Tag Archives: green new deal

March 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Most hopeful story:

  • The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.


February 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Most hopeful story:

  • Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.



even more on the Green New Deal

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I’ve been thinking more about the Green New Deal, because I just can’t help myself. It mentions water, energy, transportation, housing, food and green infrastructure. As your emperor, I will set up an infrastructure bank to fund projects consistent with approved sustainable infrastructure plans produced by metropolitan planning agencies. I will tell you what the minimum goals of your plan have to be. You can add and sub-divide goals if you want, but you can’t subtract them. I will fund generously fund university planning and economics departments and consultants to help you put your plan together if you want. I will match your investments maybe 50 or even 75 cents on the dollar, but not 100% because you have to have some skin in the game or you won’t make good decisions. I will provide some kind of ongoing support for operation, maintenance, repair and retrofit of existing infrastructure, maybe through a trust fund set up for this purpose. My infrastructure bank will be counter-cyclical, opening up the floodgates when the private sector is struggling to employ everyone able to work, and dialing back when the private sector is robust and there are inflation concerns.

States, you can have a voice as stakeholders in the plans put together by metro areas, but money will not pass through you and you will not decide which projects are funded inside metro areas. You can do the planning for areas outside major metro areas. I might let you be an equal partner with the metro areas when it comes to the food and green infrastructure side of things.

I will turn on the taps for massive funding of basic research, into all aspects of energy, climate change, sustainability and resilience yes, but also for a broader focus on innovation and getting as back to the higher productivity growth trajectory of earlier decades. Tax incentives for private R&D are a pet conservative idea that fits well here too.

Along with capital/infrastructure investment, basic research and R&D, education and training are the other key to boosting long-term growth. I will turn on the taps there too, from pre-school to grade school to college to continuing education. Again, incentives for training on the private side will be part of this. If you lose your job to a robot, going back to school or entering a subsidized training program run by a high-value-added industry will be a viable option at no cost to you.

The “federal jobs guarantee” idea surprises me somewhat. Maybe I don’t understand it that well, but it seems like a fairly conservative idea similar to today’s unemployment benefits, but requiring people to work for the federal government to get benefits. Again, maybe I am misunderstanding. If you lose your job and are able to work but lack the education or skills, I’ll pay you to go back to school or enter a training program. If you truly can’t work, you’ll qualify for disability which will be tied to citizenship rather than past employment. I’m not sure just yet whether a universal basic income is the answer, but I’ll fully explore the idea and institute it if it makes sense. If you just want to sit on your ass and watch TV, I’m not going to make you comfortable, but I’ll make sure you don’t starve or die of exposure or a preventable disease.

As far as health care goes, I’ll just do the single payer thing. Everybody else in the world does it and it works fine. If I have to, I’ll figure out what the premium needs to be for people to buy into Medicare, and then give them that option. Tie it to citizenship, not to working for a large employer. Don’t worry about the insurance companies. They will scream, but they will adapt and make money selling “supplemental” plans like they do to rich retirees now.

There are a couple things missing from the Green New Deal. Childcare is one. There is talk of “family leave”, but really supporting working parents the way other advanced countries do means more than that. A lot of people don’t know that the U.S. came within hours of having a comprehensive government childcare system. It was passed by both houses of Congress and Richard Nixon’s pen was hovering inches above, fully primed with ink, when the lobbyists got to him. (Okay, I’m making up the part about the pen, but the part about Congress passing it and lobbyists convincing Nixon to veto it is all true.) What’s good for children is generally good for women, families, the work force and the nation as a whole, so I will do something to give families flexibility to cover that gap between birth and preschool using whatever combination of home care and high-quality government or licensed private care makes sense to them.

Also missing is any concept of a “peace dividend” or taking on the military industrial complex. I’d like to get our security costs down to 2 or 3% of GDP from the current 5%, which is unprecedented in history and unsustainable. A lot of our allies are richer than us at this point and can pay their fair share. Don’t worry about the arms exporters, they will scream but they are going to be really good at building windmills. If I have to ramp up spending quickly to support allies, Congress will have to declare war and there will be war taxes and war bonds and other sacrifices so the public understands what they are giving up to make that happen. Also, I will just get rid of the goddamn nuclear weapons.

Can we afford it, how will I pay for it? I already mentioned the peace dividend. Beyond that, my friends, my plan will pay for itself through a boost in productivity growth. We’ve heard that before, but I will actually do it. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll phase it in gradually and in a counter-cyclical, thoroughly Keynesian manner, so seriously just trust me you are barely going to notice. Oh, and there’s going to be a VAT like all other advanced countries have, and a carbon tax and other taxes on pollution and waste.

more on the Green New Deal

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I’m reading a lot about the Green New Deal today. But after reading about it, I decided to just go and read the actual thing itself. It’s easy to be cynical about something like this by saying it has not been developed into an implementable plan or set of projects yet (even though it mentions “projects”, it doesn’t really contain any), and that would be true. It’s really a vision and goal-setting document. Getting people on board with a vision is the first step in a successful plan. It’s a hard step and it appears to have been done pretty well in a pretty short period of time.

The second step is developing an implementable plan to achieve the vision and goals. This is a harder step. Some people are comparing this to the 2008 stimulus program, but that was not a plan because it had no clearly articulated objectives or goals other than to throw a lot of money at a lot of projects that had already been defined by someone in the past according to whatever their goals were at the time. There was no time to develop a plan in that case – in fact, the projects had to be “shovel ready” meaning taking the time to plan anything was explicitly forbidden. This time, there actually is the possibility of taking the time to develop a plan. Developing a really good plan takes some time though. To do it well, you have to look at an enormous number of projects, policies, and other measures, consider them in various combinations, and pick a set of them that is reasonably technologically and economically efficient at achieving your goals, acceptable to your major stakeholders even if not their first choice, and implementable. I think some of this planning would have to be done at the local and regional level, preferably at the metro-area scale, although the states could maybe be involved in agriculture and inter-city transportation planning.

Finally, there is implementation. This is the hardest step. Complex institutions have to be created or existing ones repurposed; money has to be disbursed; contracts have to be written, awarded, and administered; job descriptions have to be written and people hired and trained and deployed; projects have to be managed; progress has to be tracked and laws have to be enforced. A critical mass of people involved at all levels has to understand and buy into those goals and how their little cog in the massive machine contributes to them. They have to make all kinds of little decisions and course corrections every day that keep the whole massive enterprise aimed at those goals.

So hard, harder, hardest. But like I said, the hard part is already done! In my career, I’ve seen groups of intelligent and well-educated people try to jump into implementing a bunch of projects without defining goals or having a plan for how they are supposed to tie together and meet the goals. I’ve also seen a brilliant vision translated into a reasonably technologically and economically workable, implementable plan, and then fail because key stakeholders were not on board, or because the people responsible for implementing the plan never understood the vision or how their little piece fit into it, so their millions of small daily decisions gradually caused the program to drift away from a path that was aimed at the goals, and there was no mechanism to bring it back to the path. But to end on a brighter note, if you come up with a brilliant vision, a brilliant plan to achieve it, and then you only implement 25% or even 10% of it, you have achieved something that never would have been achieved if you hadn’t come up with the vision and plan. And you show that it can be done and give others a chance to pick up the fight after you have moved on.

If I have time, I’ll try to tease out in another post what I think the vision and goals actually are, and how I think they could be achieved if I were somehow made emperor.