That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [87]
It is as if the law of gravity applies to apples but not to oranges.
To be sure, not all Americans shared this gravity-defying logic, but those who did became a powerful enough force to shape America’s overall budget and energy and climate politics and to stymie reform. They prevented the passage of an energy bill in the 111th Congress and blocked comprehensive deficit reduction. No matter what we Americans say, we are what we do. And this is what we as a country have been doing: waging war on math and physics. We’ve been simultaneously engaged in deficit denial and climate change denial.
There is no other way to say this: Somewhere in the last twenty years of baby boomer rule, Americans decided to act as if we had a divine right to everything—low energy prices and big cars, higher spending and lower taxes, home ownership and health care, booms without ceilings and busts without massive unemployment—all at a time when the country was waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya. Our sense of entitlement expanded far beyond Social Security and Medicare to encompass … well, everything.
We went to war against math and physics to finance this fantasy. In reality, though, it was actually financed—as the character Blanche DuBois said in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire —by “the kindness of strangers.” In our case that was the willingness of China to lend us money, Saudi Arabia to keep us awash in oil and petrodollars, and the market and Mother Nature to show us a certain forbearance. That kindness is surely running out. The choice we face is between reducing deficits and greenhouse gas emissions in a considered and deliberate fashion, and waiting for the market and Mother Nature to force us to do so—rapidly and brutally.
There is plenty of room for debate about the proper response to our energy and climate challenges. And there is plenty of room to debate when and whether to a run a deficit—to stimulate the economy during a recession, for example. And there is plenty of room to debate how large deficits can become without seriously endangering the economy. But it is factually, scientifically, and mathematically untrue that deficits don’t matter and that human-driven global warming that could trigger climate change is simply the invention of a global conspiracy of left-wing scientists and Al Gore.
There is something else that our math and physics problems have in common—their solutions. These solutions are not ends in themselves. They are the means to our larger goal—the place we are actually trying to reach. Our goal is to sustain the American dream at home so it can be enjoyed by the next generation and to sustain American power abroad so that the United States can play the stabilizing and example-setting role that the world wants and needs it to play. To achieve both we need sustainable economic growth. And to achieve that we need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both. In math, such a response involves cutting spending, raising taxes, and investing in our formula for success—all at the same time. In physics, such a response involves increasing energy efficiency dramatically, investing more in research and deployment of cleaner power, and imposing a price on carbon. That, too, requires an integrated approach. We need to do these things not to punish ourselves for our profligacy but to reverse the damage we have