In 1994, the Clinton administration decreed a bright shining future for education. Its Goals 2000 legislation proclaimed that by that year America’s high school graduation rate would be 90 percent and American students would lead the world in math and science achievements. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was unimpressed: “That will not happen.” It didn’t, to the surprise of no one with an inkling of reality’s viscosity.
Bill Clinton’s (then Congress’) goals, which Moynihan compared to the Soviet Union’s penchant for delusional grain quotas, illustrated what the senator called the “leakage of reality from American life.” Speaking of which: Democrats, including many presidential candidates, have endorsed something that makes Goals 2000 look like the soul of sobriety. The Green New Deal’s FAQ sheet says: In 10 years America will have only non-carbon renewable energy. (Exxon Mobil plans to produce 25 percent more oil and gas in 2025 than in 2017.) By then, “every building in America” will be environmentally retrofitted, “farting cows” (methane gas; say goodbye to hamburgers) will be on the way out, fast electric trains will make airplanes unnecessary, “every combustion-engine vehicle” will be gone (but charging stations will be “everywhere”).
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, averse to government by arrested-development teenagers, dismissed the Green New Deal as a “suggestion.” Its enthusiasts, buffeted by gales of derision, responded with gusts of dissembling as implausible as the GND: Their fact sheet was a mere draft, or a dirty trick (“doctored”), or something.
Do they know how the actual New Deal fared? Devoted to curing unemployment, the unemployment rate never fell below 14 percent until 1941, eight years into the New Deal, as America prepared for war. The 1937-38 “depression within the Depression” was the 20th century’s third-worst recession.
