Show Me the Money: Financing the Next Environmental Wave

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Pages: 229-232

229

Show Me the Money:

Financing the Next

Environmental Wave

By G. Tracy Mehan III (Sept./Oct. 2014)

Finance Policy for Renewable Energy and a Sus tainable

Environment, by Mich ael Curley. CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group.

232 pages.

From the September/ October 2014 issue of The Environme ntal Forum.

As we look to the next wave of environ-

mental improvements, and the means

of nancing them, we are confronted

with this grim reality: e federal government

is broke. States and cities are not in the best of

shape either.

Niall Fergsuon, a Harvard economic his-

torian and host of PBS’s television docu men-

tary he Ascent of Money, agrees. In his 2012

book he Great Degeneration: How Institutions

Decay and Economies Die, he notes that “the

statistics commonly cited as government debt

are themselves misleading, for they encompass

only the su ms owed by governments in the

form of bonds.”

Continues Ferguson, “But the ocial debts

in the form of bonds do not include the often far larger unfunded liabilities

of welfare schemes like—to give the biggest American programmes —Medi-

care, Medicaid and Socia l Security.”

“e best available estimate for the dierence between the net present

value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of f uture

federal revenues is $200 trillion, nearly 13 times the debt as stated by the

U.S. Treasury,” argues this native Scot. Ferguson also makes clear that this

staggering number does not include state and local governments’ unfunded

liabilities, estimated to be in the neighborhood of $38 trillion.