Buying Time Quotes

“Higher taxes to bring down public debt would also put to rest the tawdry rhetoric according to which ‘we’ should not live at the expense of ‘our children’ – when the real problem is that the ‘better-off’ live at everyone else’s expense by largely avoiding the social costs involved in the upkeep of their hunting grounds.”
― Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

“Everything suggests that declining electoral participation in the capitalist democracies is a sign not of contentment but of resignation. The losers from the neoliberal turn cannot see what they might get from a change of government; the TINA (‘There is no alternative’) politics of ‘globalization’ has long arrived at the bottom of society where voting no longer makes a difference in the eyes of those who would have most to gain from political change. The less hope they invest in elections, the less those who can afford to rely on the market have to fear from political intervention. The political resignation of the underclasses consolidates the neoliberal turn from which it derives, further shielding capitalism from democracy.”
― Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

“The European authorities are effectively lending Greece money so Greece can repay the money it borrowed from them’ (‘Most”
― Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

“As the US presidential changeover from Clinton to Bush Jr demonstrated, budget surpluses can serve as a pretext for tax cuts that generate new deficits, which then require further spending cuts to restore the surpluses. The interplay between tax and spending cuts shows that the balancing of budgets in the consolidation state is not pursued for its own sake but, as part of a programme of privatization and liberalization, is intended to bring about a general rollback of the state and its intervention in the market.”
― Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

“rates, it is now public knowledge that the infamous American investment bank Goldman Sachs helped it – for its usual exorbitant fees – to brighten up its accounts.57 It seems scarcely credible that none of this was suspected in the highly ‘networked’ international ‘financial”
― Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism