Technology Can Fix the Budget Crisis, Say Former FCC Officials

A pair of Clinton-era telecom regulators and “card-carrying Democrats” want to bring back some of the economic magic of the go-go 1990s with an ambitious plan to accelerate growth, shrink the national debt while revolutionizing the delivery of government services, and help slow global warming.

The plan from former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt and his former chief of staff, Blair Levin, is outlined in an e-book called The Politics of Abundance: How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream, and Establish Obama’s Legacy. It modestly proposes that huge economic growth can be spurred through reconfiguring the way energy is produced, purchased, and consumed. At the same time, the government can generate new efficiencies and savings using broadband applications in health care and education. All it’s going to take is a grand bargain between Republicans and Democrats in which revenue from a big new emissions tax that targets energy generated by nonrenewable sources and from utility regulation reform is swapped for lower personal and corporate tax rates and a reduction in taxes U.S.-based multinationals pay on repatriated foreign profits. It sounds like a pipe dream, but Hundt and Levin think it’s possible. “We did not put one thing in that we thought Republicans would overwhelmingly oppose,” Hundt said at the Hudson Institute in Washington. The two are shopping their plan to policymakers, lobbyists, industry leaders, and think tankers.