Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Today's program is

called Economics for a New Year. It's my hope that we can talk about some of the

urgent issues of our time, in the hopes we can do better in23 than we were able to do in 2022.

So we're going to talk a little bit about the connections between the Ukraine war,

inflation and interest rates, that coordinated set of urgent topics with some alternatives to

what we are seeing now.

I'm going to talk about a transportation system that is different from the one we have

and based on different principles.

I want to talk about a very important movement around the world called degrowth,

this movement that takes account of the environmental crisis

we face and talks about slowing or reversing growth as a way to respond and what that means.

So let's jump right in. I'm going to start with the Ukraine War, inflation, and rising interest rates.

So let's begin very simply because the issues here are simple.

The United States government is throwing $100 billion into the war in Ukraine,

spending wild amounts of money, at least by comparison with every

other kind of spending we have done in recent history, even on warfare.

This kind of explosion of extra spending all in this last 12 months is inflationary. It means lots more money

looking to buy things and that typically pushes up prices. Now, of course, if this were paid for by taxes, if we taxed the American businesses,

the American people, then they would have less money to spend because we're taxing them,

and then that money would be used for the war. So the extra spending on Ukraine

war would be offset by less spending by Americans. This, of course, would make the war very

...