When the Soviet Union collapsed, the American left enthused about all the ways the U.S. could make people’s live better with the supposed “peace dividend” that would accrue now that its greatest global adversary was no more. The word for that is naivete.
This country will write a blank check to the military. But when it comes to spending trillions improving ordinary people’s lives, the Beltway’s questions are always, How much does it cost? and How are you going to pay for it?
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Thursday night posed the How much does it cost? questions in “The Price Is Right” terms. As in, it depends on what the prize is. “Eight-hundred dollars’ worth of printer paper would be pretty lousy,” Hayes said. “Seven-hundred dollars for a brand new Corvette would be amazing. But if it’s $700 for a bucket of clams, it’s a rip-off.”
Capitol Hill lawmakers are bandying about all sorts of figures for the Build Back Better infrastructure bill. This figure is too high, say some. This much is too low, say others. Yes, but what is the prize? What are we getting for that money, however much? No one is talking about that.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont says he wants to pay for it. But pay for what? After going after millionaires and billionaires, Sanders spoke in generalities about how investments in child care, education, etc., pay off down the road. He eventually reframed addressing climate change in simple, national security terms even deficit hawks ought to understand.
“How much is too much when you’re talking about saving the planet? How much?” Sanders asked. “And if the planet goes down in 50 years—well, Gee-whiz—how much should we have spent or not spent?”
By 2014, the U.S. Navy was planning for sea level rise from climate change. Roads were flooding regularly at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, the largest in the world. Budgets submitted for building new dock facilities included extra feet of height. But Navy planners knew not to mention climate change in anything submitted to Congress. Too controversial with some lawmakers.
Joan VanDervort, former deputy director for Ranges, Sea and Airspace at the Pentagon told NBC News, “They try to stay away from the words ‘climate change,’ and use words like ‘natural resources’ and ‘resiliency’ and terms like ‘weather,’ ‘hurricanes.,” adding, “When you omit “climate change as a priority related to our national security, it’s very difficult to get funding.”
NBC News from 2018:
The Navy has long understood the stakes of global warming. It has many coastal facilities, and its forces are often first on the scene of humanitarian emergencies triggered by extreme weather.
A decade ago, the Navy commissioned the National Research Council to study the risks climate change poses to its ability to respond to these crises and keep the country safe. The 2011 report said a thawing Arctic would stress the military’s fleet by opening a vast new arena to police in particularly harsh conditions. The report also found that 56 Naval facilities worth a combined $100 billion would be threatened if sea level rose about 3 feet.
“Every year you wait to make decisions and take actions, the risk goes up.”
The report warned that the Navy needed to begin protecting the most vulnerable facilities immediately, and had only 10 to 20 years to begin work on the rest. Seven years later, there’s been little progress, said retired Rear Adm. Jonathan White, who led the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change before retiring in 2015.
“Many of those recommendations, most if not all, have gone unanswered,” he said. “Every year you wait to make decisions and take actions, the risk goes up. And I think the expense also goes up.”
But if national defense is not enough to get Congress to ante up, perhaps the question should be How much is too much to spend to save Florida? Or just Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Atlantic City, Manhattan, Charleston, Virginia Beach, and parts of Boston.
Not to mention fixing health care and replacing crumbling infrastructure.
Very smart, very progressive people, Hayes notes, insist on repeating the size of the budget reconciliation bill — $3.5 trillion — “to signal the scope of the ambition here.” But without telling voters what’s waiting for them behind the curtain, without selling them on how much better their lives will be if the bill passes, $3.5 trillion is an abstraction with no connection to their lives, no matter how impressive it sounds on Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers and activists with inflated senses of their own smarts should be selling the brownie. But they cannot resist talking about the recipe to show off what skilled bakers they are and how much they know about the chemistry of cooking, etc.
Voters don’t care. How will that $3.5 trillion-dollar brownie taste?
“We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”