This is an interesting article and it makes me think about the overwhelming difficulty in attempting to direct the nation's economy through policy. Here Reich is extolling government spending as a way of stimulating growth. That's fine but this gets back to the looming point, the monster elephant in the room, which is that growth cannot continue in an unlimited way. That has to do with the state of the global environment, we do not have unlimited resources and the world cannot withstand the burning of all of the reserves of carbon based fuels. We are talking about global warming at a rate that will cause our extinction. The growth has to be pinpoint and precise in areas of renewable resources, non-carbon based energy and build out from there.
Robert Reich: Public Debt and Economic Growth
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All these phony arguments over debt are to divert people's attention away from the "real" debt that we are incurring on future generations and it has little to do with some specious paper debt. We'll reach 400 ppm of carbon sometime this mos. Why is this so important ? because every ppm above 280 ppm ( the top end of the average amount of CO 2 in the air for 100Xs of yrs.) is a debt placed on the heads of future generations as long as we can't figure out a way to remove it from the atmosphere. Which we cannot do now or for the foreseeable future. That debt is the enormous changes we will create by thinking we can run the planet with this level of GHG in the air and the extreme warming and sea rise it's going to cause and is already starting to cause. The PTB don't want to acknowledge this real debt , they'd prefer to ignore it and focus on some mythical debt we owe ourselves not Mother Nature. That is all going to change very soon, however.
The problem is the country being so dangerously divided, and as I write this it makes me think this is intentional. Intentional because the more severely divided we are the less possibility of addressing global warming which is a corporate issue from the point of view of profit and control. It is of course a global issue and we are failing at universally.
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