The Green New Deal promises every feel-good fantasy except free ice cream
The word of the month for the Democratic Party’s would-be 2020 presidential nominees is “aspirational.”
“The Green New Deal? I see it as aspirational,” U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, told Fox News in February. She would vote for the resolution introduced by Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-Nw York and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Masachusetts, but, “If it got down to the nitty-gritty of an actual legislation, as opposed to, ‘Oh, here’s some goals we have’ — uh, that would be different for me.”
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee echoed Klobuchar on March 1 calling the Green New Deal an “aspirational document” and promising his own proposals on climate change.
“Aspirational” is another of saying that the Green New Deal isn’t a real legislative proposal. It’s just a feel-good wish list of things its proponents think Americans want and want us to believe they want, too. It’s not legislation aimed at actually making those things happen.
The resolution asserts the sense of Congress, recognizing “the duty of the federal government to create a Green New Deal.” If the resolution passed, it wouldn’t create anything. It would just assure Americans that those who passed it really, really want to do so.
It’s full of stuff most people would probably like to see: Prosperity and economic security for all people, clean air and water, healthy food, justice and equity, high-quality healthcare, adequate housing, just about everything good and desirable except for free ice cream and ponies.
But that’s only half of a deal. If we get all that good stuff, what do we give up for it?
The resolution calls, fuzzily, for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.” But it doesn’t advertise that it comes at a cost. It calls such a mobilization an “opportunity” and claims that its named predecessors “created the greatest middle class that the United States has ever seen.”
In reality, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal stretched the Great Depression out for years (as of 1940, the unemployment rate was still nearly twice that of 1930), and World War II diverted more than 16 million Americans from productive jobs to jobs that killed almost half a million of them.
What produced the greatest middle class that the United States has ever seen was luck of location: At the end of the war, the United States was the only world power with its industrial plant still largely intact, its factories being located beyond enemy bomber range. The economic impact of the mobilizations themselves was to keep people poor, dependent on government and willing to be ordered around by the likes of FDR.
The mobilization the resolution calls for would likely turn out the same way. Lots of sacrifice, little benefit.
Sorry. No deal.
Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
This story was originally published March 5, 2019 at 7:39 PM.