The Fiscal Cliff At The End Of Growth

Apropos of the "fiscal cliff" legislation, MPR quoted a China Daily editorial yesterday as saying that the US couldn't continue our debt-fueled prosperity, and that the legislature couldn't continue to "kick the can down the road."

Maybe they can't help but "kick the can down the road."

The middle class, which Democratic politicians claim to want to protect, has the largest economic -- not to say ecological --  footprint. (The poor are too poor, the rich are too few.)

It all comes down to our ecological footprint. Our economy would have been fine, if we hadn't come up against the planet's limits to growth.

So dealing with the problem of keeping society going come down to operating ecologically, and operating ecologically will change the way that comfortable working-class folks live.

Not kicking the can down the road would amount to figuring out how to reduce our ecological footprint without handing your House or Senate seat over to a demagogue.

And without precipitating an economic disaster.

CBC news program As It Happens, interviewed End of Growth author Jeff Rubin. The interviewer treated Rubin's comments as novel. Maybe Rubin's ideas weren't novel to the interviewer -- they haven't been news to me since 1972 -- but might as well have been in Martian for most of the audience.

Pity, because that's what we need to talk about, if it's possible to avoid economic collapse..