The economy is in terrible shape these days, not only in the U.S., but around the globe. And there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it. In Europe, the debt crisis clearly calls out for two solutions, default and inflation. Unfortunately, these are anathema to the ECB, leaving the continent to muddle along until the zombie banks simply run out of brains to ingest and it all falls apart. Here, consumer spending is going nowhere (although luxury spending is just fine), while corporations sit on mounds of cash they aren’t spending. It’s hard to see how the market is efficiently allocating capital right now. It’s almost as if the tragedy of the commons is real and requires government intervention to take some of that capital and redirect it to projects that benefit everybody, like infrastructure.
I don’t see how we are going to get out of this slump anytime soon, so we may as well shoot for the moon. Why not a goal to make the country carbon-neutral by 2050? Sure, it would be a monumental undertaking, with no guarantee of success. But it would put us on the forefront of technology that is going to happen sooner or later, and what we are doing at present clearly isn’t working. Is there anybody who can provide the leadership to arouse the public support for a project like this comparable to the Apollo Program? Our country’s future may depend on it.