The Deficit Hawks and the Climate Disaster

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Let’s see. Which is more alarming—the debt we are leaving to our children, or the planet we are leaving to our children? Duh …

This week’s IPCC report suggests that even if we do everything right, a great deal of deterioration in the Earth’s habitability is baked in, so to speak. And doing everything right will require a lot more public investment.

Any increase in the public debt is the price we need to pay for rescuing some kind of life for future generations. But try to find any concern for habitability in the fiscal alarmism of the usual suspects.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a creation of the late Peter G. Peterson and his family foundation, seems stuck on autopilot in a time warp when planetary survival was not even an issue.

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These people pass themselves off as bipartisan centrists. Indeed, they were instrumental in persuading Obama to create his disastrous Bowles-Simpson Commission and related automatic budget triggers to cut public investment.

This $6 million operation exists to persuade legislative and public opinion of the importance of budget balance, yet its tax forms filed with the IRS report its entire lobbying outlay for 2019, including efforts to influence public opinion, as just $28,681. (This is another good case for increasing the IRS enforcement budget.)

The Committee’s brand of climate denial via budget discipline is more insidious than the far-right, know-nothing sort. And several Democrats shamefully lend their names to it.

The Committee’s co-chairs include former Democratic Congressman Leon Panetta, who also served as Clinton’s OMB director and then White House chief of staff, and former Democratic Congressman Tim Penny. Its directors include former Sens. Kent Conrad and Chuck Robb, former Reps. Vic Fazio and Jane Harman, and former CBO director Bob Reischauer, all Democrats, as well as Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chair of the late and little-lamented Bowles-Simpson Commission.

The Committee’s advice is a perfect map of what not to do. In a recent release, the Committee calls on Congress, in the budget reconciliation process, to “restore the Conrad Rule,” a now defunct rule championed by former Sen. Conrad, requiring every nickel of new investments to be paid for by new taxes or other cuts. Not.

This long-term undertow of respectable centrist opinion suggests what Biden is up against as we struggle to temper climate disaster. It isn’t just the Republicans; it’s the fiscal scolds among Democrats.

Instead of the Conrad Rule, how about an IPCC rule? Benchmark the $3.5 trillion investment program against what it will take to save the planet. And spend what it takes.

The climate catastrophe is a threat that exceeds a major war. You wonder what these people might have been saying after Pearl Harbor? Balance the budget!

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