Polluting us with Debt

An op-ed of mine by that title appears in today's Tampa Bay Tribune.  It's online here.  It's choppier than I'd have ideally preferred, but I think the key point is one worth making.

Comments

[Roger Koppl]

Great column, Steve. Congrats on a nice op ed.

[Nick Czop]

Steve,

I think this is a wonderful piece but I don't think that you should be so discontent with the younger generation. I would point to the great deal of support that Ron Paul had last year (setting a one day record for fund-raising I think.) I believe that more young people are beginning to worry and that even more will if, as I would suspect, the stimulus fails to make a difference. I know its a tough sell at SLU but all the more reason we need to be more economically literate as a society.

[David Mathews]

Eh, the newspaper is called "the Tampa Tribune" not the "Tampa Bay Tribune" and it is a conservative rag which certainly welcomes the writings of an anti-environmentalist economist who seeks to portray the National Debt as a more important issue than Climate Change - Pollution - Overpopulation - Resource Depletion.

Since economists have such a horrendous history of making grandiose positive predictions about the future should civilization follow their leadership, I think it wise to disregard your opinions as representative of the illness which is afflicting humankind.

The National Debt is a big problem but it is not as big a problem as humankind's destruction of the global environment. The National Debt would only serve to destroy the United States of America (which must and will happen anyway), humankind's destruction of the Earth leads inevitably to the extinction of humankind.

Economists might want to place a greater value upon today's money than the future survival of humankind but more rational humans would prefer to sacrifice the economy rather than sacrifice the entire species.