Episode Details

Nothing good comes from war except, on occasion, the prevention of something even worse. As pressure increases on the Biden Administration to take more aggressive action against Putin, the question is how to minimize the collateral damage to Americans and use the crisis to move toward a more humane future. Here are five possible ways.

1. Help Americans endure higher fuel prices. The best way to stop Putin’s war machine would be to put economic sanctions on anyone buying Russian oil or gas, because oil and gas revenue makes up about half of the Kremlin’s budget. But such sanctions would also drive the prices of oil and natural gas through the roof. (Biden’s decision today to stop imports of Russian oil to the U.S. will have far less consequence because only a tiny fraction of the oil we use comes from Russia.)

Gas prices in America are already topping four dollars a gallon (here in California, five dollars). That’s less of a problem for higher-wage workers who can work from home, but it’s a huge burden on lower-wage workers who have to make longer and longer commutes.

What to do? Help Americans caught in the energy squeeze. Revive the refundable expanded Child Tax Credit, which enabled millions of poor and working-class families to survive the COVID recession.

2. Move the nation toward green energy. Oil companies are pocketing windfall profits while their lobbyists are using the crisis to demand that the U.S. build new Liquid Natural Gas terminals, allow more oil pipelines, and approve new leasing of federal lands for oil drilling. That’s the exact opposite of what we need to do.

However we invest in new energy infrastructure, none of it will have an immediate impact on energy prices. The practical longer-term choice is between an energy infrastructure that supports the production of more fossil fuels (such as the additional LNG terminals, pipelines, and oil leases that energy lobbyists are now pushing) or one that moves the nation more quickly to renewable energy sources (such as subsidies for electric cars, batteries, and charging stations).

Now is the time to redouble our efforts toward the latter. We need to use this opportunity to build more of the green infrastructure America needs for the long term.

Meanwhile, there’s no reason American oil producers should enjoy windfall profits from rising energy prices. Congress should enact a windfall profits tax on them, and use the proceeds for additional green infrastructure. (The European Union is urging member countries to do exactly this. Why can’t we?)

3. Trim the military-industrial complex. Though the U.S. and other Western allies have stopped short of sending troops to Ukraine, they are sending weapons. Even Sweden, a non-NATO member, has announced it will send anti-tank weapons, helmets and body armor to Ukraine. Finland has pledged assault rifles and anti-tank weapons. In America, budget analysts expect defense spending in the 2023 federal budget to rise to between 3.5 percent and 4 percent of GDP.

All this military spending comes at the expense of domestic priorities in the United States and abroad. It also increases the likelihood of armed conflict. The big winners: U.S. aerospace and defense contractors that are making many of these weapons systems and whose share prices are surging.

America’s defense budget is already bloated — bigger than the next ten defense budgets put together. There’s no reason for more defense spending. If anything, we should use the current crisis to reexamine defense spending and make our armed forces