Paul Krugman: Michigan’s Great Stink

The "poisonous interaction between ideology and race":

Michigan’s Great Stink, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: ...Modern politicians, no matter how conservative, understand that 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 that they were damaging public health...

This story ... would be a horrifying outrage even if it were an accident or an isolated instance of bad policy. But it isn’t. ...

In the modern world, much government spending goes to social insurance programs — things like 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 ... public goods — things that benefit everyone and can’t be provided by the private sector. ...

Yet ... hard-line conservatives have ... sought to cut social insurance spending on the poor. ... But what we also see is extreme penny pinching on public goods. ...

Nor are we talking only about a handful of cases. Public construction spending as a share of national income has fallen sharply... 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? Mr. Snyder has 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 that 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.