What Does it Mean to be Green?
By Donella Medaows
December 13, 1990
The trouble with being politically Green is that you don’t fit on the left-right spectrum. You intersect that spectrum from an angle, agreeing with parts of both the conservative and the liberal agendas and objecting to other parts. “Not left, not right, but in front,” say the Greens. Since the traditional left and right have a [...]
What We don’t Know About the Budget isn’t Easy to Find Out
By Donella Meadows
–November 1, 1990–
“I never knew that, about rich people not paying Social Security tax on all their income,” an outraged friend told me last week.
Said another equally angry friend a few days later, “That income tax bubble, I didn’t know about that. How could they DO it?”
They could do it because intelligent, busy people like my friends didn’t [...]
None of the Above
By Donella Meadows
–October 4, 1990–
It took them four months of high-level haggling. They produced a plan for the biggest deficit yet — an estimated $250 billion NOT INCLUDING the Savings and Loan bailout. Once again they shoved the target date for balancing the budget five years into the future. It is always five years in the future. And as the [...]
The ABCs of the S&Ls
By Donella Meadows
–August 2, 1990–
If five hundred billion dollars had been robbed from us Jesse James style, we would have understood what happened. We would have risen up in outrage. We would have put the criminals in jail and learned some lessons so it couldn’t happen again.
But the heist of the savings and loans associations took place without guns, without [...]
Our GNP is up; Our Welfare is Down
By Donella Meadows
–March 8, 1990–
Are you better off than you were ten years ago?
The government says you are — or at any rate the average American is. The per capita GNP (Gross National Product), our most widely watched and quoted economic index, rose every year during the 1980’s except the recession year of 1982.
But two researchers, Herman Daly, Senior Economist [...]
