Since 1982 the United States federal government has run budget deficits. In just one year-1999 was there a balanced budget. That year Republicans in Congress had Bill Clinton by the short hairs because of fellatio in office with student intern challenges. Democrat politicians that came of age since the Reagan administration are normalized to running vast public debts as the new normal. Cutting taxes and piling up debt is believed to have no negative consequences.
The over-population of the world is an old political issue. The United States population has nearly doubled in my lifetime Economic expansion was the essential goal of classical economics in America, yet it has features of a Ponzi scheme to it environmentally speaking. Instead of concern about habitat loss or degradation and mass species extermination the political discourse about the environment has reduced to one of global warming. Fixing that by spending trillions and trillions of dollars on credit is thought to be the way to resolve ongoing existential environmental threats and that is wrong. I should stipulate that I don’t believe politicians will solve the world environmental over-use issue. Probably nature itself will be the hard limiting and correcting force.
China is a world leader and stopping its own population increase. Its historically draconian measures of forced abortion would not work in the U.S.A. China is a leader in green technology for practical reasons that its manufacturing costs are less than in the U.S.A., green tech is a solid export product and it has practical, massive local applications. Economic expansion can take the form of qualitative increase rather than quantitative increase and should if the ecosphere is to be recovered to a healthy condition eventually.
Illegal and legal immigration are ways to provide cheap labor for expansive economics. An economy over reliant on cheap new labor, housing booms, more low-skilled service jobs and public debt that is slow to move away from fossil fuel automobile infrastructure and heat absorbing asphalt streets is one that is not going to be a positive factor in reducing global warming. Simply the scalar increase of population would add more global warming with the economic methods of the present to sustain it than efficiency increases in nationally applied green tech efficiency would reduce it. With the help of classical, expansive economic policies global warming may overcome someday and the world become an anarchic, living hell.
There isn’t anything wrong about a stable national population with low immigration. Three hundred twenty million Americans with off road vehicles and chain saws and polluting substances already have a devastating effect on wildlife. There is a national homeless issue because of illegal migration, over-population and a housing shortage. Those collecting rents are probably happy with that.
Nations like Italy actually had negative population growth before African and Middle Eastern immigration. With negative population growth there isn’t a need for new housing. Especially in the U.S.A. with the aging baby boomer generation there would be a housing surplus soon without the flood of legal and illegal immigrants. No one would be without a home and rents would drop. With a change in transportation methodology to quit using fossil fuels and stop using low albedo, heat absorbing asphalt for streets the rate of global global warming increase would slow. That is a practical reality and one that neither Democrats or Republican can admit reliant as they are on the economics of expansion.
Without coercion to reduce population the United States population would would naturally drop to zero and negative turf. The Democrat Presidential candidate Pamela Harris hasn’t issued progeny herself. Women today want prosperity and power rather than kids. That is OK. Yet they also want cheap labor and wealth-even servants, and the need is probably for more people to maintain physical building infrastructure with increasing vacancies if negative population growth occurs.
Robots and A.I. have developed at a time when there may be a shortage of health care workers to take care of the aging population and that is fortunate. With proper design and manufacture the need to have humans changing bedpans and monitor meds with nursing aids will drop. Americans could survive and thrive with intelligent and adaptive green ecological economics and a decreasing population quite well. The nation should be a leader at bringing green technology and farming to poorer countries directly so they too could prosper in quality in a more sustainable way with low population growth and non-coercive population stabilization.
Americans will want to forge on with growth in scientific and technical knowledge while eliminating housing shortages and homelessness through population decrease and better use of existing resources even as it solves problems of ecospheric habitat degradation and atmospheric heating. It is often the case that conservative and restorative management of things is better than exploiting and overusing them leading to a crash. It is better to remain healthy for example, than to neglect one’s health and try to repair it after good health is lost. The ecosphere is not disposable as are many products. Neither should people be regarded as disposable as they have by various societies and economic circumstances in the past.
U.S. economics is in a sense in the wave of a vast bubble of non-sustainability environmentally. At some point it will crash unless it has the good sense to transition directly toward policies of population stability. Fisheries may crash, atmospheric heating difficulties may increase and water resources become inadequate among obvious phenomena. And each of those particular issues could be solved with right political actions synthesizing technological, demographic and economic applications
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