Donate
 to this campaign

With global warming, pollution, and destruction of habitat, I am really pessimistic about the survival of planet Earth and it inhabitants. I hope we can find solutions and the resolve to carry them out.

World population is currently 6.6 billion, up from 3 billion in 1960. It is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Most of these people are poor and more concerned, understandably, with survival than any affect they have on their environment. But even if all were environmentalists, the number of people alone would put tremendous pressure on the Earth's resources. We need to slow population growth. One way is to make sure all women have information on birth control and the means to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

Also putting pressure on Earth's resources is the high rate of consumption of the more prosperous portion of the world's population. In the U.S., our multi-car families with huge houses and long commutes consume more resources than our neighbors in poorer countries. One way to reduce consumption in the United States is to force people to pay their own way - that is, change policies that allow people to spend other people's  money. We do need to help the poor, but subsidizing people who aren't needy only encourages extravagant consumption and conversion of more and more of the Earth's resources to garbage, pollution and greenhouse gases. And, of course, it is immoral to take from the poor to subsidize the rich. Here are some ways to make people pay their own way:

• Balance the budget. The national debt (as of 6/5/08) is $9.4 trillion. $5.3 trillion of that is of publicly held debt (domestic and foreign) and $4.1 trillion is held by government accounts (trust funds), the largest of which is Social Security. $2.4 trillion of the publicly held debt is held by foreign investors. The federal deficit - the amount being added to the national debt each year - is about $550 billion. We are living beyond our means; we are not paying our own way. We are living on on other people's money: our children's. They (or their children) will have to be pay off our debt - or at least pay the interest ($406 billion in 2006).

• Make credit card users pay their own fees. See Stop Subsidizing Credit Card Users. I suspect that credit card users tend to be better off than people who don't have cards. If they had to pay their own expenses, they'd have less to spend. Families without cards would have about $270 a year more to spend, and they'd be more likely to spend it on necessities.

• Make home buyers foot the entire bill.  Fewer new houses would be built - and they would be smaller - if we did not subsidize the purchase by allowing mortgage interest and state and local property taxes as an income tax deduction. (I talk about this in Reform the Tax System.) Without this subsidy, or "tax expenditure", people would be more likely to rent or buy existing housing. The annual tax expenditure for the mortgage interest deduction is $89 billion; for state and local property taxes on owner-occupied homes, it is $12.6 billion.
  
  Note: Michigan congressman John Dingell has proposed - as a way to reduce global warming - a less drastic reduction in the mortgage interest subsidy. A 9/27/07 Associated Press article in the State Journal says he's suggested a

Phaseout of the the interest tax deduction on home mortgages for homes more than 3,000 square feet. Owners would keep most of the deduction for homes at the lower end of the scale, but it would be eliminated entirely for homes of 4,200 feet or more.