Are we so distracted by political budget battles that we are completely blind to the three literal threats to human survival happening right now?
I used to think the major tradeoff was between “guns and butter” — between defending the nation and attending to our most pressing social needs.
That view put the federal budget at the center of debate. And it assumed a zero-sum game in which the more we spent on the military, the less we had for the poor. As Ike said in 1953, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
But that old zero-sum game isn’t the biggest cost Trump is imposing on us.
Yes, Trump’s war in Iran and the $1.5 trillion he wants for the Defense Department next year will make it harder for us to meet the nation’s other needs. As will the dramatic cuts he’s made or proposed in public health, education, Medicaid and Medicare, and nutrition assistance.
Yet the biggest cost is the cost of doing nothing about three worsening crises that threaten the very survival of America and the world: climate change, AI, and widening inequality.
Almost all Americans — indeed, most human beings — are now subject to the escalating costs of climate change. How much more evidence do we need?
This summer has been a living hell. Wildfires have forced around 60,000 people to evacuate parts of Washington state, destroying hundreds of buildings and leaving thousands without power. Fires in Canada turned the skies orange and the air foul across a large part of the eastern United States. Millions of lives have been threatened by a deadly heat dome.
Even if Trump weren’t worsening climate change by subsidizing fossil fuels, simply doing nothing would be shameful enough because the crisis is growing so fast. Years ago, climate scientists predicted exactly what’s occurring right now. Trump’s lack of leadership — no, his outright sabotaging of global efforts to stop the planet from becoming uninhabitable — is one of the worst sins of his sinful regime.
AI’s dangers are also now upon us.
If you believe that humans are in total control of AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Recently, at least two of OpenAI’s models escaped a sealed testing environment and broke into the servers of another AI company. The AI models “reasoned” that the solutions to a cybersecurity test were on that other company’s servers, so the models snuck onto the internet and hacked into the other company’s solutions.
This is chilling. The possibility of AI models escaping human control to do horrendous damage to human life is growing exponentially. Here again, the Trump regime’s inaction is a huge cost that’s soaring by the day.
My candidate for the third existential threat is wealth inequality, which is also out of control. Billionaire wealth is surging to monarchical heights while the wages of the typical American aren’t even keeping up with price increases — meaning that most of us are getting poorer.
The problem isn’t inequality per se. It’s the consequences of inequality — especially widening corruption. Billionaires are using their wealth to bribe politicians to reduce their tax rates (which are already lower than most Americans face) and to stop lawmakers from regulating fossil fuels or AI.
Full circle.
Of course, there are still guns-versus-butter issues. Federal budget priorities are important. America faces a yawning budget deficit and can’t possibly do everything that needs to be done. Dollars spent on the military are literally taking food from America’s hungry.
Yet on the largest existential crises of our time, where the costs of inaction are rising to frightening levels, the solutions don’t require extraordinary government expenditure. They require thoughtful environmental and AI regulations, and far higher taxes on the wealthy.
Democrats and progressives running for Congress, governorships, and other positions must speak out loudly and clearly about the rapidly rising costs of inaction on climate change, AI, and inequality.
Demand action. Educate the public. Condemn the Trump regime and its backers — Big Oil, AI, and the billionaire class — for threatening the very survival of humans on the Earth.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.