L.W.: The Grand Strategy Project at the New America Foundation. It was called the Smart Growth Initiative, I think it evolved into Grand Strategy about two years ago. It's headed by a fellow by the name of Patrick Doherty and he is getting ready, Amory Slaughter is the head of New America right now, and I think they're having some friction so I think he's getting ready to break out and become an independent entity so you'll probably hear about him soon, in the next nine to ten months anyway as a standup all by himself. Got a lot of support. Enormous support.
He's got a lot of the oil companies in with him because they are beginning to realize that image of the golden goose, you know? You may have twenty trillion dollars worth of assets but they're going to be stranded because sooner or later you're going to have to stop burning them.
So what do you do in the interim to make sure that twenty trillion or a reasonable amount of it at least is realized any way? Do you convert the stranded asset in this case natural gas or oil or coal or whatever it might be into something else that's neutral to the environment? Or even perhaps that's helpful to the environment when it is "consumed." They're doing all kinds of studies like this right now.
For example they did one for Shell where they showed where these certain types of petroleum products can be converted to feed stock and they can be converted with less energy consumption than was originally thought possible and the feed stock could then be sold for a reasonable price and amplify and augment the regenerative agriculture pillar. So, and you tie into that, the taxation of waste where you're not taxing somebody making a profit, you're taxing somebody who is actually doing damage to the environment until they stop doing it.
You make the tax burden so heavy that they are incentivized not just to pay it and continue what they're doing, but they're incentivized to change what they're doing and to make it at least neutral if not helpful for the environment rather than detrimental thereto. Then once you've recovered that situation you examine your tax system in another way so that you can move off to whatever you have to move off to in order to continue to generate revenues.
But we're figuring twenty to twenty five years of really heavy wealth creation for government from taxing waste in order to disincentivize that waste and that's a long period and we've already had KPMG for example do the audit on it and they showed that most of our figures are pretty damn accurate. That we could generate equivalent or better and in most cases better revenues through taxing waste over the next twenty five years than if you're taxing wealth I mean there are all kinds of innovative ways to look at the future if you take the conventional thinking cap off and begin to be creative and innovative.
R.K.: But what about wealth? What about these oligarchs and these multi-billionaires and the wealth inequality that the US is now almost leading the world with?
L.W.: It's dangerous. I can't say it any other way. It's very dangerous. It's the kind of thing that causes revolutions It's the kind of thing that brings about the uprising of peoples, blood in the streets, and generally winds up being damaging for everyone. Most revolutions don't succeed. Most revolutions produce, at best, equal situations post revolution to that prior to the revolution and at worst, situations that are at least for the short term or the mid term even worse. The French Revolution produced Napoleon and the French Empire.
People say, well our revolution didn't do that, our revolution succeeded, our revolution was a good one. And I usually point out ours wasn't a revolution, not really. We were British citizens. We just decided we didn't like what the King was doing to us so we broke away. You can call that a revolution if you want, I say it was an evolution. We're as much a product of Magna Carta nine hundred years before as were the British.
R.K.: What about, I have been doing a series and so have a couple of other people like Thom Hartmann about-
L.W.: I like his stuff.
R.K.: A no billionaires campaign. I believe that billionaires are bad for the economy. They're bad for America. They're bad for democracy. They're part of this wealth inequality danger.
L.W.: But you see, I agree with you. But you've got to get beyond this conventional wisdom that so many people pull out and throw up on the wall that then you're disincentivizing the most important aspect of capitalism.
You have to have the potential within capitalism to amass wealth of great proportions in order to incentivize the rest of the system. I say that's utter bullshit. I say there is no economist in the world who would stand in front of me and convince me of that. There's no economist in the world worth his salt whom I would even listen to trying to convince me of that because it's bullshit. But that's what you're up against. My father was that way. Oh no no you can't do that, that would ruin the whole system. Can't put any checks on capitalism, that would ruin the whole system.
R.K.: So if that's bullshit, then what is the deal with capitalism in terms of incentives?
L.W.: As I said before, you have to be very very careful, very meticulous in the way you design the regulation. In the way you allow labor to counteract the capitalists. And it's an imperfect game but if you're careful, you can do it. We proved it. We proved it, we've done it before. It's a constant game. You never get it exactly right. You never get it in a way that's going to last forever. It's like democracy.
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