy movement in Spain just over a year
ago—the platform against evictions was incredibly energized. And so,
they have been able to stop hundreds of evictions.
But those are evictions of people who come to them and who say, you
know, "My home is being repossessed. I’m facing eviction. Can you help
me?" There are a lot of people like Amaia who did not do this, out of
perhaps a sense of guilt or embarrassment. And so, her case is really
representative and emblematic of what has gone wrong in Spain with, you
know, thousands of people being left homeless after repossession and
eviction.
AMY GOODMAN: David Stuckler, you were in Spain when Amaia killed herself.
DAVID STUCKLER:
I was at a conference with the Barcelona Public Health Agency. The
meeting got cut short as protests erupted onto the streets of Barcelona.
People were outraged at the eviction-suicide of Amaia, at the hardship
perpetuated by deep budget cuts under the Rajoy government in Spain.
AMY GOODMAN:
On April 4, 2012, a 77-year-old retired Greek pharmacist named Dimitris
Christoulas shot and killed himself near the Greek Parliament after
writing a note that blamed his suicide on the economic crisis. His
daughter Emi spoke at his funeral and said his act had been deeply
political.
EMI CHRISTOULAS:
[translated] You found it unacceptable that they were killing our
freedom, our democracy, our dignity. You found it unacceptable as they
tightened the harsh noose of economic austerity and apartheid around us,
to the unacceptable act of surrendering our independence and the keys
to the country. It was unacceptable to you that Greece did not
acknowledge its children and its children did not recognize their own
country. You found the bestiality of capitalism unacceptable, that it
infiltrated our lives and no one tried to stop it. Then, you made your
decision to become the fear, the death, the memory, the sorrow of our
ruined lives.
AMY GOODMAN:
Sanjay Basu, you have found more than 10,000 additional suicides and up
to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United
States. Since when? How did you come up with these figures?
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Right. One of the major questions we asked here: Is this inevitable
during a recession? Recessions are bad times. Could this just be the
recession’s effects as opposed to austerity’s effects? And so, what we
did is used so-called natural experiments. We compared regions and
countries since the beginning of the recession, and even beforehand, to
control for people’s pre-existing conditions, pre-existing mental health
and alcoholism and so forth, and also compared areas that faced the
same economic shock but had different policy responses. And looking at
those as comparative cases, we could find that, in fact, during
recessions, inevitably suicides or alcoholism didn’t increase, but
rather, it was after austerity, in particular. And controlling for other
factors that could statistically explain this, austerity consistently
came up as a key trigger not just for suicides, but for alcohol,
stress-related heart attacks and other major causes of death.
AMY GOODMAN:
Now, this is the key point here, is the difference—I mean, people can
say, "Well, hard times lead to, you know, very painful decisions that
people make."
DR. SANJAY BASU: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN:
But that you’re saying that even in equally difficult situations, when
countries opt for another solution, the public health of that community
changes.
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Correct. We can look, for example, at Iceland as a contrast. Now,
Greece and Iceland are very different socially, politically and
economically, but Iceland serves as a nice case in point right now. They
had faced a debt at 800 percent of GDP, the largest banking crisis in history compared to the size of the economy.
AMY GOODMAN: When their banks failed, their three top banks failed.
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Correct, all three major banks failed. And they had invested, of
course, in U.S. mortgage-backed securities. After this, the Iceland
politicians decided to do something truly unique as compared to the rest
of Europe. They actually put the austerity plan to a public vote. And
the public voted that instead of paying off bankers’ debts immediately
through public cuts, they would instead do it gradually. They would
still bail out their banks, but over the course of time and with great
pace towards preserving their social safety net. And indeed what Iceland
ended up doing was maintaining some of the healthiest standards in the
world and the highest level of happiness.
AMY GOODMAN: We were just joined by the Icelandic Parliamentarian
Birgitta Jónsdóttir on
Democracy Now!
here in New York—she had just come in from Iceland—talking about how
Iceland recovered from the collapse of its banking system. A part of
what the country did, as you said, was to preserve its universal
healthcare system.
BIRGITTA JÓNSDÓTTIR:
Actually, everybody has the same access to health and education. So even
I, as an MP, ended up in a hospital in November, and I got exactly the
same treatment as the woman working in the factory or in McDonald’s or
Domino’s. And I like that. I love that. I think that is so important.
And so, we pay just about the same amount of taxes as U.S. taxpayers. We
don’t have to live in this insurance jungle. So we just, you know—and
that was actually one of the first things they wanted to slash down, the
IMF—no surprise.
AMY GOODMAN: They preserve their healthcare system.
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Mm-hmm. And indeed she highlights one of the key issues here, which is
that there’s a great misunderstanding around debts and deficits. When we
face a liquidities crisis, meaning that there’s a collapse in demand in
the system, we actually find, quite robustly, through peer-reviewed
journals and consistent with those of our colleagues, that stimulus
early on does not actually produce higher, longer-term debts, but it
generates the revenue and the building of the economic cycle that allows
us to pay off those longer-term debts. By contrast, these short-term
cuts end up so slowing the economic cycle that we find both economic and
public health devastation as a result.
AMY GOODMAN:
After break, I want to talk about the U.S., but, David Stuckler, you
said you looked at the labor policies of places like Sweden and Finland
in times of recession.
DAVID STUCKLER:
It’s a remarkable case study. It alludes to what Sanjay mentioned
earlier. Sweden faced a large banking crisis. Unemployment jumped by
more than 10 percentage points. And yet suicides fell steadily. What we
learned is that when politicians managed the consequences of
unemployment well, they were able to prevent a mental health crisis. The
specific programs we found are called active labor market programs.
These help the newly unemployed link to caseworkers, develop an action
plan and return into jobs. They treat unemployment like the pandemic it
is. It not only saves money on healthcare bills, but even pays for
itself by helping spur economic recovery.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about what choices the United States is making, with David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. Their book is called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently revealed the
suicide rate in people aged 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent over the
past decade, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000. The biggest increase was seen
for men in their fifties, where the suicide rate increased 50 percent.
Overall, suicides are now a greater cause of death in the United States
than car accidents. CDC Director Thomas Frieden recently spoke to PBS NewsHour.
DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN:
We don’t know what specifically is causing it, but the trend has been
consistent. And, if anything, our numbers would underestimate the
gravity of the problem. And, of course, even one death from suicide is a
terrible tragedy, and many of them are preventable. We know that in
times of financial stress, there is generally an increase in suicides.
We also know that this is a generation that grew up at a time when they
expected more than some have been able to achieve in their lives, and
also that they’re stressed with what their kids are going through and
what their parents are going through. So it’s, in some ways, the
sandwich generation.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s CDC Director Thomas Frieden on PBS. We’re joined by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. They are authors of The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.
David Stuckler is a senior research leader at Oxford University, and
Sanjay Basu is an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiologist at
Stanford University. If you could respond, Dr. Basu, to Dr. Frieden’s
comment?
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Yeah, I certainly agree with Dr. Frieden’s comment. And what we have
found in our research is that these suicide rate spikes seem to
correspond quite closely to state-level unemployment rates. And in
particular, when we do these long-term studies that track individuals
before the recession, during the recession and after, we can control for
their pre-existing mental health statistically, and we find that it’s
the new unemployment that seems to trigger new onset of depression and
suicide, particularly among our most vulnerable, adults over 50, who,
when they lose a job, are often discriminated against or have a very
hard time finding new work. There’s a great deal of shame, and also it’s
quite hard for our healthcare system to access those individuals, given
the degree of barriers that they have, social barriers, to accessing
mental healthcare.
AMY GOODMAN:
I mean, the point for people to understand in this country is, what’s
unusual for us, compared to other countries, is that when we lose our
jobs, we lose our health insurance.
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Absolutely. And we do have some safety nets in the form of Medicaid,
Medicare, but it’s quite true that there are some large holes in that
system, as has been repeated time and time again.
AMY GOODMAN:
During an interview on Fox News in February, Republican Senator Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina suggested slashing healthcare to stop
scheduled sequester cuts from, quote, "destroying the military."
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM:
The commander-in-chief thought—came up with the idea of sequestration,
destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk.
Here’s my belief. Let’s take "Obamacare" and put it on the table. You
can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy
under "Obamacare." "Obamacare" is destroying healthcare in this country.
People are leaving the private sector because their companies can’t
afford to offer "Obamacare." If you want to look at ways to find $1.2
trillion in savings over the next decade, let’s look at "Obamacare."
Let’s don’t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.
AMY GOODMAN: David Stuckler, can you respond to Senator Graham?
DAVID STUCKLER:
Austerity in health is a false economy. The cliché, an ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure, is really true. New York City
officials learned this the hard way in the early 1990s, when they cut TB
prevention programs by $120 million but ended up with a drug-resistant
TB outbreak that cost more than $1.2 billion to control. What we found
is that smart investments in public health can have a return on
investment, for each dollar, of up to $3.
AMY GOODMAN:
So, talk about the healthcare system, Dr. Sanjay Basu, how sequester
fits in, and also just what Lindsey Graham was talking about,
"Obamacare."
DR. SANJAY BASU: So, I’m not a politician and—but I do analyze data. And I think, in looking comparatively among OECD
countries, you see a lot of false claims about the U.S. health system.
Why is it that we cost so much more and seem to be getting less? I think
comparing our country to other OECD stations provides some sense of what—
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about European countries?
DR. SANJAY BASU:
European, as well as Japan, Australia and so forth. And you can see a
lot of the myths by just looking at the data. So, what are the theories?
The theory is, for example, maybe it’s just American obesity. Well,
actually, the costs started well before American obesity and doesn’t
seem to correspond actually statistically to obesity. Maybe it’s that we
have an older population, but not so. Switzerland actually pays more in
nursing home care. Japan has an older population, yet they still pay
less while getting more in terms of health. Maybe it’s just technology.
We do a lot of research and development. But, in fact, if you look at
the Securities and Exchange Commission data, the R&D pharmaceutical
industry, while making—
AMY GOODMAN: Research and development of the pharmaceutical companies.
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Sure. While they make a higher percent profit as a percentage of
revenue than any other Fortune 500 industry at the moment, they actually
spend almost double on marketing as compared to research and
development. And while we do use more technology and we do tend to have
some higher costs from technology, it doesn’t actually explain the
majority of the bundle.
What you do see, on the other hand, if you
just look at the raw data, is that we get more—we get more incentives in
order to test the people who are covered, in order to bill more. And
there’s a lot of companies making quite a bit of money on that margin.
You can go to one hospital across town and be charged double or more of
what another hospital has on a different side of town. But it’s not like
a consumer market. If I’m in a car accident, I can’t say to the
surgeon, "Hold my hand there for a moment before sewing it back on. I’m
just going to go across town and compare prices for a minute."
So healthcare is a different kind of industry,
in which we have what is classically called "market failure" by the
Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow back in the ’60s, but people ignored
his work. I think what we really have is a system where we confuse
inequality with choice. The majority of our costs come from common
conditions in a small number of patients who have complications of
diabetes, heart failure, hypertension. And we need more primary care
prevention rather than paying for the ICU care.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back, and this is a theme you follow in The Body Economic,
to the Depression. Going back to the Great Depression and the New Deal,
this is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking in 1933.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT:
It is three months, my friends, since I have talked with the people of
this country about our national problems. But during this period, many
things have happened. And I am glad to say that the major part of them
have greatly helped the well-being of the average citizen.
In the short space of these few months, I am convinced that at least
four million have been given employment, or saying it another way, 40
percent of those seeking work have found it. That does not mean, my
friends, that I am satisfied or that you are satisfied that our work has
ended. We have a long way to go, but we are on the way.
We come to the relief, for a moment, of those who are in danger of
losing their farms or their homes. I have publicly asked that the
foreclosure on farms and cattles and homes be delayed until every
mortgagor in the country has had full opportunity to take advantage of
federal credit. And I make the further request that if there is any
family in the United States about to lose its home or its farm, that
family should telegraph at once, either to the Farm Credit
Administration or the Home Loan Corporation in Washington, requesting
their help.
AMY GOODMAN:
That was President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. I think this is going to
be very interesting for a lot of people listening and watching this
today. David Stuckler, the choices made then and the choices being made
today?
DAVID STUCKLER: Completely different. Roosevelt took bold steps, at a time when debt was 180 percent of GDP,
to boost financial relief to the newly unemployed, to save Americans
from homelessness. And we’ve studied the effects of his landmark
program, the New Deal, on health. And what we found is that, comparing
the states, the red and blue states, that pushed it to different
degrees—the blue states tended to go further with the New Deal than the
red states—led to a polarization in public health outcomes across the
U.S. The greater relief spending implemented under the New Deal helped
reduce suicides, reduced tuberculosis and pneumonias, and was in fact
the biggest and one of the most effective public health programs on U.S.
soil.
AMY GOODMAN:
When you hear politicians today saying, "We’ve got to cut 'Obamacare.'
We’ve got to cut healthcare in this country," talk about what you found,
what it means for the economy to invest in public health.
DAVID STUCKLER:
Investing in public health is a wise choice in good times and an urgent
necessity in the worst of times. Had austerity been organized like a
clinical trial, it would have been discontinued, given evidence of its
deadly side effects. There is an alternative choice that we found in the
historical data and through the present recessions, that when we place
people and their health at the center of economic recovery, it can help
get our economy back on track faster and yield lasting dividends to our
society.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of the West Nile outbreak, can you talk about that?
DR. SANJAY BASU:
Mm-hmm. Down in Bakersfield in California, there was a suspicion about
why crows were dropping from the sky and people were also showing up in
hospitals. A variety of theories were posited, ranging from polio to
heat stroke, but in fact it amounted to a West Nile outbreak that,
through a number of our colleagues’ research, it was found that the
abandoned and foreclosed homes had stagnant water in old swimming pools
and in other locations that were breeding mosquitoes. And this led to a
rather large West Nile outbreak. Indeed, the reason why it was
discovered was something called the California Encephalitis Project, a
group of public system laboratories that work in concert with the CDC. And ironically, after helping to control that outbreak, they were closed due to budget cuts.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the issue of drug abuse. A recent film by Vice
has brought renewed attention to the drug crisis in Greece,
particularly the use of the new drug called sisa. This is Haralampos
Poulopoulos, head of KETHEA, the main anti-drug center in Greece.
DR. HARALAMPOS POULOPOULOS:
Sisa is a form of crystal methamphetamine. They use amphetamines and
some other liquids, sometimes battery liquids, to produce this drug.
It’s very dangerous for the health of the users. I think the main reason
for the increase of sisa is the changes of the attitudes of drug users
during the crisis. They are more self-destructive. We have 27 percent
unemployment, 62 percent the young people under 25. We didn’t finish yet
with the crisis. We are in the middle of the crisis.
AMY GOODMAN:
Haralampos Poulopoulos, head of the main anti-drug center in Greece.
David Stuckler, talk about that, and also relate it to here, as we wrap
up.
DAVID STUCKLER:
This is a devastating situation we’re seeing in Greece with a drug
crisis escalating at a time when drug prevention budgets are being cut.
With gaping holes in social safety nets from austerity, people are
becoming desperate, turning to the means of self-harm. We’ve seen drug
use and infected needles spread HIV, creating rise of more than 200 percent, leading to an epicenter of HIV/AIDS spread in Europe.
What we can learn from these mistakes, and
areas where we see successes in policy, is that recessions can hurt, but
austerity kills. When politicians make smart choices to protect people
during hard times, it doesn’t happen at expense of recovery but can help
put our societies back on track to a happier, healthier future.
AMY GOODMAN: And here in the United States, how that translates into policy?
DAVID STUCKLER:
Currently, we’re facing and implementing a large sequester in the U.S.
While it’s too early to see the full health consequences, what we are
seeing is the Women, Infants, Children’s health program, which provides
nutritional subsidies to women, will be forced to reduce those subsidies
from 600,000 pregnant women. And that program has been linked to
reducing infant mortality. We’re also seeing large cuts to public
housing budgets at a time when 1.4 million homes are still in
foreclosure. We are concerned that, if done rapidly and
indiscriminately, that budget cuts in the U.S. could create a repeat of
the disasters that we’re seeing in Europe.
AMY GOODMAN: Final comment, what most shocked you in writing The Body [Economic], Sanjay Basu?
DR. SANJAY BASU:
You know, coming from the public health field, we have something called
the "precautionary principle," which is that when a idea or policy is
controversial, we should first do whatever protects people the most. And
what we’re doing is entirely the opposite. We’ve essentially had a
massive untested experiment. That experiment has failed, and it sounds
like it’s quite deadly, given all the data through history.
AMY GOODMAN:
I want to thank you both for being with us. Sanjay Basu is an
epidemiologist at Stanford University. David Stuckler, Oxford
University. Their new book, out today, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death.
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