You Still Can't Have It All

By Michael Kinsley

George Bush accuses Bill Clinton of wanting to sacrifice jobs for the sake of the environment. Bush says he himself would never do that, although he cares passionately about the environment. Bill Clinton indignantly denies the charge. He says better environmental protection will create, not destroy, jobs.

Both sides in this argument are kidding. The obvious truth is that of course there's a trade-off between jobs and environmental standards. What's more, it's a trade-off both candidates are willing to make. George Bush, for example, signed the Clean Air Act. He brags about it. For the sake of cleaner air, that law imposes on factories pollution standards that will raise expenses and reduce output -- and, inevitably, cost jobs.

The proper question for politics is where to make the trade-off between jobs and the environment. True, as Clinton and Al Gore like to say, environmental technology will create new businesses and new jobs. But overall, a cleaner environment is a good that must be paid for like any other good, and the cost must be borne, one way or another, by the rest of the economy. We are a rich country and can afford to buy ourselves a cleaner environment. How much environmental protection are we willing to buy and at what cost? That is the right debate. But that debate is impossible as long as both sides insist that a trade-off between the environment and other good things (jobs, economic growth) is unnecessary and unthinkable.

In fact, it's even worse than that. Each side accuses the other of believing there's a trade-off -- a charge the other side indignantly denies. Dan Quayle: "Bill Clinton will say, 'Well, you know, you can't create jobs and preserve the environment at the same time. You have to have one or the other.' " This, Quayle adds, is "nonsense." Al Gore: "When Bush and Quayle say you have to choose between jobs and the environment, they're wrong." Actually, if Bush and Quayle did say something like that, they would be right. But they don't say it at all. Heaven forfend.

The environmental debate is just one example of what may be the central problem of American politics. That is the inability of the electorate to deal with the hard reality we all had to learn as small children: that more of something usually means less of something else. The politicians, like overindulgent parents, are doing us no favor by refusing to teach this lesson.

No doubt it was ever thus. But the problem does seem to be getting worse. The great symbol and measure of our inability to make trade-offs is the national debt, which has quadrupled in 12 years. We refuse to decide whether we want lower taxes or higher government benefits, so we demand both. The result is the annual deficit, cumulatively the national debt. Both candidates mouth pieties about "tough choices" but don't actually ask us to make any.

Gaze across the policy landscape, and observe a similar dynamic at work on other issues. Take health care. The state of Oregon recently attempted to rank all medical procedures based on their value to the patient and society. The intention was to change the Medicaid rules so that more poor people could be covered, but not for the less worthwhile procedures. Some of the calculations were cold-blooded: no transplants for alcoholics with cirrhosis of the liver; reduced treatment for patients deemed near the end of their life.

The Bush Administration vetoed the plan. (The Democratic ticket is divided: Clinton supports it, Gore opposes.) Critics call the Oregon scheme "health- care rationing," which is exactly right. But as frustrated defenders of the plan note, we ration care now, except we do it irrationally. We pretend to believe in unlimited health care for all, thereby making it harder to provide decent health care to many. Our refusal to acknowledge that trade-offs are necessary -- including, yes, the ultimate trade-off between money and human life -- makes intelligent debate about intelligent trade-offs impossible.

Not all policy decisions require this kind of trade-off. Economists believe almost unanimously, for example, that free trade between two nations is a win- win situation: both economies benefit. The proposed North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico thus would cost the U.S. economy nothing on balance, while bringing many benefits.

But NAFTA raises a different kind of trade-off: between economic efficiency and economic fairness. Even if the American economy benefits overall, there will be winners and losers. The obvious solution -- both to grease the political wheels for the agreement and to serve justice -- is for society to compensate the individual losers. For example, there should be generous retraining benefits for those thrown out of work. But conservatives don't like to admit that policies promoting growth can disserve fairness, while liberals don't like to admit that policies promoting fairness can disserve growth. So a natural deal -- pay for fairness policies out of the proceeds of growth policies -- is hard to achieve.

In 1980 M.I.T. economist Lester Thurow published an influential book called The Zero-Sum Society. This became a notorious phrase. Thurow's critics, mostly conservative, accused him of suggesting that the American economy could not change or grow. Thurow's point was, rather, that at any given moment society's resourcesTIME