Sacrifices: Shared, and Also the More Selfish-Style Ones

In Sunday's op-ed, Paul Krugman lays into Scott Walker, accusing the Wisconsin governor of dissembling his true intent - union-busting - by posing as paladin of the tax-paying silent majority. He writes:

"In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain."

I want to focus on Krugman's attention to the verbal gambit whereby the phrase "shared sacrifice" is supposed to help us see the sense in any plan to reduce benefits. The image speaks for itself. The fair thing, the truly equitable and just thing, is for all of us to accept some privation so no one of us (read: business interests or high-income earners) is made to carry the load for the rest of us. So far, so fair, huh?

But calling something shared sacrifice isn't enough to make it so. Raising the retirement age for Social Security is the most clear-cut example of this I've been reading about lately. Does raising the retirement age really affect the rich, middle-class, and poor equally? Are all seniors in this together? Or, since current benefit recipients are so often excluded from these austerity measures, will tomorrow's retirees be uniformly giving up no more and no less if they have to wait to retire? Extend this same line of questioning to all state benefits under attack, and it seems to me you'll sometimes stumble upon cases wherein some of us won't suffer at all from service cuts and some of us will see substantive reductions in our quality of life. And that's the general problem with this kind of talk: the equity of sacrifice is merely asserted, not proved. And by the time you're telling Wisconsinites that fiscal survival depends on making union members undergo a certification vote every year, then I really need you to slow down, can the slogans, and start spelling some things out.

Unfortunately, I think politicians will be leaning more and more heavily on the "shared sacrifice" trope cattle prod voters into repudiating the redistributive welfare state. They're free to make the argument, but it's the self-evident stand-ins for argument, the ideological short-hands, that are harder and harder to take. I don't want a smarmy appeal to simple, across-the-board nationwide self-sameness when what's on the table is a social safety net that by its nature assumes we have some stake in unequal sacrifice.