In the 1850s, London, the world’s largest city, still didn’t have a sewer system. Waste simply flowed into the Thames, which was as disgusting as you might imagine. But conservatives, including the magazine The Economist and the prime minister, opposed any effort to remedy the situation. After all, such an effort would involve increased government spending and, they insisted, infringe on personal liberty and local control.
In the 1850s, London, the world’s largest city, still didn’t have a sewer system. Waste simply flowed into the Thames, which was as disgusting as you might imagine. But conservatives, including the magazine The Economist and the prime minister, opposed any effort to remedy the situation. After all, such an effort would involve increased government spending and, they insisted, infringe on personal liberty and local control.
It took the Great Stink of 1858, when the stench made the Houses of Parliament unusable, to produce action.
But that’s all ancient history. Modern politicians, no matter how conservative, understand public health is an essential government role. Right?
No, wrong — as illustrated by the disaster in Flint, Mich.
What we know so far is that in 2014 the city’s emergency manager — appointed by Rick Snyder, the state’s Republican governor — decided to switch to an unsafe water source, with lead contamination and more, in order to save money. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that state officials knew they were damaging public health, putting children in particular at risk, even as they stonewalled residents and health experts.
This story — America in the 21st century, and you can trust neither the water nor what officials say about it — would be a horrifying outrage even if it were an accident or an isolated instance of bad policy. But it isn’t. On the contrary, the nightmare in Flint reflects the resurgence in American politics of exactly the same attitudes that led to London’s Great Stink more than a century and a half ago.
Let’s back up a bit and talk about the role of government in an advanced society.
In the modern world, much government spending goes to social insurance programs — things such as Social Security, Medicare and so on — that are supposed to protect citizens from the misfortunes of life. Such spending is the subject of fierce political debate, and understandably so.
There should, however, be much less debate about spending on what Econ 101 calls public goods — things that benefit everyone and can’t be provided by the private sector. Yes, we can differ about exactly how big a military we need or how dense and well-maintained the road network should be, but you wouldn’t expect controversy about spending enough to provide key public goods such as basic education or safe drinking water.
Yet, a funny thing has happened as hard-line conservatives have taken over many U.S. state governments. Or actually, it’s not funny at all. Not surprisingly, they have sought to cut social insurance spending for the poor. In fact, many state governments dislike spending on the poor so much they are rejecting a Medicaid expansion that wouldn’t cost them anything because it’s federally financed. But what we also see is extreme penny pinching on public goods.
It’s easy to come up with examples.
Kansas, which made headlines with its failed strategy of cutting taxes in the expectation of an economic miracle, tried to close the resulting budget gap largely with cuts in education. North Carolina also imposed drastic cuts on schools. And in New Jersey, Chris Christie famously canceled a desperately needed rail tunnel under the Hudson.
Nor are we talking only about a handful of cases. Public construction spending as a share of national income has fallen sharply in recent years, reflecting cutbacks by state and local governments that are ever less interested in providing public goods for the future. And this includes sharp cuts in spending on water supply.
So, are we just talking about the effects of ideology? Didn’t Flint find itself in the cross hairs of austerity because it’s a poor, mostly African-American city? Yes, that’s definitely part of what happened — it would be hard to imagine something similar happening to Grosse Pointe.
But these really aren’t separate stories. What we see in Flint is an all too typically American situation of (literally) poisonous interaction between ideology and race, in which small-government extremists are empowered by the sense of too many voters that good government is simply a giveaway to Those People.
Now what?
Snyder finally expressed some contrition, although he’s still withholding much of the information we need to fully understand what happened. And meanwhile, we are, inevitably, being told we shouldn’t make the poisoning of Flint a partisan issue.
But you can’t understand what happened in Flint, and what will happen in many other places if current trends continue, without understanding the ideology that made the disaster possible.
Paul Krugman is a syndicated columnist who writes for the New York Times News Service.