Your obsession with what things cost is, I realize, a conditioned reflex that almost all politicians must develop. However, it plays directly into the opposition’s narrative and their strength. Every time America is faced with a choice to accomplish some goal beneficial to the greater society the deficit hawks jump in early in the debate with the “pay fors”, demanding an accounting of how one intends to bring the “cost” down to zero.
The argument is lost at that point because voters have been convinced, without any pushback from the neoliberal “opposition” party that their government is a competing “user” of the currency that originates in business, just as they, and any entity not the monopoly issuer of the currency, is. Policy proposers are then trapped into switching gears from their stated goals to mapping our complex taxation plans to satisfy the question, completely losing sight of any benefit to the people they originally intended.
AOC is a trained economist, but she also subscribes to Modern Monetary Theory that more accurately describes the roles of government and taxpayers and presents a more realistic view of our economy from that reality. The federal government, in fact, isn’t a “user” of our nation’s currency. It is the monopoly “issuer” of that as a no-cost commodity that Congress can use to shape and tweak the private sector economy without restraint from revenue. Without a gold reserve to defend, this means that the currency-issuing government can “afford” anything that is available for sale and priced in dollars it creates as needed.
In fact, deficit spending by our government is required to keep the economy on track almost all of the time and a balanced budget, the holy grail of politicians following neoclassical economic models, presents a sure-fire way to start a recession, as it has proven the only seven times it has been sustained for any time in our past. Banks provide the vast bulk of money n circulation but that is always balanced by private bank debt and cannot retire itself. Only money created by Congress spending in a deficit of taxation can retire private debt or be net saved as a store of value.
Once one realizes that the only net source of black ink the private sector has is the red ink of the federal government policy space to spend is opened considerably. This will be required if we are to properly address climate change for the emergency it is. We can no more mitigate this with balanced budgets than FDR could have fought WWII by adhering to the gold standard.
Considering that the national debt is just an accounting entity informing Treasury and Congress of the currency in circulation and savings, not a mortgage on our children’s future, and that borrowing isn’t even a funding operation any longer and completely non-essential for funding a government that neither needs nor uses funding except as inflation control any obsession with pay-fors in the face of the dangers of climate change is absurd.
Americans have been pandered to by conservatives that told them they could have their locomotive sized SUV’s and two-story pickemups without concern as long as they could afford the sticker price and fuel. They lied (imagine that) and it will require a new breed on the left side of the aisle to counter those lies. The old guard with their tax schemes that only favor austerity and willingness to sacrifice American prosperity to avoid hard truth-telling that might cost them an election isn’t going to save us in the near future. AOC is young, but extremely intelligent, and you’d be wise not to underestimate her or her economics.
