Economic Recovery

In the fog of war, the true nature of a conflict can be obscured.

This is true in the current political debate on the economic recovery package. Whatever the perceived wisdom the struggle, at its core, is between those who profit from a repetitive stimulus and those who see a greater and longer lasting benefit from a transformative stimulus.

A repetitive stimulus uses federal dollars to create jobs and to otherwise jumpstart a stalled economy.

A transformative stimulus achieves those same objectives, but it walks and chews gum at the same time. It creates jobs, jumpstarts the economy and transforms the economy in ways that are healthy, sustainable and equitable.

As a metaphor, think of a middle-aged guy who eats too much of the wrong food and doesn’t exercise. We’d like to keep this fellow alive (he has a family after all), and so he is prescribed Lipitor. He also receives a stern lecture from his physician about a proper diet and the benefits of exercise. Believing in the miracle of meds, he takes the former and ignores the latter.

This is, in essence, a repetitive stimulus.

It keeps the patient alive since we know that meds (fiscal stimulus) work to avoid worst case scenarios. But unless a genuine transformation occurs, this middle-aged guy will not remain healthy for long. Moreover, in this or any other health care system, he will require treatment, expensive treatment, and would likely become a significant burden on his family for years to come.

Repetition of past behavior can be fatal, and if he does check out early, he will become what the Germans call a zechpreller: one who leaves without paying the bill.

Think about what this zechpreller approach means to future generations.

While a trillion dollar stimulus package is probably a necessity for today, it will become a debt that future generations will spend the rest of their lives paying off without having seen any long-term benefits from this approach. The patient repeats unhealthy behavior. The economy regains its footing, but retains the same pathological addiction to oil that precipitated the crisis.

To put salt in the wound, by the time the bill for the current economic addiction comes due, most of us will be in heaven or, since we left without paying the bill, perhaps a far warmer place.

There is a better way to approach the stimulus, and it’s represented in the transformative approach emanating from the Obama administration.

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Usually, you will find Professor Dan J.H. Greenwood teaching in a classroom at the Hofstra University School of Law. He's spent a good part of his career understanding corporations and their role in politics, and his work sheds light on why global warming is not something that corporations will be able to solve without government regulation.

We enticed him on camera to explain to us a thing or two about the pending economic recovery package. With the feds set to print a trillion dollars of new currency and give it away, we were alarmed. After all, if you or I tried to do that, we'd be thrown in jail.

For the good professor, there's no such thing as a dumb question, and so he answered our concerns. He also explained a good deal more: why the current recession is an especially good time to invest in green infrastructure projects; how the poor have been impoverished over recent decades (no, that's not a redundancy); and why the jobs we create are the truest measure of an economy that works.

So welcome to a periodic interview series SolveClimate is inaugurating with this video called A New York Minute with Dan Greenwood: Why the Recession is a Good Time to Invest in Green Infrastructure.