What should a neoliberal do? Save the planet or balance the government’s budget?

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Simon Wren-Lewis has written about funding the Green New Deal today. His answer is borrowing (which is no surprise given the structure of Labour's fiscal rule, which he co-authored). As I showed yesterday, I can live with this.

I did like his justification for increasing the national debt to achieve this goal:

No one in a 100 years time who suffers the catastrophic and (for them) irreversible impact of climate change is going to console themselves that at least they did not increase the national debt. Humanity will not come to an end if we double debt to GDP ratios, but it could come to an end if we fail to combat climate change.

That's hard to argue with.

Given the choice what would a neoliberal do? Save the planet, or balance the government's budget?

Troublingly, I am not sure I can predict the answer.


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