aqouta
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User ID: 75
People are registering their strong beliefs so I'll make a notch to register that I have no strong idea here. People from the future coming back to paint the motte as strongly and wrongly being overconfident one way or the other I am your bane. It seems hard to predict how this will shake out from the smattering of evidence we have.
aqouta
27d ago
Then I guess it cannot, even in principle, be done so I would like to not hear about it as a problem and we shouldn't bonk down norms in order to fail to solve it.
aqouta
27d ago
Just inflate the debt away to virtually nothing, swap to a Gold and/or Bitcoin standard, and keep rolling.
Ok so you want to default on the debt and then switch to a hard currency that would make doing this again impossible and thus you'd have to have higher taxes because you cannot deficit spend. This is a very silly plan.
And I am not joking. I live in Florida. We have no income tax. We have no estate/gift tax, we have comparatively low property taxes. And we're discussing getting rid of the property taxes altogether. Most revenue is sales tax.
Well yes, your state is where a tremendous amount of those social security and Medicare dollars are being funneled to from younger states to retirees. florida is the fifth oldest state
aqouta
27d ago
So why don't we take your plan to it's obvious logical conclusion, say "who cares about the debt" and just stop collecting taxes all together?
aqouta
27d ago
It looks like tax revenues were stagnant until the Trump tax cuts
Tax receipts were stagnant until Q3 2020 nearly 3 years after the tax cuts and GDP growth was steady the whole time. If the tax cuts increased revenues I'd expect GDP to accelerate after the cuts and the tax revenue to track it. I think you're vastly underestimating what exactly it would take for the tax cuts to actually pay for themselves, it's an incredible claim. When you make a nonnegligible cut to taxes you need an immense about of increased total economic activity to happen to offset that. The effect would have to be tremendous. It would show up on the GDP chart and it doesn't.
aqouta
27d ago
Europe's problem is strangulating regulation. I should note that I don't love taxes and prefer they be low. My only point is that you can't forgo tax revenue and then bemoan the national debt. You pay for the debt with taxes.
aqouta
27d ago
You don't have to actually cut entitlements at all. You can just raise taxes and use that money to pay down the debt(or at least close the deficit so you aren't creating more debt). The guy in the the white house can make that call. My point is we're currently breaking eggs and receiving no omelet.
aqouta
27d ago
It is not clear to me that this is absurd, given that revenues rose after the cuts were initially enacted.
revenue was already trending up due to a market boom. Classic economics would say that you should pay down your debts during a market boom, but we opted to run the market even hotter. An argument can be made for this, but not one that pretends to be concerned with government debt load. but this is a slightly different question. It would probably be helpful to look at an actual chart of US tax receipts and a chart of US GDP around the time of the DJT tax cuts(Jan 1 2018) you can see that GDP continue to trend up and the tax receipts stayed stagnant. The GDP trend really doesn't seem to react much if at all to the tax cuts indicating we're not really touching that laffer curve at all.
You're expressing a high degree of confidence that tax hikes won't negatively impact the economy. Why?
Tax hikes do slow the economy, no one really contests that. The question is does it slow it down so much that they actually lower tax receipts, which just there is no real indication of this happening and places with much higher taxes don't really even see this happening. The laffer curve is a theoretical thing and there is no reason to believe we're on the edge of it.
aqouta
27d ago
There are many more factors that go into tax receipts than just the tax rate. The economy itself was booming, a trend that predated the tax cuts, and inflation juiced the nominal rate. The straightforward reduction in revenue is that we would have collected substantially more revenue without the cuts to the tune of trillions of dollars.
aqouta
27d ago
Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue. No it is absurd to suggest we are on the side of the Laffer curve where higher taxes would reduce total tax revenue, we're not even close to that point and no one seriously suggests we are. They are not justified as a means to maximize tax revenue, only on the grounds that people like to have more money and they will if they are taxed less. A position I think is reasonable but it's at direct odds with a desire to pay off the national debt. If we're serious about paying down the national debt we have to raise taxes and there is no real alternative, even if you cut entitlements to the bone.
aqouta
27d ago
The position I'm responding to is that Trump cracking a few eggs of norms is worth it if that's what it takes to get the debt under control I'm pointing out that we're getting eggs cracked and the debt is not being taken under control. I'm sure we could have some debate about how best to get the debt under control, I agree some reductions in entitlements, particularly the absurd wealth transfer from the young to the old that is medicare and to a slightly less absurd degree social security come to mind. But as far as I can tell we have a bunch of cracked eggs and rather than a balanced budget omelet we have nothing to show for it. Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.
Or, alternatively, explain to the various taxpayers why THEY should be on the hook for programs they generally don't receive a direct benefit from.
I would like the extra costs to be put towards paying down the debt, having a lower debt burden is in fact a way us tax payers are benefiting.
aqouta
27d ago
The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.
Ok but Trump is not addressing the debt crisis, he's giving tax breaks that far exceed any cuts and hamstrining our industries with hare brained tariff schemes while demonstrating no understand of economics whatsoever. The old ways made us the richest nation earth has ever seen. I certainly favor some reforms, and even some stuff the Trump admin has done, but if your overriding concern is the budget then Trump is not using his smashing of norms to actually address that.
aqouta
29d ago
Yes, I don't go down the rabbit hole of porn either and keep my alcohol tastes to mid shelf stuff for the same reason.
aqouta
29d ago
I've never heard anyone here make an actual argument against transgenderism.
People do this all the time, I don't know why you would say this with a straight face. There are lots of arguments, like that the belief that someone can be a gender other than the one associated with their birth(if this formulation of gender as separate to physical sex is even reasonable) is entirely unfalsifiable even to the person supposedly experiencing it. If there isn't one single argument against "transgenderism" it's because there are something like at minimum two and probably more like a dozen different entirely incompatible ideas of what the transgender phenomenon is under the trench coat of the trans movement. Is being trans synonymous with experiencing gender dysphoria(a thing itself with myriad definitions) or is it a purely social, you're trans if you like to wear the opposite gender's traditional garb?
If I didn't know you had in fact participated in past debates on this site on this subject I might think you had just somehow managed to not stumble upon those threads but no, you have and are either experiencing extreme amnesia or are lying.
aqouta
29d ago
When you get really into porn degeneration you start wanting more and more specific stuff. It's like any connoisseur, you're satisfied with slop and don't even have to words to describe the notes of different fetishes involved. Yes, yes, pornoisseur could get an orgasm with your 2000s era stuff, and the wine connoisseur could get drunk off the swill they serve at college bars but they're chasing a more refined pallet. They're trying to recreate the wonder and discovery of when they first snuck into their dad's office while he was away and typed 'S-E-X' into google and were forever changed.
aqouta
29d ago
I did my AML training recently if you're making either 10k+ payments or "structuring" by making many smaller payments you will set off some alarm eventually, especially if it's new behavior. Another part of AML training is no one is supposed to tell you if you set off this alarm.
https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1
Was not ready for text to speech to read out the username in this url
aqouta
1mo ago
I don't know if you have experience actually working in tech but the "rapid revenue acceleration" is ringing some alarm bells and even you article doesn't really support the pessimism in these comments, mostly it's saying if you just give chat bots to your front line workers it isn't driving huge growth, which I mean sure.
How companies adopt AI is crucial. Purchasing AI tools from specialized vendors and building partnerships succeed about 67% of the time, while internal builds succeed only one-third as often.
Yeah, especially if you want this thing to be "rapid" that'll be the case. My team is building some AI tooling into workflows and it is a time intensive process. And I can't stress enough that we're not expecting them to hugely scale revenue, we're expecting them to reduce costs through labor savings which your article just isn't about. It's a totally wrong measure.
aqouta
1mo ago
I mean there are philosophical arguments that can be made, and I'm sure people will make them. But there is also the cold hard economic argument to be made that a population collapse means a whole lot of old people in your cohort are going to die slowly alone in pools of their own waste.
aqouta
1mo ago
"Mauritanians could be here" he thought, "I've never been on this island before. There could be Mauritanians anywhere." Made in the USA reverberated his entire airbase, making it pulsate even as the $9 Billion subsidy circulated through his powerful thick military budget and washed away his (merited) fear of soviet aligned countries. "With bombs you can drop them anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.
aqouta
1mo ago
I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.
I understand this is a common fear and I'm supposed to identify the doctor as some kind of monster for being insufficiently respectful of the likely dead. But, like, they're not chomping at the bit for those organs because they want to turn a profit, they need them to save other people's lives. I definitely do want safeguards put in place and to ensure the false positive rate is very very low and am in no way saying we should take healthy people's organs in some kind of utilitarian maximizing nightmare world. But sometimes the cynicism in this type of post rubs me the wrong way. We should all want the same thing here.
aqouta
1mo ago
I find this a little strange. Yes, rote memorization is a good idea. But every time I see someone criticize the common core methods it just seems like how I naturally learned to think about numbers? You definitely can truncate most of the steps, the point is spelling it all out. People will say the squares are pointless when you can just carry the one, but the whole point of the squares is to show how carrying the one works mechanically and how it works the same way with multiplication .
aqouta
1mo ago
Not allowing edits would be an extreme form of discrimination against my human right to correct egregious typos.
aqouta
1mo ago
Sure, there are definitely bits and jokes to be told about biden. It's just a lot easier for something like the onion to do so in a headline with a couple paragraphs of puns. Southpark has to commit more to bits, most episodes have something like two plot lines going on and unless they're devoting one to presidential politics it's not super easy to just have a scene where the president is doing something. Family guy with it's reference thing can do that but south park is more situational humor so you need to devote like a whole b-plot to the president, and that's a harder sell for Biden than Trump.
This is Whig history. Even your positions contradict themselves.
It was the establishment that pushed trans in sports and female equality and now as the tide turns it is the establishment that seems to be coming around to opposing it. What then should we learn from your proposed righteous arc of history? Which establishment can we assume at the Walters? This is an acid that dissolves itself.
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