RE: What's the matter with investment?

["Forstater, Mathew" <ForstaterM@xxxxxxxx>]

For all the problems with Gore, it has to be admitted that his _Earth in the
Balance_ is the closest statement by a major politican in the U.S. recognizing
this.  Of course, after becoming VP, he did little or nothing consistent with
this, but then the excuse was he is only the VP, or, structural-institutional
political realities prohibit one from moving in that direction, no matter what
their intentions. So, then we are supposed to figure that if he gets the
Preziduncee he will come through.  He certainly has more or less come out and
said that we need to undergo "in the long term" a transformation in the
technological structure of production from exhaustible resource based
to renewable resource based. So, it comes down to is that his real intention to
promote such policies and can he overcome the political obstacles to
implementing it. You can't say we aren't in the best position budget wise to
begin--best way to get rid of the stupid surplus is start majorly spending it on
environmental clean-up, renewable R&D, new technologies, low or no interest
loans to alternative energies, whatever. Mat



Peter Dorman writes:

This is because we need to undergo a rather sweeping
environmental/technological transition roughtly along the lines laid out by
the World Resources Institute and its European collaborators.  (See
GREENING THE NORTH, etc.)  But our prices are drastically wrong, and we are
suboptimizing (if that) along the lines laid down by previous decades
(centuries) of wrong prices.  Each additional new layer of investment makes
our future job more difficult.  This is not a problem for monetary or
fiscal policy, of course -- it goes far beyond either.

Peter