10/27/10 2:30pm

Article By: Majora Carter

When the same government prints money, and runs a deficit, it's not always bad, but not always good either. I am no expert on this, but i do observe that "they" always mange to find more money when it's needed. That cycle of need and capital expansion is pretty regular, and mostly survivable so far.  We put ourselves into debt now, especially for infrastructure, to foster long term economic growth and efficiency, as well as short term capital flow to businesses and individuals.

Deficit spending on war, where most of what we produce is destroyed, abandoned, or leads to veterans with long term social service needs, is risky spending - especially if it goes on for a along time...

Subsidizing things like shopping malls, stadiums, and/or prisons also produce more long term expense than is justified by the short term economic stimulus.

These are examples of bad deficit spending. 

Borrowing to pay for energy efficient improvements to existing buildings, storm water management systems, the added costs for new building to be as efficient as possible, and education at all levels produce short-term and long-term benefits across a range of interests.  These are some examples of good deficit spending in my opinion.

When we borrow heavily on our environment, there's a much longer payback period.   Epic.  The short term economic gains derived from Mountain Top Removal (MTR) coal mining are small in terms of number of jobs produced, as well as the short duration of the flow and low quality of fuel energy coming from these radical methods. 

But the costs in terms of long term damage to local drinking water, and other regional water flow problems are enormous.  The mining companies do not compensate the victims of the consequences produced from their actions, government does.  

Practices that produce well known long-term expenses should be discouraged. If the profits derived from these practices were commensurately taxed to pay for the fall out, it would not be profitable.  So, those profits come at our financial expense, leaving traumatized people with their social service needs, unusable landscapes, and continued use of an energy system that we know we will come to an end eventually anyhow.

It's been repeated many times, but i can't resist: the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones.  Stones just weren't all that good compared to the costs/benefits associated with them.  Coal is no different, and MTR is a stunning example of burdening future generations with unwanted environmental, water, social, and medical costs.

Let's apply the current anti-deficit fervor, on both the left and right, to how we produce the energy we need to run our economy now and into the future!