A bad idea is enough trouble all on its own. But a bad idea by a government official can be orders of magnitude worse because the government has the power to tax, which is the power to destroy, and what's worse, the government has the power to coerce. If you doubt that, try to stop paying your tax bill - any tax bill, income, property, business, whatever - and see how long it is before some level of government sends men with guns out looking for you.
The government has not only the power to tax, mind you, but also the power to spend, and the federal government here in the United States has some champion spenders. When he heard someone complain that Congress was spending like drunken sailors, the great Ronald Reagan correctly pointed out the key difference is that drunken sailors are spending their own money.
But now Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, of all people, is proposing a few more trillions in spending. A stack of one trillion one-dollar bills would reach the Moon and back four times. Janet Yellen is proposing to spend a stack, not a fistful, of dollars that would reach to the Moon and back twelvetimes. That's the scale of spending she's talking about - it is, literally, astronomical. And she wants to spend this money on the nebulous idea of anthropogenic climate change.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Saturday that the global transition to a low-carbon economy requires $3 trillion in new capital each year through 2050, far above current annual financing, but that filling the gap is the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
Yellen said in Belem, Brazil's Amazon gateway city, that reaching net-zero emissions goals remained a top priority for the Biden-Harris administration and this would require leadership far beyond U.S. borders."Neglecting to address climate change and the loss of nature and biodiversity is not just bad environmental policy. It is bad economic policy," Yellen said in a speech after attending a G20 finance leaders meeting on Thursday and Friday in Rio de Janeiro.
One would think that the Treasury Secretary of the United States would have some ideas as to where all this money would come from, but no. Spending on this nebulous idea so far is largely borrowed, and Yellen's proposal is many times what is currently being borrowed and spent. The developed world is already in the throes of a sovereign debt crisis; the United States is among the worst, with our current federal debt fast approaching $35 trillion. Janet Yellen wants us to add another few trillion to that, with never a thought for its effect on our economy.
Wealthy economies provided and mobilized a record $116 billion for climate finance for developing countries in 2022, 40% of which came from multilateral development banks (MDBs). Yellen said the banks, including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) were setting new targets.
A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. It's also important to note that, of the two major party candidates for the president of the United States, one of them supports this madness.
Yellen, to make matters even more ridiculous, is selling this as some kind of economic boon. Oh, the developing countries, or at least their rulers, will see some short-term economic boosts from such insane levels of spending. Much of that boost will end up in Swiss bank accounts belonging to the rulers of those countries, and some of it may trickle out into a few small-scale projects, like building seven or eight electric vehicle charging stations.
But for the developed world, the question is: whose citizens will be picking up the check for all this? In the name of climate change, of which changes humans are a small part, we will spend ourselves into penury. Virtually every such "green" program will raise the costs of everything we buy and do. It will limit our freedom of movement and our choices as to what we eat or where and how we live. It will damage our economy and our modern, technological lifestyle on which our population depends.
What Janet Yellen is proposing is dangerous and insane. The developed world cannot begin to sustain this level of spending - not even close. Yellen is demanding astronomic spending on a solution that is in desperate need of a problem, and she is willing to mortgage our grandchildren's futures to see it done.
Yellen was always a disaster as Secretary of the Treasury. She was a lousy economist when she was on the Council of Economic Advisors, she was a lousy economist when she was a member of the Federal Reserve, and she is now a lousy economist as Secretary of the Treasury. She is the most liberal SecTreas since the FDR years, and with any luck, in January, the incoming Trump/Vance administration will quickly show her the door.