The Left/Right Political Spectrum Is Irrelevant at This Point
by John Lawrence
The Extreme Right position on the pandemic is just to let it rip. This would mean ongoing disaster for the whole world into the indefinite future. The Extreme Left would advocate government spending as much money as necessary to defeat the pandemic and get the economy back to normal. The middle of the road would advocate doing half as much as necessary to sort of but not really get the pandemic under control. Result: the coronavirus would be mutating and popping back up for years just as SARS COVID-9 is a mutation of the original SARS virus and is related to the MERS virus. Whether the mutations occur in animals or in humans, it doesn't matter. Viruses mutate and doing a half ass job in getting rid of this pandemic which is the political "middle" insures that there will be more pandemics in the future. Not allocating increased funding for the study and research of viruses insures that there will be more threats to human lives and economies.
The Extreme Right position on global warming is to do nothing about it. That includes encouraging consumption of fossil fuels and not caring how many greenhouse gasses are emitted into the atmosphere. This virtually guarantees that the earth will become uninhabitable in 50 years or less. The Extreme Left position would be to do as much government spending as necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero in about 10 years. This would prevent global temperatures from rising more than the amount that would destroy the habitability of the earth. The middle position would be to spend a piddling amount to combat global warming. The result would be that the earth would become uninhabitable in a slightly longer time frame.
Republicans want to limit Federal government expenditures to solve problems while maximizing the private sector in the economy. Problem is that dealing with the pandemic and climate change are problems private enterprise is not capable of solving or even leading the way. Is there a role for private enterprise? Certainly, but government must play the leading role or these major problems as well as a number of others will not be solved. Private enterprise won't engage in any activity for which there are no profits to be made. Some problems like the pandemic and global warming are not likely to yield much in the way of profits. Ergo, private enterprise will not be interested in dealing with them.
The COVID relief package that Biden has put forward is totally dependent on Democrats controlling both Houses of Congress. That in turn was totally dependent on the Georgia runoff elections for two Senators which produced two Democrats. Otherwise, there would be no COVID relief package or follow on projects to deal with global warming because not enough Republicans will be voting for any of Biden's projected spending to solve these problems. So the Extreme Left position of these issues which are totally necessary if they are to be dealt with successfully would not have been possible. Even successfully dealing with these two existential problems was hanging by a thread because the election of two Democratic Senators from the state of Georgia was heretofore unheard of. But now there is a chance.
What really needs to happen with regard to government spending is that the public, and that includes Senators and Representatives, need to be educated on how the economy really works. Deficit spending is not really a problem. Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. Republicans rely on the ignorance of the public while suggesting that adequately dealing with global warming or the pandemic will raise their taxes. It does not have to increase taxes which is the conventional understanding about it. The Federal government does not need to pay back Federal deficits because the US dollar is a sovereign currency. The Federal Reserve can just "print" the money - although it doesn't actually print it - it creates it by a few keystrokes on a computer. A household or private firm must pay back its loans. Even US states must pay back loans usually by raising taxes. Th Federal government does not have to raise taxes nor does it have to pay back loans. Treasury bonds can just end up on the Fed's balance sheet where in fact most of them do end up. So a government, any government, which has a sovereign currency can create as much money as necessary to solve any problem. The only caveat is that money creation under certain conditions can induce inflation.
Too much money sloshing around in any sector can produce inflation in that sector. What the US economy has created recently is asset inflation but not inflation in the real economy. Tax breaks for the rich has resulted in the bidding up of assets. Take the stock market, for example. Major corporations have used their tax breaks not to build production facilities but to buy back their own stock. This raises the stock price: ergo, asset inflation. The same holds for the real estate market. People, with more money than they are willing to put to productive use, use it to bid up the value of real estate. Ergo, inflation. This makes housing less affordable. The real economy has under utilized capacity in terms of all the unemployed and underemployed labor. Government spending which soaks up this capacity and puts it to productive use in converting to a reusable energy economy and upgrading to green infrastructure should not produce inflation. Neither will more government money spent on research on viruses produce inflation. What else produces asset inflation is money spent on the military-industrial complex. Think $600 toilet seats.
The US public needs to be enlightened on how the economy really works at the macro level. That being understood would take all the wind out of the sails of Republican objections to government spending. It does not have to raise your taxes because the US government can never run out of money. An understanding of Modern Monetary Theory leads to that understanding.
