Ep. 4 - The Green New Deal Lives ft. Andrés Bernal

Funny Money is a show about the economy, how it works, and how it can work better. In this episode, Ka interviews Andrés about his role in the formulation of the Green New Deal, the history and dynamics of climate policy, what the #GreenNewDeal actually is, and how to think about the classic question: how do you pay for it?

Link to Visuals discussed in the episode: https://bit.ly/AndresBernal 

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Hosts: Jessica "Ka" Burbank & Andrés Bernal
Producer: Mike Lewis
Sound Mixed By: Curtis Clogston

#FunnyMoney #MMT #Money #Economics #Politics #Environment #ClimateChange #GreenNewDeal #Science #Funny #Humor

Transcript

0:02

First things first. This is Funny Money This is a podcast about the economy, how it works and how it can work better. Today I'm joined by my co-host, Andrés Bernal. He's always here, but today he's going to be talking more than usual. Are you ready to talk more than usual, Andrés? I think so. That's amazing. Let's start at the very beginning. You are friends with a person.

many people know: 0:23

AOC. You were her policy advisor in her first congressional race, and you even know her before that. And we have a photo from the archives. Let's show the people the history. We do. Never before seen. And that's actually where you are right now. You can tell by the bookshelves. That's actually this bookshelf. But I didn't have the second one. This was a long time ago. It was, I think, 2015 I'm going to say or maybe early 2016. Leading up to the presidential election. And we wanted to start a podcast. So we were just hanging out and talking about the implications of a Donald Trump victory. And we were very young and naïve at the time and had no idea what was coming. Yeah, I'm sorry that dream didn't work out for her. You know, shoot for the moon maybe fall in the stars or whatever it could be AOC in this chair right now. But not everything works out for everybody. Not everything works out. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Alex. All right, so let's get into what some of that was as a part of the campaign. And just in general, you had major contributions to the formulation of the Green New Deal. And I think a lot of people don't fully know what the Green New Deal even is. So can you explain what it is and your involvement in forming it? Definitely. So, yes, I think there's a lot of confusion. Often about is it some kind of bill? Is it a specific program? So it can be helpful to think about it

in three different ways: 1:57

to think about it as a political vision, as a policy framework, and then as the actual congressional resolution that it is. And I think to compare those three ways of thinking about the Green New Deal to the history of environmental policy can help give us some insight into what's different about it and the things that are happening. So in 1970, we had our first Earth Day, and that kind of marked the beginning of modern environmental policy and politics itself. And the vision there was kind of like the U.S., at least in the in the U.S. I'm speaking specifically here. It was kind of like we need to clean up. There's too much pollution, there's too much smog. And there was some bipartisan consensus around that time. And so a lot of the agencies and legislation were created around that early seventies time. But that was kind of short lived. And soon after that, the fossil fuel industry and the business community started to resist any more kinds of changes. And one example of this is, you know, Jimmy Carter gives this speech in the middle of having gone through the OPEC crisis, and he's talking about sustainability and he puts solar panels on the White House roofs and all this kind of stuff. Right. And then Reagan wins the next election and takes down the solar panels and it takes us on this completely different path. But in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which has become famous now, but they get formed in ‘88. They write their first report in 1990, and by 1992, there's something called the Rio Summit, or more specifically, the Rio Earth Summit. And they come up with this thing called the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. And so this is when, like the United Nations starts coming together and having conversations around what do we do about this problem? Because the science was already settled, in the sixties, we already knew this was going to be an issue and it was only going to get worse. So conversations start to happen in a serious political way in these early nineties and then the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gets formed in 1994. And this leads to what we know now is COP, which stands for the Conference of the Parties, which is like a yearly meeting. We're now on like year 27 or COP 27(*It’s COP 28 Now) So people might have heard of this every year. People talk about this meeting where people come together and one of the things about COP is that it says that powerful, wealthier countries have more responsibility for climate change than do other countries that are not as powerful. The United States obviously is a huge part of that. And that's important because in 97, the Kyoto Protocol, which is this legally binding agreement to get countries to start to come together and and bring down emissions isn't signed by the U.S. So George W Bush is president at the time and he's like, nah, we're good. And he doesn't sign it because he says that this is going to be an economic burden for the U.S. And that kind of famously starts this era of climate denialism as we know it today. I mean, it coincides with also the rise of the news networks and Fox News and the sensationalized media that also kind of gives birth to all of this climate denialism using tactics that we had seen before in the tobacco industry and things like that. So by 2009, there's another one of these summits in Copenhagen to create new accords. And at that time, Obama is president. So people have a lot of hope, right? That was like the hope and change campaign. And it's also important to note that this is right after a financial crisis, but that accords and that conversation is also considered a huge mess because it's very weak. The binding parts of Kyoto and the Kyoto Protocol are kind of put to the side. Obama and U.S. representatives move the target to 2.0 degrees Celsius of warming rather than 1.5 as like what we should hit. The global South and or countries around the world who are not as wealthy and powerful are, very upset at this point for feeling like they were pushed out from a lot of these conversations or having to take on a heavier burden than the countries most responsible for all of this. So that's kind of a mess, too. And then finally, in 2015, those were the Paris Accords, which I think many people know of, which makes some progress. And talks get more serious. And that leads to the famous report which states that, you know, we have to keep the earth under 1.5 or maximum two degrees. A lot of people know of this report that was released in 2015. So that's seen as more of a success. So it's kind of back and forth because right after the Paris Accords, Trump is elected and takes us out of those accords. So that's kind of been like the political history of that whole story up until, you know, the Green New Deal becomes relevant. Are you saying COP 27 is like a good cop? Like, would you say that. That might be. Well, you know, it's in a it's being held in a big oil producing country. So I don't know if it's it might It's in the UAE, so it might still I think we can still say that all cops are still bad. All right. So then you got into some more like market first stuff. We saw all these policy proposals about addressing climate change like cap and trade. Can you walk us through some of that more neoliberal stuff to approach climate change policy? Yes. So even though many of these summits are already weak and, you know, the US refuses to even join or ratify it, what is proposed is more than anything, these market based solutions, as you said. So it's kind of assuming that the only way to solve this problem is to find incentives for the market or business or profit to be able to move us in the direction of of more sustainability or decarbonization. So that involves market schemes like cap and trade, where you can purchase, your way out of polluting basically by purchasing the rights to pollute so that others can then not pollute and find a way for the market to balance itself out. The more ambitious version of that, I think, is the carbon tax, which many economists were supporting, which is saying, look, we just got to put a tax on on fossil fuel use and hope, then then that pressures the market to move towards sustainability as well. But what both these things have in common is that there's this vision of the market being the natural order of things or the kind of natural state of the economy. And anything the government does is like an intervention into that market. And so you have people on one side arguing like that's going to be bad for the economy because there's going to be too many regulations because is going to be constraining growth, all that kind of stuff. Right. And then the other side is kind of like we have to address market failures because that's how that's the most ambitious part at this point. It's like, you know, there are some areas where clearly the market isn't working, like it's driving us towards a climate apocalypse. So we have to fix some of these market failures. That's kind of like as good as it got. But what's I think important to frame the rise of the Green New Deal is that around that time of the Copenhagen summit, we had just been out of a financial crisis. And so the conversation of economic recovery and, you know, responding to this huge international recession that a lot of people lost all their wealth. People got kicked out of their homes It was a horrible, horrible thing and driven by all kinds of scams and greed and unethical, horrible behavior, predatory behavior. Right. So that kind of like starts this growing intersection between people talking about climate and people talking about the economy at the same time. And people around the world, like in Europe, start mentioning this thing called the Green New Deal as an appeal to things that were done during the Second World War and the Great Depression and trying to invoke that as perhaps a way to address the recovery from the financial crisis and climate issues. At the same time, the American Green Party takes it up around that time as well as part of their official platform. And Thomas Friedman, who is like a notable political columnist with horrendous opinions. Yeah, we're going to meet him and Reagan in Hell one day. Right, Right. Yeah. So Thomas Friedman, like, very randomly brings it up in The New York Times op ed, but his kind of take is like trying to bring back American patriotism into climate policy. And he frames it in that op ed as like climate policy is wussy and too feminine. We need a more masculine kind of policy. And he brings up the Green New Deal and nobody really remembers that part of it because we then have a much better version of it when AOC is elected, really. And it had been in talks, you know, in different spaces up until then. It was in the Green Party. People were talking about a new New Deal. So personally, like I remember when AOC was running, we went together to a conference where Stephanie Kelton and Randall Wray, who, you know, have been guests on this podcast, they were speaking there and this was called The New New Deal. And so, that played somewhat of a role in emphasizing the importance of this Green New Deal political vision. So as a political vision, and I think we have a slide here to demonstrate like the vibes that we're talking about. We're like invoking this big investment vision of like transforming our way of life in our infrastructure by leveraging the power of the government, the power of jobs, the power of building stuff together. So in one sense, the Green New Deal is exactly that. It's a vision to mobilize public purpose and public power to bring us, you know, all these new kinds of jobs and projects and change our infrastructure, all those sorts of things. Now, as a policy framework, we get into more of the specifics of how that will work. So one of the things that AOC is most famous for is, of course, occupying Nancy Pelosi's office with the Sunrise Movement and a bunch of you know, there was already energy there on like we have to address this climate crisis largely because the IPCC released this report that I had mentioned. And so people it was on people's minds. It was like, oh shit, like we are we aren't doing anything about this. So, you know, this youth movement starts to build up. They form the Sunrise Movement. There's other organizations that have a lot more history doing this kind of work and environmental justice and all sorts of things. So there's this attempt to bring it all together into a policy framework that basically says, okay, instead of relying on incentivizing markets, we are just going to skip that part and assume that we can design new infrastructure, new jobs, new energy system by investing in these things and putting people to work and improving and changing people's quality of life. So that's kind of that policy framework, perspective as well. And the way that that manifests itself is as a congressional resolution and it's HR 109 So this is what Markey, Ed Markey in the Senate and AOC in the House released together, which is a resolution. And that is not the same as a bill that goes into law, but rather resolutions offer a kind of a sense of like this Chamber of the House agrees that we need to think about this and act on this. And so this resolution provides that guide or that framework for what the problem is. Climate change caused by people, caused by human industry, caused by more powerful countries and industries, etc.. Right. And then the solution, which is like we need to address the injustices and decarbonize through jobs, investment, all this sort of thing. So that's kind of like the three major areas, right? A political vision to act, to change the direction that things have gone in, a policy framework to do it in a particular kind of way. And then the resolution, which currently sits as the main representation of the Green New Deal in our Congress. So the signs were in Nancy's office. So why is she out here calling it the Green Dream or whatever? She knows what it's called. It was on the sign of some people calling it that. Here's a clip from Politico of Pelosi just demonstrating some of the neoliberalism for our listeners. It says, quote, from Pelosi, It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive the Green Dream or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right? So that's a little taste of the neoliberalism. Can you get into the Green Dream or the New Green Deal, as some of them call it? Yeah, it's so weird because as soon as the Green New Deal started to get popularity and excitement, a lot of the establishment across parties was like doing this weird thing of like, Oh, we don't even know what you're talking about. So they were saying things like the the New Green Deal or the Green Dream. And in one sense it just I mean, obviously, especially for those that should know better because they consider themselves left of center or, you know, not unhinged Republicans. It's like they have total political amnesia and have no recollection of the actual New Deal and what it was. I mean, that's why it's called the Green New Deal and not the New Green Deal or whatever. It's for a reason. And that's because this country accomplished things and proposed bold, ambitious changes in that era. It wasn't perfect. And a lot of what's green about the Green New Deal is to improve and surpass many of its limits and imperfections. But like, that's the gist of it, that there was a moment and there was a time in history that we had big ambitions and we've kind of lost that. And settled for, you know, failure and always debating on Republican or conservative terms today. Can you get into just a general overview of what the goals of the Green New Deal are? Yeah, definitely. So when we think about the Green New Deal as a policy framework, what gives it its substance or allows other people in the Congress and then people outside of politics to organize and vote for are certain principles. We got five principles that were established early on. And so this kind of really summarizes what I've been talking abouy so far. So based on these IPCC goals, right. We need to keep the earth from warming to a certain level, right under 1.5, maximum under 2. How do we do that? Well, one thing we need to do is to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. So if we're going to decarbonize, which is no longer put out carbon dioxide as the the main way that we produce energy, we need to decarbonize. And so in order to do that, we need to invest in creating new energy systems. And that's, you know, one of the fundamental things that people think about when they think about climate policy is how do we transition to renewable energy? So that's like one piece. The second piece is we're going to do that by creating millions of good high wage jobs. This is very kind of connected to the legacy of the New Deal in that it showed that the government can transform a country and a society, including also during World War Two, by creating public employment, by paying people to do things that are going to benefit everybody in the end and benefit those workers because it's dignified work. Point three, Invest in the infrastructure and industry of the U.S. We've heard this countless times. Our bridges are falling apart. Our industry sucks, our infrastructure sucks, right? Upgrading all of that. So retrofitting buildings, transitioning public and municipal vehicles to electric, changing the way we travel. All of this requires infrastructure. So building that out, I mean, again, those are jobs that give people a good standard of living and also starts to shift how our economy functions and the energy that relies upon it. And then number four is meeting and securing the clean air, water and community resilience, which has been a part of like what the EPA tries to do for a decades. But it always is in this situation where the level of toxicity and pollution from industry is so much faster than what policy can respond to, because nobody, has the money to do these things, to achieve these things. They're underfunded and they're always getting pushed back because people are like, Well, this is going to be too many regulations on business and this and that. So to finally invest in research and development and making sure that, you know, people have respectable clean air and water and whatnot, and this is very connected to point five, which is promoting justice and equity. Sometimes this is referred to as a just transition. So if we're going to transition to a renewable based sustainable economy, that transition then has to have justice as a big part of it. So one of the key things about that is that, you know, frontline workers or workers that do construction and clean things and oftentimes workers that do low paid, low income level work, they live in communities or are involved in hazardous jobs that deeply affect their health. So it's one of the levels where what the economy is and the energy system that the economy is based off of is connected to quality of life, public health and those sorts of things. So we need to like look at those communities and address this problem of fossil fuels and global warming by also concerning us with the people affected and hurt the most from it. And in addition, people who have worked, workers who have been part of the fossil fuel economy, it's not their fault that these were the the jobs available to them right. So we also want to make sure that that transition doesn't, you know, throw people under the bus, if you will, or kind of leave people behind, even if they worked in the fossil fuel economy. So, you know, a lot of working class people need to either have their retirement paid for them or get trained to be able to participate in a new kind of economy, have their health care guaranteed. All of these things are going to be crucial so that if we're trying to make this transition, you know, it's not going to be on the backs of everyday people because that would be awful, right? So those are the fundamental objectives of what the Green New Deal is trying to achieve and do. Yeah, from what you said there, it makes sense that it's not all explicitly things that are considered environmental policy. It's things like health care or the reduction of wealth and income inequality, because those are things that got us into this mess in the first place Is that an accurate read of why the Green New Deal isn't just explicitly environmental policy? Yeah, I think that's a huge part of of that shift in thinking because one of the things it does is it acknowledged interdependence, an interconnection of our various social institutions. So if we have I mean, first and foremost, energy is a fundamental part of everything. It powers and drives everything. And if that energy system is producing consequences, that make people sick, that are making the planet on fire, you know, destroying ecosystems not even just the carbon dioxide itself, but the industry that is emitting all this carbon dioxide also destroys ecosystems. Biodiversity is going down, like all of these things are connected to our health, to our relationship to the natural world, to how we value each other, where we can tolerate these very obscene levels of income inequality. So there's no way to actually fully and adequately address climate change itself and global warming without seeing the problem holistically. So let's get into our favorite stuff, the economics of it. There are a lot of people who say, you know, how are you going to pay for it? They get sticker shock when they think about trying to define the cost of the Green New Deal. I always remind people the cost of not doing anything is actually much higher than any amount of dollars. We would put into the economy to mobilize the resources necessary to do the things we have to do to get our economy to a place where it's sustainable. Can you say why the Green New Deal will benefit the economy when many detractors say it will actually destroy it? Yeah, that's a key part of what we're trying to do here on this podcast, right? We've had guests now speak to different paradigms in how we think about economic development and even economics in general. And a lot of the dominance of mainstream economics puts us in a zero sum situation where we have to choose either the planet or the “economy” And they're framed as opposites. And this has really been, I think, one of the paralyzing problems to climate policy in the last 50 years or so, because we always end up in this dilemma. And by thinking back to this era of the mid-twentieth century and the rise of thinkers like Keynes and other more radical and bold, visionary economic thinkers that we've been calling heterodox economics up until now, right. We see that at the time when fascism was taking hold in Europe and we were in a global depression, these questions would have been absurd. Right? Like, how are you going to pay for it? Is this going to destroy the economy, this and that? Right. Those questions made no sense. We just started taking action and investing. And so one of the big insights from that that we heard from Randy Wray in our previous episode was that you create a stimulus so that people have money, have income, so that the economy doesn't continue to spiral. And you use that stimulus to meet certain objectives that specifically raise quality of life, that make our lives better, that make us happier, that make people able to thrive, that repair some of the biggest injustices of the past. And then specific to what we're talking about here, right, can transition our economy to one based on renewables and sustainability so that climate change doesn't just destroy it all, right? Which is like the path we're on if we don't continue taking bigger and bigger action. So, you know, the economy is not this thing in and of itself. The economy is people. And what they do every day, what we consider and define is work and then the outcomes that it produces and the quality of life that it produces. So we need to move towards sustainability. That's not destroying the economy, that's making an economy more resilient and better for people, for everybody to live in. And I think another big piece of it, too, is changing the way using stimulus and investment in job creation to change the quality of how we consume things and how we produce things in this economy so that they're more in line with ecological constraints and limits. Right. We need to pay attention to if we're going to overreach over what we can produce in terms of different ecological systems and whether if there's already institutions analyzed forms of work and economic activity which are just destroying everything. Right? So shifting that by paying us by paying people to do things differently begins that process of moving away from something like GDP, which doesn't tell us anything specific about what the quality of the results are. It just kind of gives us like, Oh yeah, we're producing more, we're producing more. We can produce more prisons and that's GDP. We can continue producing hazardous waste or even carbon dioxide. It's not telling us the quality of what we want. So thinking about alternatives to GDP that are premised on quality of life, that are premised on sustainability and kind of more circular recycling based ways of of living and producing. More public transportation, for example. All of those things can be brought about at the speed in which we need them through these insights of investments and, demand. By demand it means people who work and are consumers for a living, they will stimulate the economy in a particular direction when they are paid to do things. I think that's why the pay for debate sounds so absurd to me when it comes to the Green New Deal. And we all need to know that this is coming from Democrats and Republicans. It's coming from people like Dianne Feinstein. We're trying to promote the Green New Deal. Well, there are reasons why I can't, because there's no way to pay for it. Ridiculous to tell that to children. Sorry, kids, there is no future for you on this planet. But it also it comes from Republicans, too. Let's watch this. Now. I'll tell you what's laughable is that the Green New Deal is estimated to cost nearly $93 trillion. I mean, here we have a situation where Democrats want to spend like drunken sailors. We're headed toward a default, But let's just give all this money to climate. All right. Let's get into the good stuff while we're all here. Let's talk about the money. Yeah, is this going to bankrupt the country? So we have really stressed on this podcast that we need to rethink the way we understand and talk about public budgets and money in general. And I think for me, the reason why I'm so passionate about this and, you know, modern money theory as a as a perspective is because I don't see how we can possibly overcome this climate crisis without changing the way we think about budgets and money. There's just no way. If and as we fail to do that, we will see the social consequences, not only in climate change getting worse, but in people starting to give in to conspiracy theories or turn to authoritarians or, you know, fascism being on the rise again and extreme racism and these sorts of things because everybody has been so captivated by this zero sum mentality that comes from the mythology and the fundamentalism of conventional thought about money and budgets. So will the Green New Deal in the United States bankrupt the country? Absolutely not. It will help the country thrive. And one of the ways that that will happen is using the insights that we've talked about in previous episodes, that what matters for the United States government is not, whether it's going to run out of money, which is impossible. It's a conversation about the resources that we have available, the capacity that we have as a country. If we're just thinking about the United States and how our investments produce the outcomes that are desirable. And that's up for debate. But that's really what should be guiding this debate about climate change and money per se. So when the Green New Deal started to get popular and this debate obviously came to the forefront, Stephanie Kelton, who was a guest on the podcast as well, her and I, along with Greg Carlock, we coauthored this op-ed for HuffPost called We Can Pay For a Green New Deal. And that kind of started the journey in which Modern Monetary Theory or modern money theory, MMT has had a role as one of the major voices in the Green New Deal conversation. And our argument being, as I've said already, this is the only way that we can successfully do what needs to be done as quickly as possible and to the extent that we need it, everything else is just tinkering on the edges and will in some way or another through its own logic, meet a dead end. So this is the only way we can do it. And, you know, I've tried to do my best to get this perspective out to as many people as possible. I know you have as well right. There's been some conversations with Representative Ocasio-Cortez herself. I think we have a picture of that, too. And some progress has been made in MMT getting a bigger platform and being spoken about in ways that it was totally marginalized before pushed out from the debate. But now it's it's becoming something that is just providing insights at every turn, right? We think about budgets a certain way. It turns out they're wrong. We have a different approach. And now with the conversation of inflation, it's also contributed to that too, and pushing us to change how we think about inflation and prices as well. That's what we always hear is more tears, right? Is that printing money will always cause inflation, that any dollars you add to the economy devalue every other dollar already in exist. And how do you respond to this common statement that printing money always causes inflation? I think it's really important to touch on this. Whenever we talk about something like the Green New Deal. Yeah. I can never get tired of saying it enough that we need to shift our initial reaction to how much something costs away from the notion that any kind of spending or any growth in the public deficit is inherently this weird thing called printing money, and that doing so will automatically as if it's some kind of law of nature, devalue the dollar itself. And what we need to move towards is an understanding and an evaluation of what is the current standing of our economy, what can it do? Does it have unused capacity? And this also links back to the Second World War when John Maynard Keynes wrote How to Pay for the War, he didn't write up a bunch of, checklists of like, we're going to get the money from here, we're going to get it from here, and we're going to get it from here. And that's how we'll defeat fascism. He was like, No, let's do an evaluation of all the resources we have in the capacity of our economy. And that will give us a sense of how much we can produce, how many, I don't know, like tanks we can produce and weapons and all of that that will be needed to fight a successful war. So that's the perspective we need to think about when it comes to the Green New Deal and climate change, what will we need physically in terms of technology, in terms of work, in terms of the scientists and what they say, you know, where they might say we're not quite there yet. Right. What do we have in in order to expand and accelerate research and development? All of those questions are what matter, not, you know, where is the money and where are we going to find the money? That is just a completely irrelevant question. So the sooner we shift how we evaluate whether we can afford something, the faster we will be able to meet these urgent crises. Now, one of the problems is that progressives oftentimes meaning very well and on the right moral side, will want to link up the policy of taxing the rich or taxing the wealthy as the answer to financing these progressive policy goals that we have and the response that I have and that many of our colleagues in the MMT community have is that, yes, we should tax the rich because they're too wealthy and they have too much power and it's bad for democracy. And so let's set some kind of a ceiling or limits and constraints on how much wealth can accumulate. However, we're very, very adamant about differentiating that this is not the same

as saying: 38:36

using taxing the rich as the means to finance these goals, because that is a huge problem and dilemma because on one hand taxing the rich doesn't tell us anything about our economy's productive capacity. So it doesn't give us any information about like how much we can actually afford. These are just numbers. And that's, I think, something that was a huge lightbulb moment for me. We can tax the rich as much as we want. That's not going to tell us whether we have the resources and the capacity to do this energy transition. Secondly, if we make our programs and our policy agenda dependent on the success of defeating the richest lawyers and how much money they have stowed away somewhere, and the politics of all of that, I mean, is that a situation where maybe we'll will get like 5% of a Green New Deal agenda moving and then, you know, we don't have the rest of the money, So that's it. So I think it's very, very important to delink that thinking from whether we can pay for things. And Randy Wray who was the guest last time, he has done an analysis with his coauthor that gives us some insight into whether we can afford a Green New Deal based on this resource perspective. This is something sometimes called non fiscal pay fors So pay fors in terms of resources, things that are non fiscal. And his analysis told us that if we were to do the greening projects and Medicare for All and a job guarantee which is a fundamental part of making sure that this transition is just and we even tax the rich a bit and we we opened up some resources by cutting down the military budget a bit, but ultimately we even included student debt cancellation through the analysis of GDP and resource use. A Green New Deal with everything would be only 1.3% of GDP per year. So if we were to not reduce the military budget, which again, like all of us are for because it's the right thing to do. But even if we didn't do that, the whole Green New Deal would be only 2.3% of national GDP per year. Now, as I said before, like GDP is a problematic metric to use, but it's telling us output. It's telling us how much stuff per year we need to dedicate of our economy. So, yeah, it's not out of this world or crazy. It's just going to require a lot of political will. Now, if we were like getting to the end of a Green New Deal are really, really into it. And we started using all of our capacity. Everybody was working. The U.S. was pushing itself to its limit and maybe we started to see costs rise because of this. Wray and others have proposed that we can we can institute a surcharge on increasing payroll taxes a bit, and that might be one way to reduce demand if that's happening. But other people have proposed things. For example, something that's missing from the conversation often is that banks in the financial system that are basically license based, given a license or a charter by the government to issue loans. When they do so, they're creating money too, and we often ignore that part. And a lot of the money that they're creating is going to fossil fuel projects and other really problematic and destructive things. So if we really were serious about reducing the amount of income and spending and stimulus going into an economy at full capacity, then maybe we can put some controls or credit controls on who gets to receive a loan. And some research and some work has been done on this. For example, Nathan Tankus has done this through his envisioning of a new monetary policy that's a fantastic report as well. So this is like one of the most effective ways of thinking about paying for the Green New Deal. And if we were to actually start seeing results, which would be good and needed to scale down on spending a bit, there's multiple ways to do that. Yeah, I think a lot of folks that talk about how the economy works in the context of we always have to have the revenue there to fund the spending and any additional dollars cause inflation. The explanation that the real productive resources are the main concern can we resource it? Do we have enough workers to do the labor necessary to have a Green New Deal? Do we have the land, machinery and tools to put to use to do what needs to be done to rebuild our energy infrastructure so that we're relying on sustainable energy? All of those things are the questions we need to be asking. Is that capacity there so that when the dollars enter the economy, they'll be putting real productive capacity to use towards that end. And I think oftentimes when we hear like Alan Greenspan talk about something like this, he talks about it really from a consumer perspective, Right. That there needs to be things out there for people to buy with the money if we add dollars into the economy. He said that when he was talking Social Security, when he was asked by Paul Ryan about it. But I really think the vice versa perspective is very important. But to many people, that sounds like a planned economy right. The government is deciding how resources, labor and tools are being directed. So that sounds scary to people, right? Planned economy sounds like communism and commies are always very scary and very, very bad. And so what do you think this sounds like a planned economy? Yeah. And that's such a common demonization tactic to scare people into not wanting to do any of this. But my response is always to say we already lived in a planned economy and capitalism is a planned economy. The planners are just trying to get really, really rich and wealthy and powerful. So the question really is, can we democratize some of the planning and can we incorporate actual sustainable, justice based goals into the planning as well? Or are we going to allow the drive for as much power and wealth as humanly imaginable to be the only logic that moves our lives forward? I mean, I think there can be a time and place for that, but I mean, it's just so overwhelmingly in control of everything that we need to very seriously change our priorities on what other kinds of social logics shape our lives. And that's what I think about when I think about planning. I love that way of putting it that we already have a planned economy and the people doing the planning are the billionaires because they have the money to direct labor and resources in their corporations. They are controlling the economy. When you have that much wealth, billions of dollars of wealth, you are running the economy. You have the capital necessary to direct labor, to direct resources, to direct the land, all of those things. Not only that, but also we've outsourced new money entering the economy to private banks. Right. And so some banker at JP Morgan is actually planning our economy when they decide which new businesses are going to get a loan. And so that's really flipping common thinking on its head. And it's really important to break this down. The Green New Deal just kind of opens conversations about ideas that we really need to unpack and some things we need to unlearn. And I think the Green New Deal has already impacted other real policies that have been passed in really meaningful ways. So the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, that was a huge policy being passed that there wasn't a big pay for debate in the traditional sense. Can you talk about the influence of the Green New Deal on that and what you would have to say to folks who say, you know, the Green New Deal hasn't had an impact? The Green New Deal is, in fact, dead? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I would also add to to your point, right, like Elon Musk would not have been able to buy Twitter without the support of banks kind of choosing him to receive that kind of support. So, yeah, I think it's just so important to know that we already plan and choose winners and losers. And anybody knows, like it's common knowledge that the majority of people that own stocks it's a very small percentage of the American public that own the vast majority of stocks, people that want to start businesses, they know how difficult this is. So, yes, fundamentally, we already pick winners and losers. But to the point about the Inflation Reduction Act, I mean, as we saw the introduction of a new perspective on the economy and money and finance into the Green New Deal, we saw a lot of backlash and then COVID happened and people realized in real time that in order to respond to a complete catastrophe of a public health disaster, we just spent the money and like it was right there. It happened right there in front of us. We just spent the money. We even sent people checks like, we can do that. There was no conversation about, you know, nobody was like pulling out the binders full of women, the binders to reference Mitt Romney... Well, that's not fair. Somebody at the you know, they had to press a button to credit the account. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But nobody was pulling out the binders, trying to find out where are we going to find this money for, you know, this pandemic relief. So I think that started to shift the conversation. And one thing you saw was a lot of people trying to prove that the MMT framework was false as we started experiencing inflation and kind of say, oh, you see, you don't know what you're talking about all along, but what we're seeing now is that this whole time we've been saying we need to change the way we think about inflation, too, because that's also ridiculous. It’s completely useless the way we do it in a conventional sense. So I published a paper. I think we have it here to pull up about rethinking inflation through the pandemic from an MMT perspective. And one of the things that I do in this paper is try to argue we need to start paying attention to the specifics of industry and just kind of to keep reiterating this theme, real resources. Are we at full capacity? Are there shocks to our infrastructure and our supply chains? So in COVID, we saw the way the pandemic hurt the state of our supply chains. And that had a huge impact in slowing things down, creating shortages, creating bottlenecks, and that raises costs up. And then the big one that's now being really talked about is like, oh, this is actually true, was profit led or sellers inflation. Which is like people with a lot of market power, companies with a lot of market power, took advantage of the expectations that things were going to be more expensive and they were like, yeah, let's just charge people more. And we've seen a huge trend towards consolidation of industry in shipping in, you know, different raw materials in food that have allowed these price setters to basically charge people whatever they want or get away with a lot more. And so that also played a role with inflation. And nobody was talking about this except for heterodox non-mainstream economists, including the MMT community. And so one big thing that I bring up is spending money in general isn't going to tell us by itself whether inflation is going to go up or down. We need to see like, what are we spending money into? What are we going to accomplish if we do that? If we spend more money into creating more renewable energy infrastructure, that's going to bring the cost of energy down. Because we know as a fact that renewables are less volatile and more energy efficient than fossil fuels. And when so much of our economy depends on fossil fuels, including our food, we see the problems. This when we have a war that compromises energy or when we have a pandemic. So we're really needing to shift the way we think about inflation and prices. And MMT is contributing to that conversation. There was also a report that I worked on on what I'm calling Fossilflation and other people are calling this as well, but tackling Fossilflation basically making the argument that the fossil fuel economy is contributing heavily to our vulnerability at the level of prices and costs and so we really need to think about that, about the role of energy, specifically when we prepare for a future where climate disasters might become more common and disrupt our food and disrupt communities and disrupt our supply chains. Right. We really need to start to think about how an energy transition is fundamental to building some price resilience into our economies. Andrés, thank you so much for talking to us about the the Green Dream or whatever you call it. It's almost like MMT is going to save the world. That's crazy. That's nuts. Yeah, that's wild. And it's almost like, why we do this podcast? We be wild’n out here. Is there anything you want to touch on that we haven't touched on yet Andrés? Yeah, just to keep it simple, the IRA Inflation Reduction Act, one thing that's really interesting about this is it starts to actually acknowledge what we're talking about. Maybe not fully, but it starts to move in that direction because it starts to look at inflation being a problem because of many of the things we discussed from the supply chains to all those ships that were not being able to be moved around. And they were all stuck, in ports, all of these things and it actually started investing in renewable energy. People ask themselves, why is the biggest climate investment in U.S. history It doesn't even mention climate. It's the Inflation Reduction Act. And I think it's just really telling because these things are connected. The problems with inflation and the price issues we saw is deeply connected to energy and climate. And so we see the shift is starting to happen. I think it's also really important to note that the first iteration or maybe we can call it Phase One of Green New Deal politics put a lot of pressure to adopt a Green New Deal agenda. The youth movement got behind it. Two major presidential candidates got behind it, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were talking about the Green New Deal. I think that Biden does not talk about Build Back Better and does not push forward the IRA without Bernie and Warren and those movements already having been behind this, it opened up the possibility that, wait, there's more to climate policy than just cap and trade and a carbon tax. We can actually design infrastructures and communities. And so in that, I don't think the Green New Deal is dead at all. Some people think that I'm very persistent in saying like this is just phase one. We're entering phase two now. The Green New Deal was reintroduced as a resolution this year, and there's just no way around the reality that we will not get to where we need to go without a Green New Deal pushing things forward. And we actually have, I think, a slide of a couple examples of Green New Deal policies, bills that are already in Congress. And so we have everything from a Green New Deal for Public Schools, a Green New Deal for Public Banking, a Green New Deal for Public Housing, and a federal job guarantee, which is something MMTers talk about a lot. But these are bills that are in the U.S. Congress as part of the Green New Deal framework and they're not going anywhere. We have also something called the Green New Deal for Cities and Towns to like revitalize so many towns that have been just hurt by the pandemic and just years and decades of economic stagnation. So there's a lot on the table. And, you know, some of my favorite social movement thinkers kind of say that politics and social movements are sometimes like seasons. You know, when you're in the summer or you're out, you're hanging out, you got that dog in you, you're feeling good. But when winter comes along, sometimes that's the time to take a step back and reevaluate and look at what's going on? What do we need to learn from what just happened. Get some rest and then pick it up again. And I see this journey into climate politics and the Green New Deal similarly. I think we had phase one, we had some successes, we had some limits and we met some constraints, and we're just regrouping and we're going to keep going. We're going to keep pushing this forward. We need a thumbnail for this video to just be you with laser eyes and it just says Phase Two, and then it will be a clickbait title. The Commies want Green New Deal, Phase two. I think that's beautiful. Let's do it. Our producer, Mike, what do you think of that? Should we do it? Mike says Lmao in the chat. So we're doing it. We're doing it. Thank you, Andrés. That was great. Thank you for your work on the Green New Deal. I look forward to living in a world built by the Green New Deal, and it's that utopia picture. That's the world we could be living in. That's the world we're going to be in. That's right.