WiseOne wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 8:27 am
Took a quick peek at the Green New Deal. It's mainly a call for Congress to get off their derrieres and stop amusing themselves with Trump-baiting, and start working on infrastructure that really does need attention. Not at all a bad thing.
In general, I think it makes more sense for the government to limit what entities can do ("you can't dump your toxic waste into the cities drinking water"), instead of telling them they have to do something ("you have to insulate your house with R50 insulation"). For instance, if we didn't mandate that cars had to be uparmored, fuel efficiency would be much higher. They have an emotional response to THAT tradeoff (if people get in wrecks, they'll be more likely to get injured/killed), but when you can abstract the tradeoffs (it will cost a lot of money to do all this, but we are a currency issuer, blah blah), it seems more palatable.
Some of the items on the list are ridiculously naive, like "upgrade all existing buildings to make them energy efficient" - hell, if that were at all feasible NYC would already have done it.
In the
archived FAQs, they graciously admitted that the government simply hadn't given away enough money:
"Merely incentivizing the private sector doesn’t work - e.g. the tax incentives and subsidies given to wind and solar projects have been a valuable spur to growth in the US renewables industry but, even with such investment-promotion subsidies, the present level of such projects is simply inadequate to transition to a fully greenhouse gas neutral economy as quickly as needed."
Others are pure socialist crap like the one calling for cash welfare for "anyone unable or unwilling to work.",
Evidently, one of her advisors, a law professor, went on
Tucker Carlson's show and spouted off, repeatedly, that the "unwilling to work" part was a fabricated lie and she "never said anything like that."
Later her team admitted that it was in the first draft.
"A guaranteed job for all." (Guaranteed by whom? and to do what?) and "high speed rail to make air travel non-existent" (is she not aware of the distance between the west and east coasts?) But others I could really get behind. High speed rail for mid/near distance travel, infrastructure repair, smart power grid, more sustainable/renewable energy.
As Cullen wrote, she is a MMT proponent, so they thinks the government can just borrow all the money. The adviser from the Tucker segment said that even though we're going to have a lot more money floating around because of the government spending, we're going to have a lot more goods to offset it, "if the money you're spending is resulting int he production of a great many more goods, you have no inflation problem." This isn't even internally consistent with their plan, since most of it is retrofitting things we already have that are cheaper. So you aren't getting any new goods, you're replacing ones you already have. IE, spending money on an electric car and associated infrastructure replaces a gas car and infrastructure we already have.
I'm skeptical of the ROI claims for infrastructure, like "for every $1 spent on highways, we get back $6 in productivity gains." From what I can tell, they're making assumptions such as "if a $20/hr worker can get to their job 10 minutes faster with this new highway, then we get a $3.33 increase in productivity per person per day. If 100 of their fellow workers can take the same highway, then you have $85,000 of new productivity a year."
We don't even budget enough to take care of our existing infrastructure (which I don't believe would be left to rot and decay). Just stop and think about what adding a bunch of new, higher-tech infrastructure, with its associated maintenance and replacement costs, will result in.