No Gain, No Pain

In 2004, a writer named Warren St. John published a book about the mad passion of University of Alabama football fans, and it helps explain the election results this month in France and Greece — and America's budget politics.

In Tuscaloosa for the Alabama-LSU game, the writer runs into Alabama fan Don Cole. Don is awaiting a heart transplant. He is wearing a beeper that will ring if a heart suddenly becomes available. But the beeper will ring only if he's within a two-hour driving radius of the hospital in Nashville, Tenn. If Don is more than two hours away, he doesn't get the message, and he doesn't get the heart. At the moment, in Tuscaloosa, he is more than three hours from the hospital.

Why, the writer asks him, would he risk missing a heart transplant for a football game? He answers, "If I can't go to Alabama football games, what's the point in living?"

This is a story about doubt and trust and sacrifice.

Don Cole jeopardized his chance to get a heart transplant because he had a lot of doubt — doubt that he might never get a heart at all, doubt that the operation would be successful, doubt that the heart would work afterward. So he decided he wasn't going to sacrifice something he enjoyed right now for something he might get later.

In the elections this month in France and Greece, the voters had a choice. The side campaigning on "Painful Austerity — Yes!" lost, as it had in earlier elections in Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.

The voters are a little like Don Cole, saying skeptically, "You want me to sacrifice the little comfort I have right now for something that is going to cause me pain and might not work anyway?"

In the absence of trust, people reject sacrifice. No gain, no pain. If you can't show me that I'm going to get something out of it, then I'm not going to put myself through this.

In a low-trust environment, it's hard to sell austerity.

That's why French President Francois Hollande did well campaigning on a growth platform. In Berlin this month, meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Hollande said of the EU budget rules, "I want to renegotiate what has been agreed to include a growth dimension."

The growth vs. austerity choice is a raging debate in U.S.

There are two reasons to favor the growth approach.

First, austerity requires sacrifice, and only under very narrow conditions will people accept sacrifice. They must believe that there is an urgent need, that the sacrifice would be distributed fairly and that the sacrifice would lead to greater benefits or prevent greater pain. Austerity is not likely to be accepted until there is a plan with some bipartisan support that meets that three-part test.

Secondly, austerity alone is not enough to fix the deficit. The most recent time we erased a record deficit, austerity played a secondary role. President Bill Clinton pushed through a tax hike on the top 1 percent in 1993. Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich struck a balanced budget agreement in 1997, which made significant spending cuts. But the biggest factor in balancing the budget was the record economic growth under way at the time. The proof is that the Balanced Budget Act projected a balanced budget by 2002, but because of higher-than-expected tax revenues, the budget came into balance in 1998.

This is why austerity (not as a campaign theme but as a concrete set of budget cuts) is a hard sell in America. Most voters are skeptical of at least one of the three conditions — that it is needed, that it would be fair, that it would work. In fact, the biggest political stumbling point is on fairness — shared sacrifice. It's hard to persuade people to sacrifice Social Security or Medicare benefits and reduce their standard of living if people on the upper end won't sacrifice through higher taxes that would not reduce their standard of living.

This doesn't mean there won't be sacrifice embedded in the budget, but right now, the best Congress could do is impose it; in this climate of low trust, voters will not freely accept it.

To close the story of Don Cole, after that football season, the intrepid Alabama football fan did get a heart transplant. Unfortunately, he suffered complications and never made it out of the hospital. He played his last season very well.

Tom Rosshirt was a national security speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a foreign affairs spokesman for Vice President Al Gore. Email him at tomrosshirt@gmail.com. To find out more about Tom Rosshirt and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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