By all serious accounts given our fiscal stance and the Trump tax
cuts, we face the very real possibility of adding a trillion dollars to
our government debt over a decade. Politicians can get by with
promoting such policies because the day of reckoning is usually
delayed and often unpredictable. But given a slowing economic
environment , which I believe we face, the possibility of a future
disaster worse than the recent Great Recession is very real.
I support adjusting the level of taxation to meet the level of spending
when we are near or at full employment so that we do not continue
enlarging our US Government debt which if not dealt with could in
the future lead to a worse disaster than the Greek one.
The evidence increasingly seems clear that we are not only facing
global warming but that human use of hydrocarbons is not an
insignificant factor contributing to the warming. One remedy that
has been proposed is a system of cap and trade which I oppose
given the European experience which clearly shows that such a
system can easily be gamed at the expense of doing something
seriously about the problem. Instead, I favor a stiff carbon tax that
is not revenue neutral given the need to improve public transportation
in our central cities like Detroit, the need to put resources into
developing non-carbon energy resources and the need to reduce
the burden of our government debt.