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News and social media platforms have been abuzz over Ivanka Trump's interview with Fox News on Tuesday where she commented on the 'Green New Deal' (GND) proposed by new congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). Here's what she said:
STEVE HILTON, FOX NEWS: You've got people who will see that offer from the Democrats, from the progressive Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 'Here's the Green New Deal, here's the guarantee of a job,' and think, 'yeah, that's what I want, it's that simple.' What do you say to those people?

IVANKA TRUMP: I don't think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something.

I've spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get. So, I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want. They want the ability to be able to secure a job.

They want the ability to live in a country where there's the potential for upward mobility.
Ivanka Trump was largely blasted throughout the media as an out-of-touch privileged hypocrite who has had everything handed to her. This underscores a commonly held view by those on the Left that see the conservative 'work-for-what-you-get' sentiment as a fundamental manipulation that the elite use on the blue-collar worker to maintain their wealth.

The common worker is, on the one hand, compassionately regarded by the 'left' as a victim of capitalism, and on the other callously portrayed as a simple-minded redneck whose unlimited gullibility leads him to believe that one day he too might be 'one of them mighty fine rich folk'. Perhaps there might be something to this, but perhaps that is not all there is. There is something about this 'work for what you get' mentality that is deeply rooted within the American mindset, and exploring AOC's proposal within this context might help explain the strong response to it.

Initial reactions to the 'Green New Deal' from both the Left and Right - within the population generally and politicians particularly - has involved mostly ridicule, exasperation, scorn and dramatic condemnation (complete with hamburgers). At least one of the reasons for this was the fact that a summary of the GND (that has since been deleted from AOC's website after it was widely mocked on social media) called for economic security for everyone (even those "unwilling to work") and said air travel should be eliminated along with "farting cows." These depictions are, of course, not representative of the whole resolution, and it's possible that the outrageous summary was the work of a 'saboteur' or written up by an ideologically possessed devotee. But even after the full 'official' text was released, the response was, let's say, underwhelming, and while the proposal has its steadfast supporters (primarily among those who sponsored it), it seems that the vast majority of Americans are against it, and for good reason.

While the text does detail a few theoretically good ideas, like supporting family farms, clean water, respecting indigenous lands and treaties and reducing fossil fuel consumption to mitigate the health hazards from environmental pollution, the fine print contains all manner of objectively implausible, unrealistic or unnecessary ideas that tarnish the entire document. Basically, any 'good' is vastly outweighed by the very much ideologically-driven bad ideas. Some examples include the creation of high-speed railways, updating every building in the US within 10 years to meet new 'green' energy standards, ensuring that 100% of power comes from zero-emission energy sources, and so on. Perhaps worst of all is the fact that, underpinning the proposal is the creation of a new economy through massive government expansion.

Ideology

The document's proposals for revamping infrastructure and manufacturing, creating jobs and rolling out new transportation networks are clearly based on 'green solutions' that are fueled by identity politics. The proposal draws on the urgency of global disaster via man-made climate change to attract supporters, and bizarrely claims that climate change has "exacerbated systemic racial injustices". Ocasio-Cortez herself has stated that "the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change".

If it were to become law, the GND would usher a dramatic expansion of an already massive welfare state using 'vulnerable populations' as a means of increasing centralized power and control. This is another underlying theme in the deal. Under the GND, all new jobs, project work, contractual work, etc. would be prioritized for the "disenfranchised" i.e. persons of color, minorities, women, homosexuals, etc. In this way, the GND favors divisive group identity designations over competence.

In a time when people on the Right are being depicted as subhuman and lacking any intelligence or humanity, it's not difficult to imagine that broad-scale and selective social changes like the GND could make an already bad situation in the USA worse. Imposing a country-wide and radically new system onto a society in a very short period of time generally does not work (unless you're starting from scratch... or looking to collapse a system). One of the greater evils of the anglo-Saxon world in the modern era has been to push the 'Western way' onto foreign nations that have their own history of development, functionality, and symbiosis. We've seen what happens as a result (think Iraq, Libya, Syria etc.). Some may see it as 'karma' that such a policy would eventually be forced on 'the home nation', but that doesn't stop it from being a very bad idea, especially given the current political climate in the USA.

Practicality

Question: how do you make every building (business and residential properties) in America 'green'? Answer: with vast amounts of money, taxpayer's money. Question: how exactly will forcing all existing buildings to 'go green' create jobs when the new 'green industry' will obviously supplant existing industries? The authors of the GND claim that it will create jobs with benefits such as paid leave, paid vacations and retirement security, yet they also claim that, under the GND, it will be necessary to provide targeted programs for state-funded housing, health care and food. How productive will these guaranteed jobs really be when the government will have to provide hand-outs that the supposed new jobs should pay for? It's something of an axiom that the US government is extremely fiscally inefficient, particularly in the way it employs far too many people (currently about 2 million civilian workers). How much more inefficient would government become under the GND, which requires the creation of 13 million new government jobs for the 4% of Americans who are unemployed? An industrious and hard work ethic has long been a part of the 'American way'. Many Americans regard this as fundamental to the American spirit. The Green New Deal seems to want to crush this.

High-speed rail in the United States

Most Americans want to see better roads, better bridges and better infrastructure in general. But that's not what the GND promises. California is proof that America is nowhere near ready to implement a high-speed rail network on a country-wide scale. The sunshine state recently gave up trying to create its own high-speed rail network, with the governor (who is a fully paid-up believer in the Globalist Green Agenda) stating that the program is out of control with costs ballooning to $77 billion. A scaled-down version of the project envisions finishing a line that is 171 miles long linking just the Bay Area. And the estimated date of completion? 2027.

High-speed train networks just don't make sense given the country's geography and distribution of population density, among other factors. Hardly anyone uses the railways for travel and everything is structured around air or car travel. Americans do love their cars, but there is also a practical issue here regarding how towns, cities, etc. were laid out many decades ago.

The people behind the GND want to expand this program throughout the country and use the state to essentially ban the use of cars for travel. Whatever happened to the much-touted 'land of liberty'?

Conclusion

One study found that the cost for the GND will be somewhere in the range of $94.4 trillion, or over $600,000 per household. From the study:
"The American Action Forum calculated guaranteed green housing would cost between $1.6 trillion and $4.2 trillion; a federal jobs guarantee between $6.8 trillion and $44.6 trillion; a net zero emissions transportation system between $1.3 trillion and $2.7 trillion; a low-carbon electricity grid for $5.4 trillion; and "food security" for $1.5 billion."

Enough high-speed rail "to make air travel unnecessary," would cost roughly $1.1 to $2.5 trillion. Universal Health Care, or a Medicare-for-all type plan, would cost $36 trillion over 10 years, totaling $260,000 per household in the United States."
Put simply, the GND is an ideologically-driven scheme hatched by a bunch of virtue-signaling pseudo-intellectuals who have no idea how the country actually functions.

That there is such a strong reaction from Americans to this proposed overhaul of the 'American way of life' is just one reason why the GND should be panned. It's not like we're talking about any real solutions to real problems here. When a government overrules the majority view on issues that directly relate to their private lives, it's always a bad idea. Americans have their particular way of doing things, just like any other nation, and nothing good can come from the radical reshaping of existing social norms in an effort to steer an entire population in a direction it apparently does not want to go.

Yes, Americans are already steered and controlled - again, just as any other people - but the fundamental human psychological need for the stability of social structures remains the same across the board. Injecting instability into an already hystericized population is madness.

This resolution seeks to give the government vastly increased power to interfere in the private lives of its citizens. For a majority of Americans, the government is already too big, and interferes too much in their lives. That is the number one problem that so many Americans have with this resolution. People reject it because they already know the essence of what it would entail if implemented. At best it would tax the hell out of its citizens in order to pay for initiatives that have no guarantee of making life better for anyone, or cutting pollution (quite the opposite). At worst it would ignite unprecedented global conflict as the US government would be forced to engage in new aggressive wars of foreign intervention to secure access to the raw materials required to 'green the entire economy'.

Improve US infrastructure? We're all for it. But creating an even bigger government that will have greater control over the private lives of its citizens while presenting them with a worse deal is not what we want, and if that means not being 'number one' in modernity and 'progressiveness', then so be it.