I’m working on a little something, so meanwhile I’m sending you over to give The Week’s Ryan Cooper some clicks. He’s written a great summary of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s decision to poison Flint, Michigan’s water supply in the name of Almighty Austerity:
You know what’s bad? Brain damage.
Flint, Michigan, is finding this out after it accidentally gave its entire population at least a little bit of lead poisoning when it switched up their water supply. In an attempt to save money for a cash-strapped city, Flint started drinking water from the Flint River — but ended up contaminating children with a poisonous heavy metal. Governor Rick Snyder has declared a state of emergency, and the federal government is investigating.
Why on Earth did they do this? Austerity. Aside from the obvious humanitarian disaster, this is a stark demonstration of austerity’s false economy. Trying to be cheap on Flint’s water supply will end up costing the state of Michigan (and probably the country as a whole) a ton more money than it would have to fix it properly in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t austerity as in “let’s be fiscally responsible.” This was “austerity,” as in “let’s see how much money we can save for ourselves by brutalizing people in lower tax brackets”:
But emergency managers, particularly the ones appointed by Governor Snyder (a Republican) have been far more focused on cuts for their own sake, particularly crushing unionized public sector workers. The idea to temporarily use Flint River water while another pipeline was being constructed was one of those cost-saving measures.
It was immediately obvious that the water was filthy, and residents loudly protested that it was cloudy, smelled bad, and tasted worse. General Motors stopped using the water because it was literally corroding their machinery. But Snyder and his handpicked head environmental official Dan Wyant studiously ignored the problem — despite internal warnings of lead poisoning as early as July of last year — until an outside scientific study demonstrated extreme levels of lead in Flint children. In late December — over a year after the water switch — Snyder finally apologized and Wyant quietly resigned.
What an ugly story.
Hey, thanks for reading! If you come here often, and you like what I do, would you please consider contributing something (sorry, that page is a work in progress) to keeping this place running and me out of debtor’s prison? Also, while you’re out there on the internet tubes, please consider liking this blog’s Facebook page and following me on Twitter! Thank you!
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
This is exactly correct. Austerity, for the sake of squeezing a nickel from the poor and giving it to the wealthy and politically connected.
What makes this a capital crime in my professional opinion is that the City Fathers of Flint could have averted the entire situation if they had just budgeted a thousand dollars for a competent water supply engineer to go over the plan and see what might go wrong. They did not do this for the simple reason that, because Austerity, there was not a thousand dollars to be had.
Yet there will be millions of dollars found to fix the problem that ideology caused. Makes me wonder why I spent all those years and incurred all those opportunity costs to get my PhD, when all the important decisions are made by people who don’t know which end of the electron microscope you look into.