6/30/2008
Tom Sladek: Sustainability is hot
Sustainability is hot. The word has “legs”. Everyone’s jumping on the band wagon. Since the “S” movement springs from environmental advocacy, let’s look to the U.S. EPA website for the definition:
Sustainability means “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Most of the chatter we hear about sustainability relates to consumption of resources, waste disposal, and “carbon footprint”. The latter attempts to assign responsibility for CO2 emissions, intending to reverse the human-caused global warming which has been “proven” by an Al Gore movie and climate computer models which are changed each time they prove to be wrong. Scientific evidence? None.
But you can’t argue with the thinking behind EPA’s concept of sustainability. We should meet our needs today in ways which won’t prevent the kids from having a good life as well. We’re not doing that, however, and it has nothing to do with how “green” we are. The true sustainability issue for our time is government entitlement spending.
Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan has developed a plan for spending constraint and tax reform he calls “A Roadmap for America’s Future”. Ryan’s solutions, which I will not go into here, can be debated. What is not debatable are the cold hard facts that create the need for initiatives like Ryan’s. At his website www.americanroadmap.org, Ryan cites the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “Long-term Budget Outlook” issued last December. Under current law and tax code federal debt, now at 37% of GDP, will rise to 109% of GDP by 2031, just 23 years away. By mid-century federal spending will pass 40% of GDP. In Ryan’s words, “by 2060, the economy enters a free-fall, and CBO cannot model the economic impact later in that decade because debt rises to levels the economy cannot support”
Very well, you say. But we can avoid all this debt and economic ruin if we just raise taxes, right? Wrong. The CBO report says that funding current law’s ever increasing entitlement spending with higher taxes would require tax rates beyond that which the economy can support. After seeing Ryan’s report, the Wisconsin State Journal editorialized the following:
“If you are 30 years of age or younger, pay close attention. If the federal government maintains the status quo in spending, it will virtually assure that just when you are in your peak earning years, around 2030, your taxes will be at least 33 percent higher than they are now. That's just to maintain existing programs, without any new initiatives. So much for your peak earnings. So much for the lifestyle you expect. And it gets worse for your children. A lot worse. This is not a speculation. This is not about partisan politics. This is math. Just add up the unfunded promises”.
We do have a sustainability problem, an urgent one. But it’s not about wind turbines, polar bears or Al Gore nonsense. It’s about economic calamity. If you think you can stomach the grim picture, I invite you to visit Rep. Ryan's Roadmap site, and click on “What’s the Problem?”
Tom Sladek is a Director of the Brown County Taxpayers Association and wrote this article for the June-July edition of BCTA’s Tax Times.
COMMENTS
"Sustainability" is sustainable! Ha!
Excellent column, Tom. That's a great new way to look at the entitlement spending problem.
Lance Burri (Mon Jun 30 08:33:38 2008)
I have long been a fan of the Brown County Taxpayer's Alliance, and I really enjoy their newsletters. Perhaps I should pay dues as my effort toward "sustainability!"
If you add together the lavish entitlement spending (worldwide - not just in America) described in Tom's commentary and the demographics that are quickly overtaking the world, people in their 30's may well see the the end come during their lifetimes.
It's depressing to contemplate. Like Arnold said, "Judgement Day was inevitable. All you did was delay it." [My apologies to the Governator for my lousy Austrian accent]. Common sense has taken a hiatus in the U.S. Congress under the liberals.
God bless America.
Duke (Mon Jun 30 08:45:37 2008)
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