Climate Debt Denial

In: Dissent: a quarterly of politics and culture, Band 60, Heft 3, S. 33-37

Abstract

At the height of the Washington feeding frenzy about the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, and sequestration, austerity hawks coined a new label to denigrate lawmakers who were opposed to cutbacks brought on by the cynical manipulation of national debt: "debt deniers." It was a savvy way of turning the tables on those who had gotten traction out of depicting the GOP as hopelessly affl icted by "climate denial." Not that there was any real equivalence between the two charges. After all, economics, unlike climatology, is not a science, and there is nothing approaching a consensus about the fiscal wisdom of running large government debts, especially if they are U.S. debts, backed by the still almighty dollar.