It’s the Numbers Stupid!
- Lindsey Grant
- September 19, 2003
- Forum Papers
- Forum Paper
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In 1992, Candidate Bill Clinton’s election campaign manager is said to have tacked a paper to the
bulletin board with the slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid!” I will borrow that blunt but effective message for this paper. From coast to coast, crowding has become a central issue at the local level, but — almost universally — the issue is argued without any recognition of the force that drives it: national population growth, which in turn is driven by immigration and by the high fertility of many of the immigrants. Only Congress can get at the fundamental cause of the crowding. The unhappy victims of crowding should direct their fire, not at their neighbors but at Congress.
Lindsey Grant is a retired Foreign Service Officer; he was a China specialist and served as Director of the Office of Asian Communist Affairs, National Security Council staff member, and Department of State policy Planning staff member. As Deputy Secretary of State for Environmental and Population Affairs, he was Department of State coordinator for the Global 2000 Report to the President, Chairman of the interagency committee on Int’l Environmental Committee and US member of the UN ECE Committee of Experts on the Environment. His books include: Too Many People, Juggernaut, The Horseman and the Bureaucrat, Elephants in Volkswagen, How Many Americans?