Pushing austerity: state failure, municipal bankruptcy and the crises of fiscal federalism in the USA
TLDR
In this article, the authors examine the means by which the Wall Street crisis of 2008 has been translated into a state crisis, especially for the state at the subnational and urban scales.Abstract:
By way of a critical exploration of austerity politics in the USA, the paper examines the means by which the Wall Street crisis of 2008 has been translated into a state crisis, especially for the state at the subnational and urban scales. It examines the strategies, rationales and tactics adopted by advocates of austerity measures, which amount to a sustained effort to socialize, rescale and ‘dump’ the costs of the economic crisis. These manoeuvres are transforming the operating environment for state and local government in the USA, and they are remaking the terrains of urban politics at the same time.read more
Citations
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The depths of the cuts: The uneven geography of local government austerity
TL;DR: Gray and Barford as mentioned in this paper argue that it has actively reshaped the relationship between central and local government, shrinking the capacity of the local state, increasing inequality between local governments, and exacerbating territorial injustice.
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Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit
TL;DR: In 2014, approximately 100,000 vacant lots lie "vacant" in Detroit after decades of industrial decline, white flight, and poverty, and according to the Detroit Future City plan, traditional public services (water, street lights, transportation, garbage pickup) and the "grey infrastructures" that deliver them will be reduced and eventually withdrawn from these zones as discussed by the authors.
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Austerity in the city: economic crisis and urban service decline?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider how the financial crisis originated in the urban and became part of a broader state crisis with consequences for cities and explore political implications that include the undermining of democratic processes and the rise of new "austerity" regimes.
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Transatlantic city, part 1: Conjunctural urbanism
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore contemporary transformations in metropolitan governance in the wake of the entrepreneurial turns of the 1980s and subsequent waves of neoliberalization and financialisation, a case is outlined here for a "conjunctural" approach to urban analysis.
References
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This Could Be the Start of Something Big
TL;DR: Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka as discussed by the authors pointed out the promise and pitfalls of this new approach and argued that what they termed social movement regionalism can offer an important contribution to the revitalization of progressive politics in America.
Journal Article
Fiscal Federalism, Political Will, and Strategic Use of Municipal Bankruptcy
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suggest that allowing bankruptcy courts to impose resource adjustments serves to neutralize the strategic behavior of local officials and thus encourages localities to internalize the costs of their activities in a manner more consistent with the tenets of fiscal federalism.
Book
Plunder: How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation
TL;DR: In this article, the authors presented a valuable synthesis of macro, micro, and public choice literatures on the Great Depression and extended it to the recent financial crisis and made a list of policy recommendations, including easing monetary policy, re-inflating housing demand through immigration reform, suspending all tariff and trade barriers, extending the right to work, ending conventional fiscal stimulus measures, reforming Social Security, establishing a plan for longterm balanced budgets, using the bankruptcy code to deal with failing corporations, and imposing losses (haircuts) on private debtors in failing institutions.
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State and Municipal Alternatives to Austerity
Robert Pollin,Jeffrey Thompson +1 more
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Bankrupt Politics and the Politics of Bankruptcy
TL;DR: The authors argued that bankruptcy is fundamentally a distributional exercise and the shape of bankruptcy law is an expression of distributional norms and interest group politics rather than an exercise in economic efficiency, and that bankruptcy can no more remake fiscal federalism than it can fix a firm with an untenable business model.