The Cost of Not Planning for the Future

THE COST OF NOT PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Monetary Sovereignty, Inflation Prevention, and Fifty Years of Missed Opportunities
A proposed framework for long-term federal economic policy

I. The Telescope We Didn’t Build
In December 1972, Apollo 17 departed the Moon. The United States had accomplished one of the most remarkable technological achievements in human history. It had developed the rockets, navigation systems, communications, materials, computers, and human expertise necessary to send astronauts nearly a quarter-million miles from Earth and return them safely.

Then it stopped sending people to the Moon. The technological challenges hadn’t suddenly become insurmountable. The financial challenges easily could have been met. But, the political priorities had changed.

The Apollo program was motivated substantially by competition with the Soviet Union. Once its central political objective had been achieved, continued lunar exploration lost much of its urgency.

This decision didn’t terminate American space exploration. NASA continued remarkable robotic missions, planetary exploration, and astronomical research. The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, among many other achievements, demonstrate the continuing value of publicly financed science.

But, the decision not to maintain a sustained human lunar program interrupted the development of capabilities that might otherwise have advanced for another half-century. We never will know what we have lost.

Consider the possibility of a radio telescope on the Moon’s far side. Earth’s ionosphere blocks many extremely long radio wavelengths from reaching terrestrial telescopes. The Moon’s far side offers an additional advantage: protection from much of Earth’s radio interference.

Would the moon observatory have been operating today if the United States had continued developing lunar infrastructure after Apollo? Would it have improved our lives? Would it have improved our knowledge?

What other capabilities has America failed to develop because its government has treated federal financing as a limitation? The issue extends far beyond astronomy but reaches into healthcare, energy, housing, transportation, education, agriculture, and inflation itself.

We must assume that decades of greater investment in science would have paid dividends for years. The shortsightedness of our leadership has  been astounding.

II. Monetary Sovereignty and the Meaning of Federal Affordability
The United States federal government is the sovereign issuer of the U.S. dollar. Unlike households, businesses, and state governments, it doesn’t need to obtain dollars from customers, employers, or taxpayers before spending dollars.

Federal spending, taxation, Treasury securities, and Federal Reserve operations are part of a monetary system whose ultimate dollar-denominated assets are created by the government in a 4-step process:

1. Congress proposes
2. The President  approves
3. A clerk types numbers into a computer.
4. Dollars come into existence.

This process has  no physical limits.

There are institutional constraints. But they are not like the inability of a household to create dollars.

The role of Federal Taxes
A householder may be unable to purchase a house because they can’t obtain sufficient money. By contrast, the federal government, and its monetary institutions, has the unlimited capacity to create dollar-denominated financial assets. It does not need to tax or to borrow. It merely creates dollars, as many as it needs, by pressing computer keys.

Why does the federal government collect taxes, if not to fund the government’s spending? Two primary reasons:

1. To control the economy by taxing what the government wishes to discourage and giving tax breaks to what it wishes to reward (i.e., tax loopholed for the rich.)
2. To assure demand for the U.S.  dollar by requiring that taxes be paid in dollars.

Federal taxation transfers purchasing power from the economy. Taxation reduces Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, and so, is recessive.

Today’s federal tax laws widen the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest. In short, our federal tax laws were designed by the rich and powerful to make the rich richer and the rest poorer.

The federal government could continue spending indefinitely and still never need to collect another penny in taxes. Federal affordability shouldn’t be analyzed as though the government were an unusually large household. There is no financial reason for Social Security and Medicare to be insolvent. There is no financial reason why the poverty is inevitable. Only the rich want it that way because of Gap Psychology. 

The crucial question isn’t simply whether the government has enough dollars. It is whether the nation has, or can develop, the real resources necessary to accomplish its objectives. Those resources include labor, materials, energy, land, technological knowledge, shipping, productive equipment, and organizational competence.

Dollars can be created instantly, but they instantly can’t create trained physicians, copper mines, housing, roads or electrical generating stations. With careful planning, federal spending can finance the training, research, construction, and investment that increase those resources.

The role of Treasury securities:

1. Provide dollar holders with safe storage for unused dollar-denominated financial assets and
2. Help the Federal Reserve control interest rates by providing a “floor” rate.

A government issuing liabilities in its own floating currency doesn’t face the involuntary nominal insolvency risk of a household or business. Its principal long-term concerns include inflation, productive capacity, exchange-rate consequences,  the effectiveness of its institutions, and above all, politics and voter ignorance.

The danger of confusing financial and physical limits
If every qualified construction worker were already employed and essential materials were scarce, additional spending may initially increase construction prices rather than housing production.

But, the United States has unemployed construction workers, available building materials, suitable land, and a severe shortage of affordable housing. If the government refuses to finance construction solely because doing so would increase the reported deficit, the financial constraint may prevent the use of otherwise available real resources.

The result: fewer homes, higher rents, and reduced living standards.

These circumstances would require different policies.

A government effort focused primarily on deficit totals may fail to distinguish between them. A resource-based framework must distinguish between them.

III. Inflation: A Problem to Anticipate, Not Merely Suppress
Inflation is a sustained increase in the general price level. History shows that inflation is not, as often claimed, “too much money chasing too few goods,” but simply, too few goods (and services). Major historical inflationary episodes generally have involved shortages of goods, services, or productive capacity.

This observation has a profound policy implication. If insufficient supply causes inflation, increasing supply should be an anti-inflationary policy. Yet public discussion frequently emphasizes reducing demand,

The standard response to inflation often includes higher interest rates, reduced fiscal stimulus, or restrictions on public expenditure, i.e. the infamous austerity that  has destroyed many economies.

These policies can reduce price pressures by slowing spending and recessing the economy. But they don’t eliminate the underlying shortages. Higher interest rates don’t produce additional electricity; they don’t train physicians; they don’t manufacture semiconductors or construct affordable housing.

Indeed, by increasing financing costs, higher interest rates can discourage investment in the productive capacity needed to prevent future inflation.

While demand suppression is recessive, supply expansion grows the economy. Which is preferable?

Austerity can impose substantial opportunity costs without producing an actual recession. And when governments decline productive investments because of supposed financial limitations, those costs can accumulate for generations. The most expensive government decision may be the investment it never made.

Demand suppression: The cost of research is visible and one of the first things to be cut. The cost of failing to conduct research is largely invisible.

An appropriation of $10 billion appears in the federal budget. The medical discoveries, technologies, productivity improvements, and scientific breakthroughs that might have resulted from an appropriation never made appear nowhere.

The same applies to preventive investments. We see the dollars spent building electrical capacity. We don’t see the factories that never opened because electricity was insufficient.

There’s an additional problem: The less research we conduct, the less we know about what we’ve lost. Ignorance conceals its own cost. Sadly, the U.S. government deplores the cost of action but ignores the cost of inaction.

The critical distinction: short-run and long-run effects
Targeted federal investment may initially increase demand for labor, equipment, and materials. Its capacity-expanding benefits may arrive months or years later. Therefore, spending intended to reduce future inflation can temporarily increase current inflationary pressure.

This isn’t a contradiction. It is a timing reality. Investment always precedes results. That creates a political bias against investment. The expenditure is immediate, visible, and measurable. The potential benefit is future, uncertain, and often invisible.

If we wait until shortages cause inflation before investing in additional supply, we already have waited too long to prevent that inflation. We need to distinguish between the cost of investing too early, the cost of investing too late, and the potentially much greater cost of not investing.

The future must be financed before it can be built. That is precisely why anticipatory planning and apending matters.

A politician might brag, “I cut federal debt,” but unlike personal debt, federal debt can be an economic benefit and isn’t a burden on anyone—not the government, not taxpayers, not anyone. You’d never guess that from these headlines.

IV. What America’s Inflationary History Suggests
A useful evaluation begins with the major inflationary episodes since World War II.

1946–1948: Postwar reconversion: During World War II, American production focused on military needs. After the war, factories needed time to shift from wartime to civilian production, and price controls were lifted. The inflation that followed was due to the delay in addressing the shortages of civilian goods. Once the scarcity was resolved, inflation eased.

Earlier planning for civilian reconversion could have reduced inflation. A coordinated transition program to  accelerate the production of housing, automobiles, appliances, and other consumer goods could have reduced inflation without the need for recession. The relevant research question is how much additional civilian supply could realistically have been available, and when.

1965–1969: Vietnam, domestic expansion, and capacity pressures
War requirements increased federal purchases of military goods and services and absorbed a growing share of available productive resources. Unemployment declined, leaving employers with a smaller pool of available workers. Inflation accelerated with limitations on labor and productive capacity.

Earlier investments in industrial capacity, workforce training, productivity, and infrastructure could have reduced scarcity.

1973–1975 and 1979–1981: Energy disruptions
The oil shocks of the 1970s offer particularly strong examples of supply-related inflation. Higher petroleum prices affected transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, heating, and countless other activities.

Because energy is an input into so many products and services, its price increases spread throughout the economy. Higher interest rates could restrain demand, but they couldn’t directly increase the global oil supply, and the interest itself became part of inflation.

Long-term investment in energy efficiency, alternative energy sources (currently being cut), electricity generation, storage, and transportation systems might have reduced American vulnerability to oil disruptions. The question isn’t whether the government could have prevented international political events. It is whether the United States should have made its economy less vulnerable to those shortages.

1990–1991: Another oil shock
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait disrupted global oil markets and contributed to a sharp increase in petroleum prices. The episode illustrates the continuing vulnerability of an economy heavily dependent on particular energy sources and supply chains. Earlier investments in diversification and efficiency could have reduced exposure.

2021–2022: Pandemic inflation
The pandemic produced an unusually complicated combination of supply shocks. Factory closures, shipping disruptions, labor shortages, semiconductor constraints, and changes in consumption patterns limited supply.

Federal fiscal assistance supported household income and purchasing power. The episode demonstrates the importance of economic resilience. Earlier investment in domestic semiconductor capacity, public health preparedness, port infrastructure, medical supplies, and diversified manufacturing could have reduced inflation.

Shortages, supply disruptions, and limitations on productive capacity repeatedly have played major roles in inflation. Anticipatory investment could have reduced those constraints before inflation emerged. That question should become a central subject of federal economic research.

V. The Ten-Year Shortage Forecast
A government that waits for shortages to appear has already surrendered much of its ability to prevent them. Building power plants, expanding electrical transmission, training physicians, constructing housing, and developing new technologies all require time.

Some investments require a decade or more before their full benefits become available. Consequently, an effective inflation-prevention strategy must forecast future supply and demand.

The United States already possesses many institutions capable of contributing to this task. The Energy Information Administration forecasts energy markets. The Department of Agriculture studies agricultural production. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment and occupational demand. The U.S. Geological Survey monitors mineral resources.

The Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Department of Health and Human Services possess additional relevant expertise.

The problem is not a complete absence of forecasting. It is the absence of a sufficiently integrated national forecasting system that converts forecasts of future shortages into coordinated preventive investment.

Proposed institution: The National Supply and Inflation Prevention Council
Congress should establish a permanent, independently evaluated institution charged with identifying future shortages. Its responsibilities would include:

1. Publishing five-, ten-, and twenty-year forecasts of essential supply and demand.
2. Identifying bottlenecks likely to produce significant price increases or public hardship.
3. Estimating the investments needed to expand capacity.
4. Comparing federal investment with regulatory reforms, private investment, and other alternatives.
5. Monitoring progress toward measurable capacity targets.
6. Publishing independent evaluations of inflation-prevention outcomes.

Its forecasts should be publicly available, with uncertainty ranges and clearly stated assumptions. Its purpose would not be to predict the future perfectly. It would be to identify foreseeable shortage risks early enough that prevention remains possible.

VI. Priority Areas for Federal Investment

A. Energy
Energy is an input into nearly every economic activity. Electricity demand is growing, including demand associated with data centers, electrification, and industrial activity.

A comprehensive federal strategy should support generating capacity, transmission, storage, nuclear energy, renewable energy, grid resilience, and research into improved technologies.

It should also finance workforce training and manufacturing capacity needed to build those systems. The objective should be to increase reliable energy availability at sustainable real costs while accounting for environmental consequences.

B. Housing
Housing shortages can produce persistent rent and home-price pressures. Federal investment could support infrastructure, affordable housing construction, factory-built housing, construction productivity, and workforce development.

Spending alone cannot solve shortages caused by restrictive zoning, permitting delays, or unavailable land. Federal financing should therefore be coordinated with state and local reforms.

The principal measures should be additional completed and occupied homes, affordability relative to incomes, construction productivity, and changes in rents.

C. Healthcare
Healthcare capacity depends heavily on trained personnel. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a possible shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. Training a physician takes many years.

Waiting until shortages become severe is a poor strategy. Federal investment should support medical education, residency positions, nursing programs, clinical training, and healthcare facilities where shortages are documented.

It should also support R&D for productivity improvements that increase access without compromising quality. The objective should be adequate medical services, not merely additional spending on healthcare.

D. Food and agriculture
Food production faces risks from weather, water availability, energy costs, soil conditions, disease, and transportation disruptions. Preventive investment should support agricultural research, crop resilience, irrigation efficiency, fertilizer innovation, storage, and distribution.

Federal research can also develop technologies that reduce the resources required to produce a given quantity of food. The relevant measure is not simply acreage planted. It is the dependable availability of nutritious food at sustainable costs.

E. Water
Regional water shortages can constrain agriculture, housing, industry, and population growth. Investment should support water recycling, leak reduction, efficient irrigation, infrastructure maintenance, and regionally appropriate supply expansion like desalinization. 

Water planning must account for environmental sustainability and the physical limits of local watersheds.

F. Critical minerals and industrial capacity
Modern manufacturing depends on materials whose supply chains may be geographically concentrated. Federal policy should support processing, recycling, substitute materials, strategic inventories, and diversified sources. The objective is not necessarily complete domestic self-sufficiency. It is resilience against disruptions that could interrupt essential production.

G. Research and development
Research is the most difficult investment category to evaluate because its eventual benefits are uncertain. Yet scientific discoveries can create entirely new productive possibilities. 

Artificial intelligence illustrates how accumulated research, computing capacity, investment, and engineering can produce rapid technological change.

Federal research spending should support basic science, applied research, experimental technologies, and public-interest discoveries whose benefits may not be immediately profitable to private investors. Lunar radio astronomy belongs in this category. Its direct effect on consumer-price inflation wouldn’t be obvious. But its scientific value could be enormous.

That distinction matters: Not every worthwhile federal investment needs to justify itself as an anti-inflation measure.

VII. Why Long-Term Planning Is Politically Difficult
The benefits of preventive investment frequently arrive long after the politicians authorizing it have left office. Its costs appear immediately in federal budgets. Its successes may be nearly invisible. If a shortage never develops, voters seldom realize that an earlier investment prevented it.

By contrast, an emergency shortage creates visible political pressure for immediate action. This produces an asymmetry. Preventive spending is easy to criticize because its benefits are uncertain and delayed. Emergency spending is easier to justify because the problem is already visible.

The same pattern appears in disaster preparedness, public health, infrastructure maintenance, and national security. A successful anticipatory investment system must overcome this political incentive.

Possible institutional remedies include multiyear authorizations, independent forecasting, publicly reported capacity targets, and regular congressional evaluations. Long-term planning should be protected from arbitrary interruption without becoming immune to democratic oversight.

In a future paper, we will discuss costs, methods, priorities, and results.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Source: https://mythfighter.com/2026/11/03/the-cost-of-not-planning-for-the-future/