The world is up in arms about Donald Trump withdrawing America from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Personal beliefs aside, there is a pretty tremendous business case for staying in the climate agreement, even expanding on the requirements, and leading the world in confronting the issue of renewable energy.
But having written a fair number of campaign ads over the years, I am not going to pretend like a rational argument is going to be accepted.
Instead, I’m going to lay out the biggest issue and biggest reason to embrace new technology and new energy sources::
Innovation drives job creation.
Study after study shows that innovation is the real driver of economic growth, investment in new technologies, new ideas.
The real crisis in the country is jobs and economic inequality. As in, we don’t have enough stable, good paying jobs to continue to push growth forward.
The platform that Donald Trump ran on was one of turning back the clock to a time when the economy was a much different beast.
These promises of turning back the clock were also lies.
And, I get why they were appealing because for 40+ years, the argument has been advanced that government doesn’t do anything. And that the only way to grow the economy is to get these darn regulations out of the way so that people could just do what they need to do.
Never taking into account the reality of the situation.
I have a colleague and we were talking about the business environment here in DC and we came up with a term for it:
“Dumbass or Delusional”
Too bad that is the state of much of the discussion about what is going on in the economy, in business, and in the world.
The fact is, the real problem in America isn’t necessarily taxes or regulations: its priorities.
Here’s where our priorities hold us back as a nation compared to the rest of the world:
- Our tax system is manufactured in a way to penalize work and reward speculation.
- Our medical system isn’t set up to ensure the productivity of our citizens, it is set up as a profit center for the economy that acts as a tax on productivity.
- Our lack of investment in infrastructure puts us at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.
- The lack of investment in new technologies, in science, and in solving the education problem is a tax on the future stability of the economy.
If you look at it from the POV of priorities, you see that we have made choices and those choices have real consequences.
And, I get this…budgets are priorities. And, we’ve been being fed a line of logic for 40+ years.
But the real villain isn’t Donald Trump, or the climate agreement, or taxes…these are all symptoms of another issue, a sickening inability to focus and make priorities that are in the best interests of the country and the larger community.