The Great American False Dilemma: Austerity vs. Stimulus

[stockholmer]

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/great-american-false-dilemma-austerity-vs-stimulus/64249

Probably no American city better illustrates the trajectory of post-war US growth than Los Angeles. With its ganglion of highways (built when oil cost $14 dollars a barrel) and its never-ending boulevards that, having replaced vast acreages of citrus, now light up the night sky, the City of Angels spent 40 years blowing past its old pre-war borders and filled up an entire geological basin with infrastructure.

The scale of this expansion can be seen in this very helpful satellite photo from NASA, which captures a sweeping view of Los Angeles County. For example, Hollywood, a common reference point for most Americans, is reduced to a small village from this perspective; a mere data point, if you will, as the greater metro region cascades without interruption 100 miles to the east.

Even more awesome to contemplate is that much of this landscape is duplicated to the south, as well, through Orange and San Diego counties. Indeed, nearly 7% of US population lives in the five large counties of southern California, with counties like San Bernardino having exploded from 200,000 people after WW2 to over 2 million today. Unfortunately, what was long accepted as a triumph of growth the past 60 years has now become a rather burdensome and exceedingly expensive system to maintain.

I bring up the case of Los Angeles because there is currently a rather tribal, oppositional, and, of course, very heated debate taking place in the US right now that roughly frames the solution to our problems as a choice between Austerity and Stimulus. For this debate to have meaning, we need to consider how economic policies will actually solve the problems currently endured in a mega-region like Los Angeles. Unemployment, food stamp use, and energy costs have leapt ever higher here since the 2008 crisis. Moreover, the seeds of these trends were already showing up before the infamous Autumn of 2008. How would either a new phase of belt-tightening or reflationary policy actually affect southern California?


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