Equating deficits and climate is stupid
by David Atkins
Tom Friedman has a column today equating progressive resistance to deficit reduction to conservative resistance to carbon reduction. It’s a tempting parallel for a climate-aware centrist pundit to make. I myself even brought up a certain parallelism between the two issues a couple of days ago in the sense that American democracy is ill-equipped to handle long-term problems.
But there are a few enormous differences between the two. Pundits like Friedman claim that progressives don’t want to do anything about the deficit because interest rates are low at the moment, so the deficit “problem” won’t rear its head for quite a while. In this way we are compared to conservatives who refuse to act on climate change.
But that’s not the actual reason most progressives oppose short-term austerity. The big differences between the two issues are:
1) Unlike runaway greenhouse effects, deficits will mostly decline naturally with economic growth. The biggest cause of the major debt-to-GDP ratio increase since 2007 is not surprisingly the Great Recession. Most of that problem will disappear with a robust, demand-driven recovery. Yes, there are certain problems to solve as the population ages, but those are almost entirely due to rising healthcare costs that are best controlled with a universal single-payer system. In the case of deficits, the “problem” really will mostly resolve itself by doing nothing. Not so with climate, which will spin out of control if nothing is done.
2) From a political point of view, progressives don’t deny the deficit exists. We simply contend it’s not the crisis others are claiming, and that the “solutions” of the conservative crowd aren’t solutions at all. Conservatives who refuse to act on climate change don’t admit the problem but refuse to act because it’s a long-term problem: they are science deniers who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the problem in the first place. Further, the dire projections of Chicago-school economists are simply not as reliable as the dire projections of climate scientists.
3) Unlike the climate crisis, the deficit isn’t a force of nature but a political balance sheet issue can never be “solved.” As the experience of the Clinton presidency demonstrated, deficit problems solved by Democrats can easily be recreated by Republicans who pass tax cuts for the wealthy and conduct illegal foreign wars. Weaning the nation off of carbon is a far more permanent thing.
4) The proposed “solutions” to cutting the deficit won’t work. Cutting Medicare, Social Security and other programs important to the poor and middle class will simply increase economic insecurity and drive down demand, leading to double dip recessions and increased deficits. As Europe’s austerity-mad failures have shown, the touted “solution” to the deficit “problem” only makes it worse. Eliminating carbon emissions, on the other hand, is the straightforward solution to the climate crisis.
Attempting to equate deficit reduction and climate change mitigation is yet another attempt by centrist pundits to place the stock market and governmental balance sheet juggling on a par with the forces of nature. They aren’t. Markets and government investments are man-made, with malleable sets of rules. Nature isn’t so forgiving.
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