I think there’s a key misunderstanding with regards to what real change should be.
The inflation reduction act seeks to curb inflation overall, that’s the goal. How do we measure the success of this bill? Well, that seems obvious - by looking at how it impacts inflation. Yet is that really meaningful change?
If I leave my house once a month, kick a wall as hard as possible, and then go to the hospital, does the hospital patching up my foot amount to meaningful change in my life? The damage to my foot gets worse every month. My actions eat up actual resources that could be better used to help others. Fixing my foot up is both literally, and figuratively treating the symptom and not the root cause.
The hole that everyone falls down is conflating real change to an immediate reduction in events and situations they personally don’t like. There is no single cause behind the high inflation we’ve seen in recent years. It’s not covid, it’s not printing too much money, it’s not republican or democratic leadership. It’s a byproduct of a collection of systems and their interactions with one another. The sum total of countless decisions spanning decades - from actual changes to monetary policy, to changes on how we teach monetary policy, to reactions to the 2008 crisis, or Covid, or globalization, etc, etc.
Putting an end to recent inflationary trends would do absolutely nothing to change the underlying systems that got us here today. It would do little to change our overall social and economic trajectories. The same goes for student loan forgiveness. Even if Biden made education free for all Americans, would the average American find themselves to be in a better financial situation than, say, 30 years ago? Beyond that, would that cost just magically go away, or simply be transfered elsewhere?
Given recent economic trends, cheaper and potentially free education is practically inevitable. The average worker is trending towards generalization, and the workplace is changing so rapidly that a variety of secondary industries centered around providing educational services to already educated adults have ballooned in size over the past decade. There is no realistic future where education isn’t far cheaper and more available, we’re simply at the point now where this reality is being reflected within the perceived pool of actions available to our leaders - in this particular instance made more available by an immediate need to appease a population segment that’s rapidly seen their future prospects dwindle.
None of what Biden has done is new with regards to actual impact on the average American. He has done exactly what plenty of other American presidents have done prior. The sole reason why you assign more value to his student debt relief program or the added renewable energy subsidies is because it impacts you directly, and is something you can relate to. He has addressed an immediate problem that you strongly relate to.
Some years ago I was enrolled in one of the first real college degrees specifically focused on training individuals to enter the modern renewable energy sector. As part of this program I spent a decent amount of time specifically researching climate policy, and in my own time I made an active effort to study the science behind climate change. This was something like 15 years ago now. One thing that was painfully obvious to me at the time was that significant climate change was practically inevitable.
Positive feedback loops weren’t well understood, but certainly studied and documented enough to be raising some massive red flags, yet climate models always seemed to lean towards optimism for what I can only assume was the sake of political buy-in. And here we are, in 2023, only just admitting that we won’t hit our 1.5C target that was set not even a decade prior. Most people seem to have been very aware that nothing meaningful would be done to prevent climate change.
So why then would you equate the recent surge in spending on renewable energy to real change? At this point in time real change with regards to th global climate crisis can only come as part of a massive, collective effort on behalf of the whole world comparable to what we saw during the great wars of the last century. Investing additional resources in a growing industry that is financially viable is hardly enacting meaningful change - that is simply operating as usual.
