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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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During the conversation on X between Musk and Trump, they floated the idea of Musk leading a 'government cutting commission' or basically a setup where Musk would come in and cut the fat from the government.

This idea fascinates me, and while I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons it may be terrible, I fear that financially the U.S. may need to do something dramatic like this in order to get the debt under control, etc etc. Also I, along with many other mottizens, am just pretty bearish on the efficacy of most government. Especially federal officials.

The question for me is - how would this work? Which areas do you think would get cut the most? (education was mentioned here specifically) Which areas are critical and should remain mostly untouched? (post office?)

On top of that, if this were to happen, what would be the primary blockers? Do you think Elon is the right man for the job without political connections? Are there ways in which the President can be prevented from firing large swathes of the federal admin? Potential disasters that could happen if critical employees are in fact fired?

Samo Burja floats a simple idea inspired by Musk's Twitter takeover: Fire 80%, hire back 10%:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dg_bQcswbeM?si=k0QiBLWgyM47iMVr&t=299

There's more detailed discussion in that podcast, but to give my layman take:

Potential disasters that could happen if critical employees are in fact fired?

After the initial twitter purge there were fires to put out, but it seems rehiring back the 10% that revealed themselves to be load-bearing was enough to keep things alive, basically as they were before. Perhaps a critical employee would refuse out of spite and take their severance, but I'd guess that sort of person has a lot of overlap with the sort of person who was wasting space/actively harmful anyways.

Do you think Elon is the right man for the job without political connections?

No, running a tech firms is simpler & requires less political savvy. But he provides the model. I've spoken about this to liberals/centrists who'd normally dismiss me as a libertarian nutjob for wanting to gut the FDA, but being able to point to X at least provides a salient real-life example of the sky not falling. Maybe Musk could spearhead it somehow, he seems to have learned the friend/enemy rule of politics & can bring visibility to this strategy.

The right man for each job remains important: Elon probably tanked Twitter's stock value, whether X is better than Twitter is a matter of taste. He cared more about his free-speech agenda, which is what we got. There's no libertarian panacea where you gut an institution and things just become better off naturally, and the wrong person with the wrong priorities might keep all the wrong people.

The right man for the job is, of course, Peter Thiel. Or people in that network, perhaps there's a shadowy cabal of live players assembled around Samo Burja's "Analysis" firm. Or more realistically, the sort of disgruntled ex-FDA-insiders you might hear on a tech-right podcast:

https://www.fromthenew.world/p/richard-bruns-inside-the-fda

I say "tech-right" not to be partisan, more to describe this: people with the autism to know and care what actually works (like EAs), but enough cynicism & familiarity with how institutions work to not be eaten alive immediately (like the OpenAI fiasco).

Thinking a few thousand people from a little internet bubble I know about would ever get near the halls of power seemed like a childish/schitzo pipe-dream, maybe it is. But after the JD Vance pick, things look a bit different.

There's no libertarian panacea where you gut an institution and things just become better off naturally

However, personnel are policy. A lot of the more destructive bureaucratic policies come from (and are enabled by) having too many people, and they get auto-immune diseases just like activist organizations do as the incentives for both are the same (where they have to become more extreme to justify themselves/their budgets).

and the wrong person with the wrong priorities might keep all the wrong people.

Which is why purges of those offices are, traditionally, near-total. While it's true that an office full of wrong people if purged will still remain mostly composed of wrong people afterwards, it takes a much smaller amount of right people to prevent wrongness from being tolerated in the organization (it's easier to get to 50/50 right/wrong when there are only 10 right people to find vs. needing 100 or 1000 to balance them out- the purpose of reviving 10% of the organization afterwards is to figure out who the John Galts were, and John Galts tend to be right by virtue of being John Galt anyway- it's the human equivalent of the "if you don't know what a system does, turn it off and see who starts screaming" tech cost-cutting practice). Offices do still tend into wrongness over time if not properly managed (Conquest's Second Law: any organization not devoted to being right becomes wrong over time), but a small office is still easier to reform than a large one.

people with the autism to know and care what actually works (like EAs), but enough cynicism & familiarity with how institutions work to not be eaten alive immediately

I think you can just call them "men" (different from "boys" who only have the autism, and are unable or unwilling to defend the power their works leak; the 20th century, great as it was, is more or less defined by this childishness).

I think you can just call them "men" (different from "boys" who only have the autism, and are unable or unwilling to defend the power their works leak; the 20th century, great as it was, is more or less defined by this childishness).

Ty, I will use this. I've argued before that if autism is an "extreme case of the male brain", and on-the-spectrum just means "kind of autistic", then isn't on-the-spectrum just... male? But someone wrote a piece debunking the extreme male brain theory, since instead of the high-T male traits that theory predicts, autists show lower-T traits, more likely play video games and dress-up... This all makes sense.

Still, my point stands: where are the maximum-T great men? Playing it safe, getting high in Austin, defending their irrelevant works. It's going to take at least some boyish idealism to want to tilt at the windmills of the US government. I predict more of this in our future.

Not quite the same thing, but lots of states- both red and blue- have sunset commissions to review regulations and programs after a certain amount of time. I’d imagine a government cutting commission, in practice, would look a lot like that.

I think this approach would work much better on an ongoing basis simply because it’s not just a question of whether or not an agency is “doing its job”, but also whether or not it’s a job that we need to have done at the federal (or state) level. Some things are obviously federal-scope issues that cannot be localized to the state or local level because a uniform approach would ease commerce or provide interoperability standards. Having a single agency deciding the standards for weights and measures makes sense. Having one agency deciding on product labels means that companies don’t have to waste resources complying with 50 different standards. Other things are better left to states. I think states should be the ones deciding on their curriculum standards, their transportation needs, and so on. Montana is rural, and thus telling them to build high speed rail is silly.

There was a previous attempt to do this during the Reagan years. It was called the Grace Commission.The Report they generated was mostly about non-partisan ways to cut government spending. Things like saving money by using a single personnel management system (rather than unique personnel management systems for every agency). It mostly went unimplemented.

I do feel that you can get something out of trying to cut the costs of government. But the real issue is an underlying disconnect of incentives. So someone can put in a lot of effort to do all the cost fixing, and then a decade later its like they basically did nothing. Because no one in government fundamentally cares about saving money.

how would this work?

In a perfect world? Some third-party group (or, ideally, groups) with a lot of credibility provides review of spending by target and by effectiveness and by necessity of underlying goal, which Congress analyzes seriously, and implements in the next budget with enough detail to have a serious result, after which the President faithfully implements it.

In a merely-ridiculously implausible one, rather than pigs-flying-and-hell-freezing-over one? Someone points to Bad Departments, and the President just refuses to spend money wherever he feels like it and doesn't have an active contract already implemented, while prohibiting those in the agency from signing new contracts or issuing new RFPs. And probably gets Impeachment 3: Electric Boogaloo for it.

I'm... not optimistic, even on top of the issues re: Trump biting, political viability, and a thousand other problems. Anyone trying this would get absolutely wrecked politically. If you think the Washington Monument strategy is bad when the national parks service applies it, you're gonna have a Real Fun Time when the DoE starts talking about dumping low-level 'nuclear waste' somewhere. And things like federally guaranteed student loans are both a massive time bomb and also the sort of thing where trying to rip off the band aid completely screws over a third of a generation without a much better plan than anyone in federal office is able to conceive of.

Trump might still do it by accident -- he's been promoting fucking with foreign aid to incentivize foreign countries to take certain deportees -- but even if that happens it's gonna get slapped back, and the areas he cares about most are the smallest for spending.

Which areas are critical and should remain mostly untouched? (post office?)

The Post Office is actually in a weird place; it's theoretically independent and self-funded (since 1971), though there's some cash infusions for infrastructure and that make that a little fuzzy in the edges. ((Though its finances make so little sense that its advocates have spent the last decade trying to come up with justifications for tweaking its mandate into something that could justify a vast cash infusion; as it is, the entire business model depends on junk mail.))

you're gonna have a Real Fun Time when the DoE starts talking about dumping low-level 'nuclear waste' somewhere.

I don’t have the time to write a whole post about this right now, but it is not widely-enough known how much of a complete clusterfuck the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act turned into. The only reason it didn’t turn into a national crisis is the fact that low-level waste isn’t actually very dangerous. You can tell universities, laboratories, and hospitals that there is no outlet for their waste, and they will just hold onto it in random cabinets for decades with no noticeable consequences.

the entire business model depends on junk mail

Hey, don’t forget important insurance and government documents that arrive at least a week after I need to take action on them!

And the entire business model, insofar as there is one, of the telephone network is the same: doctor’s offices and scam calls.

It’s kind of remarkable how our entire communications infrastructure has collapsed into email and live chat. And our use-cases for old telecommunications wiring has been, “let’s see if we can pipe Ethernet over this.” My house has no less than three generations of telecom hookups: an old POTS box from Ma Bell, a cable hookup from the local Evil Cable Company, and now the fiber line from Remarkably Good Fiber, Inc.

Does anybody even use letters to communicate any more? The post office is like that unused POTS box attached to the side of my house, doing nothing.

I've sent letters and postcards to my friends for many years. People are usually delighted to receive mail from someone they actually know. It also makes a durable store of memory when you receive them.

Anything else interesting happen in it? I listened for a bit and after five minutes of Trump talking about how awesome he was I tuned out again.

There's a transcript here. Trump came out against nuclear power, but other than that it's about what you'd expect.

He didn’t come out against nuclear power. When he said he was worried about nuclear power, he meant it in the military sense. Musk then brought up how nuclear can be great for electricity and Trump agreed and joked it needed to be rebranded.

Trump came out against nuclear power

Damn it, can we have a single American leader with the courage to say “split baby split?”

Although my guess is his opposition to nuclear comes more from his connections to big oil and coal than to any environmental or “nuclear waste is scary” principle.

I think the above post is mistaken. Trump supported nuclear power for electricity. Was against nuclear proliferation

I'm very hesitant to accuse Trump of having any principles.

The one nice thing I have to say about Walz is that he was supposedly pro-nuclear. I'm not hugely optimistic about it a) lasting the rest of the election season or b) actually doing anything -- Walz signed a pretty big energy bill, but never actually did get rid of that nuclear moratorium -- but triumph of hope over experience yada yada.

I think there are certain things Trump believes in, particularly his general views on immigration and crime (which were mainstream to moderate for most of his adult life), his belief in infrastructure development (he was a real estate developer, after all) and his belief in American greatness/speaking loudly and carrying a machete. All of these views were once very moderate right, but the mainstream left has moved so far to the left that they appear extreme -- particularly in how they'd involve reversing progressive, uh, progress.

But I agree, when it comes to things like guns, taxes, abortion, and the culture war, Trump's stated positions are just pandering to his base. One of my major problems with Trump is that for all the ways in which he's accelerated the culture war, he isn't actually a culture warrior. He doesn't really care about the culture war, he just gestures towards it because the Republicans who do care about it are friendlier towards him than the people who don't. But his own views are extremely moderate on culture war issues, with the exception of immigration (which isn't about culture to him, it's about basic respect for the law and drug trafficking). This includes abortion. If I were a betting man, I'd say at least some of his many sexual partners have gotten abortions after being impregnated by him.

People who listened to the interview: what was the deal with Trump slurring? I've listened to highlights and...what the hell? I've never heard him sound like Daffy Duck before, though I don't consume a ton of Trump content. Were these fake clips? Was the sound quality possible on Twitter just that bad that it made it sound like he was slurring? Does he do this all the time but I've just never noticed because I normally see the visuals as well?

Most likely it’s an attempt to do in software what those fuzzy mic covers do physically, reducing the blown out sounds from things like p-sounds that are super aspirated.

But it’s probably someone’s side project and not close to perfect. I saw others posting they’ve heard the effect in other Spaces hosted on X.

This is the first good explanation I've heard.

Perhaps myasthenia gravis? I don't know, really a stab in the dark. I don't hear any signs of fatiguing through the conversation, which I would expect if there was neuromuscular deterioration. It's just hard to not have age and illness-related explanations pop to mind when we're talking about an elderly guy suddenly lisping when he's never done that before.

Alternative suggestion that I just heard that seems more likely - perhaps a dental issue.

I listened to it and didn't really notice. He came off as more casual but I wouldn't say he was slurring.

https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1823189120325439548

https://x.com/Komaniecki_R/status/1823181351316754529

There were several moments like this. I've never heard him sound like that before.

???? He sounds totally normal to me here, like he always does. Not sure what y'all are picking up on

If you've got some neck fat then a fitted shirt collar will strangle you a bit when you lean forward and look down like that. It's seen as a quasi feature since it forces you to keep your chin up.

Huh. Never thought about it like that.

During the conversation on X between Musk and Trump, they floated the idea of Musk leading a 'government cutting commission' or basically a setup where Musk would come in and cut the fat from the government.

Musk brought it up 3 times, clearly hoping to get something on the record from Trump. It was clearly central goal of Musk's even with a little mini-lecture about inflation planned. Trump dodged a solid answer at all. On the third try the most he said was "I'd love it" to the idea, but not to Musk helping.

I'm not saying it won't happen, but it sounded like a Musk idea that Trump didn't bite on, and it would completely depend on his actual administration.

I agree. I mean personally I'd hate to see it anyway because I think Musk's other companies are extremely important and someone else hopefully could cut the budget. We'll see.

I think Musk's other companies are extremely important

This is true.

and someone else hopefully could cut the budget.

This is ... I guess true, under the unlikely premise of a majority of politicians actually caring to cut the budget?

Acquiring lots of debt is super fun at the time, forgoing debt or even acquiring debt more slowly is so much less fun that stupid people call it "austerity", and actually paying back debt is almost a ludicrous idea now. We haven't repaid more than a couple percent of the federal debt in a year since the 1920s, and that was when the debt was like 3% of GDP, not 130%. If most voters were smart enough to grasp accounting identities then they'd consider the fact that debt spending in one year means debt repayment (or at least less opportunity for debt spending) in a later year, and they'd control for that when judging economic outcomes ... but they aren't, so they don't, and thus politicians have to choose between making themselves popular by making life harder for their successors or vice-versa.

Nobody wants to pick vice-versa.

Sigh. Such a terrible system. But I guess this is just the world we're in.

How would a society where this system actually worked even look?

This idea fascinates me, and while I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons it may be terrible, I fear that financially the U.S. may need to do something dramatic like this in order to get the debt under control, etc etc

What does under control mean here? It's not that long ago (late 90's) the United States has a budget surplus. Our debt to GDP ratio could also be shrinking substantially if we repealed the Bush and Trump tax cuts (i.e. went back to the tax rates we had when we had a surplus). The growth of United States debt to some unmanageable level only seems inevitable because one of the primary ways of reducing it is implicitly off the table. This asymmetry also infects US political discourse. Any new spending must justify itself with how it is going to be paid for but the same is rarely asked of tax cuts.

The question for me is - how would this work? Which areas do you think would get cut the most? (education was mentioned here specifically) Which areas are critical and should remain mostly untouched? (post office?)

Any discussion here needs to start with the actual federal budget. About 60% of which is Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Military. Cutting the DOE down to 0 would cut ~10% off the deficit. You could eliminate a solid majority of federal government departments and still not arrive at a budget surplus. Most of them are tiny relative to the size of the deficit.

On top of that, if this were to happen, what would be the primary blockers?

The largest one is probably the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. The Act was a direct response to executive branch employees (including the President) giving out government positions as a kind of patronage. The Act reformed the hiring process for large swathes of administrative agencies to be based on merit and competitive exams rather than political appointment. You might have heard about this in the context of Trump trying to create Schedule F to designate a bunch of positions in the executive branch as exempt from civil service protections.

Do you think Elon is the right man for the job without political connections?

I am not sure how Elon is "without political connections." He just hosted an interview with a candidate for President. His companies are government contractors. He has adversarial relationships with particular executive branch departments. He is not exactly someone with no personal financial interest in the operation of specific government departments.

Are you claiming that if we reverted to the Clinton-era tax code that we would have a surplus again?

It depends on the year, but yes. If we have the Clinton-era tax code in many recent years (assuming no changes in spending) we would have had a budget surplus.

This is not true.

The budget for 2025 will be around $7.3 billion in spending and $5.5 billion in revenue, with a deficit of $1.8 trillion.

To close the gap via taxation alone, we would need to increase revenue by 32.7%. But the tax rates today are only slightly lower today than in 2001. Employment taxes have not changed. Personal tax brackets are changed only a small bit (the top bracket is 37 now vs 39.6 then). And some taxes have increased! For example, there is the 3.8% Obamacare surcharge on capital gains. The biggest reduction was in the corporate tax, but corporate taxes are only a small percentage of revenues.

It gets worse. Even if we increased tax rates by an incredible 32.7%, tax receipts would not actually increase 32.7%. People would work less. They would avoid taxes more. The economy would shrink. We would need to increase taxes by a LOT more than 32.7% to balance the budget. It may not even be possible, since at some point increasing tax rates actually decreases tax revenue.

Expenditures, meanwhile, have grown by leaps and bounds. In 2001, total outlays were just $1.862 trillion, less than 18% of GDP. In 2025, federal outlays will exceed 25% of GDP.

What’s the source on the deficit? I think we need to borrow about 1t every 100 days so 1.8t is probably too small.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59946

Servicing debt now outstrips military spending.

Citing a brief budget surplus in 25 years ago isn’t really something to crow about.

Finally, we don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem. But I’m fine if you want to raise the taxes back to Clinton level taxes if you also reduce government spending to that level.

Any discussion here needs to start with the actual federal budget. About 60% of which is Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Military. Cutting the DOE down to 0 would cut ~10% off the deficit. You could eliminate a solid majority of federal government departments and still not arrive at a budget surplus. Most of them are tiny relative to the size of the deficit.

Yeah, man social security is such a screwed up situation. Really unfortunate for all around.

TBH I think creating social security may have been the #1 political blunder of the last century. Just an incredibly awful decision. I can understand where it was coming from but oof... it has crippled us economically.

Every developed country on earth has public pensions.

In place of social security, what should we have instead? An opt-out system like Germany? Chile’s semi-private system?

Maybe a pension system where it can't be raided to fund overseas wars and other things? Or I don't know, a system where instead of going into a big government account, the money goes into an account you actually personally own?

I'm not saying it's a terrible idea, I'm saying that the implementation is beyond fucked.

Or I don't know, a system where instead of going into a big government account, the money goes into an account you actually personally own?

AKA the Australian superannuation system where every few years the government notices that people who make a lot of money have a lot in their retirement accounts and the poor people don't and maybe we need to mess with the rules a bit to mitigate this unfairness...

Yeah, creating pots of money under government control often has unintended consequences.

TBH I think creating social security may have been the #1 political blunder of the last century. Just an incredibly awful decision. I can understand where it was coming from but oof... it has crippled us economically.

I think it could be salvaged to be a great policy. We just need to tie political positions to a maximum age that is the same as the retirement age. If you are eligible for social security, then you are ineligible for office.

Older politicians would have an incentive to raise the retirement age, but voters and younger politicians would have an incentive to block it. Raising it solves the fiscal crisis, lowering it keeps the old fogies out from running our government further into the ground.

This is a clever idea. Me likey.

This would be interesting in industry too. Maybe we put a cap on full time, but let older folks come in as consultants or advisors or something and cap em at 10 hours a week.

Eh, I'd keep it limited to government. Because many people suck at saving for retirement, even with social security as a guaranteed minimum income.

If anything, just change the way laws work with respect to age discrimination. Legalize discrimination by age for people that are over the retirement age.

Not sure I agree. Social Security existed in the same form it does now when we last had a budget surplus.

Worker to retiree ratio was far different, however.

I wonder how much the people who instituted Social Security, which is basically the world's largest pyramid scheme, can be reasonably blamed for not seeing this coming.

On the one hand, the theoretical argument that "exponential population growth can't go on forever" is pretty strong. On the other hand, literally all empirical evidence up to that point was that population always grows exponentially until it hits Malthusian limits; the demographic transition was a hell of black swan.

And, of course, trying to make up for the missing grandchildren by importing infinite low-productivity foreigners into the magic dirt is just retarded.

Is that true?

This chart says the ratio was just over 3:1 starting in the 70s. It cuts off at 2013, which makes me suspicious as hell, but there’s not a ton of movement.

It was 3.4 at the end of Clinton's term. It's ~2.7 now. The figure after the decimal matters

Thanks.

I’m having a hard time seeing a 25% drop as categorically different. It’s certainly not an improvement…

That 25% drop is a 25% increase in the cost of the program as a burden on individual payers. If the program previously made up 40% of the budget then it would now make up 50% if nothing else changed. Seems like a big difference to me when that is basically a trillion dollars.

Its why small changes to social security basically make or break the US budget. Raising the retirement age is one way to help the ratio, and they've started doing that. They can also undercount inflation and then the program gets an effective paycut. They've been doing that.

What does under control mean here?

"Interest payments on bonds are the 3rd highest item on the US Budget, half of the entire public deficit goes to paying them alone, and the interest rates aren't even that high." sounds pretty out of control to me.

Sounds like we should repeal the Bush tax cuts. Their permanent extension was expected to cost 16T over a decade. That, amortized, would have covered the federal deficit in its entirety every year since it was made permanent (in 2016), with the exception of 2020 and 2021.

See this comment.

I’m not against tax increases, but AFAICT developed countries do not generally fund the government with taxes on high earners- including those which are very willing to tax high earners.

Instead, middle class taxation, debt, and natural resource wealth are the three options for funding a big government. The US doesn’t have enough oil for the petrostate option, so the options are middle class taxation a la the nordics or debt, or massive cuts.

I can oppose personally paying Norway level taxes, even while supporting tax increases at the high end to go with spending cuts.

You're right, I misread my source which includes all revenue drops post the making permanent of the Bush tax cuts (in 2012). So that number is also inclusive of Trump's tax cuts and some similar measures.

I'm not against tax increases, if they go with an automatic death penalty for the entire congress, senate, the president, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (just for good measure) for spending the money on anything other than paying back the public debt.

So interest payments account for half the budget, and there are two items that cost even more $?

Is this some new kind of math?

So interest payments account for half the budget

Of the deficit.

Sorry. I read the comment several times. Guess I should have read a few more.

This will be very difficult, for two major reasons:

  1. Government operates based on rules, while private entities operate based on performance. Your boss can fire you if you're ineffective. The government can only fire you if you don't follow the rules. It's easy to follow the rules and still be ineffective. So government relies on constructing the right rules to achieve its ends, and we don't even agree on the ends, much less the specific rules. The rules end up being byzantine tomes of regulations that no one understands. So there's tons of intractable inefficiency that cannot be addressed. Musk would have to somehow make government employment contingent on performance rather than rules.
  2. More importantly, efficiency requires making costs and benefits explicit and commensurable so tradeoffs can be made. People hate making money commensurable with lives, happiness, or other sacred values. Even conservatives use terms like "death panels" when this topic comes up. Any cost-cutting that comes at the expense of a few hours at the end of a few peoples' lives, or of the academic success of a few economically disadvantaged children, is going to be raised as a fatal flaw in the whole endeavor, regardless of how many billions of dollars were saved. Musk would need to sidestep this issue somehow.

My best idea for solving #2 is to give people a choice to accept a payment to forgo a government benefit. For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan. This of course is distasteful to supporters of government healthcare, because they want the costs to be socialized. Adverse selection will cause people who are healthy to opt out etc. The same adverse selection follows for other kinds of government benefits, such as education with school vouchers. In the limit, the people remaining receiving benefits would be precisely those who take out more than they put in, and this would highlight the cost everyone is paying to support those people. The existing system obfuscates who is causing the high costs.

Doesn’t Germany allow individuals to opt out of public pensions(but not back in)?

For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan.

The problem with that is that people will take the money, spend it, and then we'll see a parade of sad little kids on CNN whose parents can't afford medical treatment, and then the government will have to either pay for the medical treatment anyway (encouraging people to take advantage and raising the costs), or they'll have to go on CNN and publicly declare "fuck the kids", which they won't.

You could, trivially, cover basic healthcare for all the children in the country and waive everything else. I think Harris county's gold card system works a bit like this- hospitals will always be reimbursed for the health care they aren't allowed to deny+basic preventative, and it saves money in the big picture view.

I think this is the root of the problem in a nutshell.

In a modern society, very few people - even reactionary conservatives - are truly comfortably with the idea of stupid people dying in the streets. To be clear, I'm not talking about drug addicts, career criminals, etc. I mean otherwise law abiding citizens who just suck with money. We all probably have at least one friend or relative who is an all around good person, but just awful at managing money. I don't think that person should end up so destitute that "dying from exposure" is a real risk. This same logic is why most societies decided to eliminate the debtors prisons.

But if there's some sort of guarantee - explicity in the case of social security, but implicit in a future even without defined benefits - that you won't starve simply because you're a moron, people will continue to be morons.

I think our debt and deficit realities are too large to get out of with austerity. "The only way out is through" meaning we need a new generation level of growth to happen. This won't be AI automating laptop jobs. It really has to be something like (forgive the buzzword) a second industrial revolution. There's also a necessary energy component and the really enraging fact there is that we know what that is - nuclear. There is a literal Green Cult out there, however, that is dedicated to preventing the human species from solving nearly all of its energy challenges.

Human nature can't be mitigated with crafty policy. That is one of the central tenets of classic conservatism and one of the horrible, awful traps that Liberals keep falling into.

We all probably have at least one friend or relative who is an all around good person, but just awful at managing money. I don't think that person should end up so destitute that "dying from exposure" is a real risk.

They aren't. And outside of soviet republics, true shitholes or countries undergoing historic catastrophes, nobody fitting that description ever was. Dying from exposure in the middle of the street takes multiple levels of failure, requires burning every safety net there is one by one. Just failing at money is not enough - friends and family are still there. Unless someone lost and/or alienated all of them, which is even more massive a failure than going bankrupt.

But that's just a nitpick; I'm not disputing your larger point.

We all probably have at least one friend or relative who is an all around good person, but just awful at managing money. I don't think that person should end up so destitute that "dying from exposure" is a real risk.

You can let them die of exposure, you can control their life for them, or you can shovel in-principal-unlimited amounts of money at them. No other choices.

Limiting this today is that there is one large group for whom dying from exposure or controlling is considered OK, which is adult men.

I agree. Deaths of Despair for white males and intragroup murder for black and latino is the slow motion mechanism for societal realignment. We can pretend otherwise for a few generations but, eventually, gravity catches up.

Here's the thing - as a left-winger, I agree there's wasteful spending in the federal government and bad regulations. We might even agree, if we went line by line on some. But obviously, there's a lot we would disagree on.

But, what I would agree too is a commission with equal numbers of liberal, libertarian, conservative, and left-wing economists. Of the regulations or spending, if a supermajority of all four groups agree a regulation or spending line on the federal budget is inefficient, they all go to an immediate up or down vote in both the House & Senate immediately after the end of the commission, if a supermajority of three out of the four agree, it's put forth in the pertinent committees, etc.

As a conservative I support this measure, as long as ‘left wing’ economists are not Marxist and the selection process is reasonable.

How do you feel about social security?

Fixing the budget is quite easy conceptually. Just cut Social Security. Old people have had their whole lives to get their affairs in order. The “fat” is the fact that we pay people simply for being alive once they reach a certain age. Maybe you need someone with basic math skills to structure the phase-out so that people who have already paid in don’t get completely screwed, but this is a fundamentally simple problem from an operations standpoint.

I would say to cut Medicare too, but I worry that many families would literally bankrupt themselves pouring money into the pit that is the US healthcare system in order to save granny. It is quite hard to evaluate costs and benefits in a dispassionately economic manner in these areas, which is probably why we’re in this mess.

Social Security? How about you make the defense dept do a proper accounting audit for once? Then after that go for social security.

It's worth pointing out that social security spending is now about 2x defense spending. In 2025, a projected $1.6 trillion vs $850 billion.

Defense spending/GDP hasn't been lower since the 1930s.

We could and should make the Pentagon more efficient, but it's not the panacea that many imagine.

I want to fix the budget, but I'm less than stoked about robbing me of the money I was forced to pay to social security in order to do it. Personally, I think that if politicians can't agree on what to cut (which is a likely outcome TBH) we should just cut all budgets at the federal level by x% in order to make it happen. For example, if we need to cut spending by 20%, every single department budget gets slashed by 20%. No exceptions. While it would be better if our representatives could agree what needs to be cut, this would at least be better than the current status quo where the US just keeps borrowing money it's never, ever going to pay back.

I want to fix the budget, but I'm less than stoked about robbing me of the money I was forced to pay to social security in order to do it.

If you got back everything you paid into social security, it would be a pittance, because the program has always been funded by stealing from the young to pay for the old, and reliant on the idea that there are a lot more young than there are old so that stealing a little bit from each young person doesn't hurt too bad but is still enough to pay for the old people.

The demographic transition wrecked that, and now we are just going deeper and deeper into debt while we try to figure out a solution (no, immigration is not a solution).

Social security's insolvent. There will be automatic cuts in a decade. Expanding lifespans and falling birthrates will make the situation worse. There's no way the program survives long enough for me to get a penny out of it.

Accordingly, your demand that you benefit is actually just saying that you don't want to be the one stuck with the bill—that's for other schmucks. Keep forcing people into the Ponzi, to make sure it's solvent long enough to fulfill the promises it made to you, specifically.

And this despite that it doesn't really promise you any direct reward! There's no accrued payout that's sitting for you on a leger somewhere. That's just the story they tell you to make you think it's reasonable.

It's almost a quarter of our yearly spending.

No. Social security needs to go. At the very least, we should be means-testing. It's unfortunate that there's no political will to touch it.

Accordingly, your demand that you benefit

That is not actually my position. I demand that, after I have been forced to pay money in, that money isn't just ripped away to balance the budget. I accept that, if we stop trying to prop it up, social security is likely to run out of money long before I see a dime. I'm ok with that (relatively speaking). My demand is that we let the money run out first, not just pull the plug. The former is unfortunate but unavoidable, the latter is a vicious slap in the face to everyone who has been forced to pay into this bad program.

Fair enough—it's still a slap in the face to everyone who will have to pay in the meantime, though.

I'm fine with cutting off SS taxes immediately. Though from what @sarker said, that would mean that the money runs out immediately so I guess maybe it amounts to the same thing. I was under the impression that there was money left in the pot, but it sounds like I was mistaken.

I'm not sure, exactly. I'm pretty sure that other government programs took out loans from social security.

Social security is the single largest debt owner for the federal government, isn't it?

we let the money run out first,

There is no money. Money paid in today is paid out today.

https://www.npr.org/2005/04/06/4580019/shaking-faith-in-social-security

I thought the money technically did already run out. Didn’t the federal government borrow all of it decades ago?

The government maintains the fiction that there are two separate accounts.

  1. The general account which has a massive debt.

  2. The social security trust fund (funded by employment taxes) which has a positive balance

At some point this farce will no longer be maintained as the "trust fund" will be depleted. In theory, this would cause a reduction in benefits, but I doubt the gerontocracy would allow it. More likely, we will see massive tax increases on the remaining workers to subsidize the old.

The plan seems to be

  1. Borrow until enough Boomers die to transfer political control to the Millennials

  2. Cut off Generation X

  3. Profit.

That I don't know, unfortunately.

The fact that we don't means-test, which seems like such an obviously correct and non-controversial idea, is indicative of just how much of a third rail any meaningful cuts to SS are due to the old people voting bloc. Even though it is kind of crazy to oppose making it so that you don't collect SS if you are fabulously wealthy, the topic is like other third rails (guns, abortion) in that even reasonable changes are vehemently opposed. Unlike guns and abortion, though, you are probably not going to get the SC to intervene here, so the only possible approach is legislative. The "adults" from both parties need to get together and get real about SS, publicly contradicting party leaders who attempt to make the issue partisan, and see if they can't at least manage to means-test for the sake of the grandchildren. The Ponzi scheme doesn't have to go to zero - we just need to start cutting benefits as the current level becomes unsustainable. Perhaps another solution would be to embrace more official, non-citizen immigration so that we can have a bigger cadre of workers who pay into SS but never get to withdraw.

bigger cadre of workers who pay into SS but never get to withdraw

The slogan for the upcoming civil rights struggle for these people is already written though... "No taxation without representation!"

Means testing deprives the program of its third-rail status and turns it into just another welfare program.

Even though it is kind of crazy to oppose making it so that you don't collect SS if you are fabulously wealthy

Means testing that would actually make a difference would affect far more people than the "fabulously wealthy".

For example, if we need to cut spending by 20%, every single department budget gets slashed by 20%. No exceptions.

This is conceptually simple but in practice is a terrible idea.

  1. Departments already running lean are penalized and may dip below the minimum number of people they need to fulfill their core mission.

    Corollary: Inevitably the small department that keeps the whole organization running will get thrown under the bus and sooner or later everything goes to shit.

  2. Departments whose heads had the foresight to maintain appropriate blubber reserves chug along unaffected and wasteful. You'd need an 80% cut to start to make a difference.

I've seen this exact scenario play out in corporate cost cutting campaigns.

I've seen this exact scenario play out in corporate cost cutting campaigns.

Selfish request: Please share an anecdote about this. I have a special fascination with corporate restructurings / cost cuttings / re brandings / org redesign.

Related anecdote:

My husband's employer provides various services to other companies, with different departments providing different types of services. They recently had a situation in which $Big_Client had contracts with multiple departments: dept. A's contract was making a ton of money, while dept. B's had over time become unprofitable in ways they were unable to remedy. The guys in A thought it was in the company's overall interest for B's contract to keep going, because A's profit was far larger than B's loss and they thought B continuing to provide their service helped keep $Big_Client well-disposed towards the company overall.

Top management, however, saw only that dept. B was not as profitable as they would have liked, and so that contract has recently been terminated. Only time will tell if this winds up harming dept. A's profits from that client.

I don't want to give away too many details for opsec reasons.

However, the broad strokes are that I worked at a big company you've heard of. One day the top brass decided that the company has gotten too big and it's time to downsize. Naturally, top brass has no visibility into what parts of the company are load bearing and which are not, they can only tell which parts are cost centers and which are profit centers. So inevitably they lay off large portions of a few teams that are maintaining tooling that nearly every other (productive) employee at the company depends on to do their work.

The company hasn't gone out of business (yet), but there was absolutely a huge productivity hit for me because that tooling was no longer reliable and I needed to work around it somehow. Multiply that out by tens of thousands of employees and you can imagine the scale I'm talking about here.

In my department as well they laid off some of the top guys that were universally admired (and I'm not talking management, I'm talking about guys at the coalface). Meanwhile I was aware of people in other departments who accomplished as much in a quarter as I accomplished in a week (and I am not a particularly productive employee). They kept their jobs, because their bosses liked them and their poor performance was never a matter of record.

Of course, this is all perfectly illegible to the brass. From their perspective, they saved a bunch of cash - mission accomplished!

Also I've never seen a "cheese slicer" budget cut like this (as they are called here) actually being enacted without the proposing party, right out of the bat, going "well, of course, this sector is the exception" (typically defense) followed by "and this too... and this..."

I think that would be a significant challenge for sure. The only way it works is if there are no exceptions. Not for teachers, not for our troops, not for Grandma who has cancer, none. I'm willing to grit my teeth as the things I care about get hit, but I don't think most Americans are.

I'm not saying it's the best solution. I'm well aware it would have problems! But we absolutely have to stop racking up debt. The problems you mention are real, but less bad than the status quo.

Just cut Social Security. Old people have had their whole lives to get their affairs in order.

I was too busy fighting for my country in Vietnam! (I was a Viet Cong radio operator who immigrated to the US in 1995)

Fixing Social Security is neither easy nor sufficient to solve the problem.

If we cut the SSA budget by 20%, we'd save $320 billion in 2025. The deficit is projected to be $1.8 trillion.

But even this modest victory is a pipe dream. The political situation in our country prohibits reducing Social Security at all. Our best bet is to fudge the CPI numbers and inflate away the problem. (We've actually been doing a pretty decent job at that).

The trouble with inflating away excessive social security payments means you're also inflating away debt repayments ... and maybe you can gaslight grandma into thinking she's getting a fair deal, but you're not going to pull one over on quants managing trillions of dollars of investments.

From a moral standpoint, it does seem like an improvement to stiff all T-bill owners rather than just grandma. If we were rolling over the debt every 30 years, gently inflating it away would seem to be a tolerable solution. "Aw, you loaned someone disposable income under the impression you were going to get to force their kids to pay it back with interest? Here's some monopoly dollars, and be thankful you're getting that."

But from a practical standpoint ... we're not rolling it over every 30 years. Something like 15% of federal debt is 30 year loans; more than that is one-year loans. And between the one-year loans and the older debt maturing in the same year, we need to roll over something like 9 trillion a year these days, at interest rates that are going to go up as inflation rates do. As soon as we find it too hard to refinance that 9 trillion (because cranking up inflation is when prospective reinvestors realize the game of musical chairs is now ending), the only way to bring it to levels we can repay will be very-non-gentle inflation.

The trouble with inflating away excessive social security payments means you're also inflating away debt repayments ... and maybe you can gaslight grandma into thinking she's getting a fair deal, but you're not going to pull one over on quants managing trillions of dollars of investments.

That's a feature not a bug. And quants won't be able to stop it. Here's why.

  1. The Federal Reserve owns a decent chunk of the debt. They don't care if it gets inflated away. In fact, they prefer it.

  2. We just had an episode of inflation in which the debt got inflated away. Bond holders took a bath. Debt/GDP declined from 130% in 2020 to 122% today, despite near-record deficits: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/gfdegdq188S

  3. Many institutions are required to hold T-bills. They will have no choice but to accept a soaking.

  4. As recently as 2022, investors were loaning money to Germany at negative interest rates. Not all investors are rational.

  5. It's possible that private investors will simply stop buying debt entirely and the Federal Reserve will take it all. This is exactly what has already happened in Japan. MMT will sneak in through the back door.

I am not claiming that this process will not come with significant disruptions, but it's the only way to avoid default.

Unfortunately, a world where we're comfortable paying for things by printing dollars is not healthy either. Congressmen lose all sense of scale that is created by forcing oneself to compare to revenue taken in and get used to printing more money. We don't want to be Argentina (or take your pick of reckless country).

Regarding 3, will that result in black market or foreign institutions trying to do the same things without the T-bills?

I think any effort will be ultimately doomed by corruption and inertia, but this would be amazing, there are no elements of the government that should be untouched, and Elon would be the perfect person to lead it (were he not already such a lightning rod for criticism).

I highly, highly recommend the recent Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk. It's a page turner.

I am also currently reading the book "Titan", a biography of J. D. Rockefeller.

Having consumed approximately 1200 pages of biography, I can tell you that both tycoons share a love for cutting waste and diving into small details of their operations. In the Musk biography, there's an anecdote about him going between stations at a factory. He finds a station where a machine appears to be operating slowly. He asks to make it go faster. Someone is found who can override the default settings. He turns it to max speed. It fails. Lowers the speed. Failure. Lowers the speed. Success. Now the station operates 3 times more efficiently.

Similarly, Rockefeller once saw that barrels were being sealed with 40 dots of epoxy. He says, try 38. They leak. Try 39. It works.

Musk succeeds because he pushes all the way to the point of failure and then pulls back. That's why was able to make a profitable electric car company when it was considered impossible and send rockets into space for 10% the prevailing cost.

How would Elon solve government waste if he were god-emperor? He wouldn't start by reducing headcount by 10%. He would eliminate entire departments then add back personnel as necessary. What would happen if we just erased the Department of Education? My guess? Nothing.

And yes, government waste is a huge and growing problem. Consider the Biden administrations effort to connect rural households to the internet. It's a $42 billion program and no households have been connected after 3 years. It might fail entirely. The CHIPS act, similar failure. We also recently spent $7.5 billion to build 7 electric charging stations.

These are deep failures in the government, driven by corruption and incompetency. We need to clean house. And to do so we need someone in charge who is unafraid to be unpopular.

Basically, we need this: https://old.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/15v90es/libertarian_javier_milei_shows_his_plan_to_reduce/

In IT they call this a 'scream test'.

Unplug stuff, and if you hear screaming, plug it back in.

He wouldn't start by reducing headcount by 10%. He would eliminate entire departments then add back personnel as necessary. What would happen if we just erased the Department of Education? My guess? Nothing.

I won't say that my mouth didn't water a little bit at the thought, but eliminating dots of epoxy is one thing and eliminating people is another. If you lay off the entire department and it turns out that you still need them, how many are going to be willing to return? How many of the key people who actually get things done are going to be willing to return? That comes down to the motivations and alternatives available to those people, which is not really legible (in fact it's probably not even legible who these people are).

Removing unnecessary people is in fact the key to Elon's efficiency. In the biography, he is cruel to his staff and it seems to be effective. He is constantly firing key staff the moment they start to rest on their laurels. No one is irreplaceable.

Furthermore, his denial of praise seems to motivate people to perform at a level that would otherwise be impossible. It's the same sort of philosophy employed by Asian tiger moms and the band director from the movie "Whiplash". Never say good job.

At some place like the Department of Education, the cuts would be deep. People don't choose that job unless they are in it for an easy paycheck. But, deep in the bowels of the department, there are probably still some young people who would relish the chance for rapid advancement once the cruft has been removed.

Removing unnecessary people is in fact the key to Elon's efficiency. In the biography, he is cruel to his staff and it seems to be effective. He is constantly firing key staff the moment they start to rest on their laurels. No one is irreplaceable.

How many times does Elon fire someone, regret it, ask for them back, and they come back? He fired a lot of Twitter people and it mostly still works, but I can't see shit without logging in and that smells like a load shedding strategy to me.

No one is irreplaceable, but that doesn't mean that you can fire anyone and everyone with no impact on operations.

But, deep in the bowels of the department, there are probably still some young people who would relish the chance for rapid advancement once the cruft has been removed.

Certainly. The trick is to not fire those guys too.

He fired a lot of Twitter people and it mostly still works, but I can't see shit without logging in and that smells like a load shedding strategy to me.

I wonder if it was also to try to get people to get an account, instead of merely lurking? That would raise engagement with the platform. (I know people who have done so, though I've stubbornly stuck to what's left of nitter for now.)

How many times does Elon fire someone, regret it, ask for them back, and they come back?

I think it actually happens a bit. I read the book awhile ago, but I remember a case of this exact thing happening. The person had gone to another company and was bored so came back despite Elon being a dick.

The trick to Elon's efficiency is to cut all the dead wood and half the live wood, going all the way to failure, and then adding back the necessary parts. And... it works.

It's the same sort of philosophy employed by Asian tiger moms and the band director from the movie "Whiplash". Never say good job.

The tiger-mom kid who was a violin virtuoso wound up quitting the instrument because of the pressure, which is one argument against a Whiplash-style approach.

Yeah, probably a bad idea to try this with your kids since replacement cost is high.

But enforcing it on everyone else, that’s fine?

I’m sympathetic to Elon’s management style, and I give it credit for a lot of his results, but I would be miserable working at SpaceX. Suddenly importing that culture to the nation’s largest employer would be a disaster. The civil service isn’t supposed to be populated by rockstar engineers doing the impossible. It’s not supposed to be high-risk, high-reward at all.

The government is rarely in the business of visionary promises, so the upside is capped. It doesn’t have long tails for compensation, so it’s not going to attract top talent. There’s not much room for out-of-the-box solutions, so the potential savings are mostly careful execution. There’s a case for handing that over to Jeff Bezos or the ghost of Sam Walton, but Elon Musk? Not my first pick.

Top people at SpaceX will cash out tens of millions of dollars if it goes public at its current valuation. The most he can offer at the Department of Education is what, $150k and a nice pension?

The most he can offer at the Department of Education is what, $150k and a nice pension?

Yes, but he could offer status. The low-level drones are stuck behind 12 layers of bureaucracy. They can't advance until someone retires. Or... is fired.

Change offers opportunity. J Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI at age 29.

Possibly not even the pension if people stop trusting the government to live up to it's long term financial obligations.

Maybe you only cut the ones without legible outputs.

James Scott, telephone!

Legible output selects for departments engaging in fake performance. Like health centrals that focus on dealing with non-sick people or police departments boosting numbers using speed traps instead of following up on rape cases. This shit is absolutely rampant and without an in-depth understanding of what the organisation does and what the "legible output" actually means, making cuts based on that is a godawful idea since most of the most important people don't have legible output and the least important and the actively parasititic often have large legible output.

Indeed, beware of mean chickens.

I think what makes this impossible is unions. If you just broke all the public sector unions, then allowed public sector managers to hire and fired as they wished without union interference, that'd solve a lot of the worst issues without even needing a business genius to step in and try to optimize.

I don't think so. The incentives of public sector managers are still to get their budget increased. So instead of expanding jobs for featherbedding employees, you'd expand jobs for featherbedding managers.

It wouldn't be a perfect system still, but the unions are the biggest barrier to improving.

Bigger budget is one incentive of managers, but they're also incentivized to do a good job to get promoted, and also most people just want to do a good job in general. Getting rid of unions will remove a lot of the worst distortions.

The public sector has very regimented advancement compared to private industry. There are hard caps on how fast you can get promotions or even raises. If I had to guess, this is an intentional countermeasure against nepotism/graft, but I suppose tall poppy syndrome is also an option.

I expect it's both anti-nepotism and anti-tall poppy. The public sector workers don't want any coworkers to be working hard so they're revealed to be lazy/incompetent. Just busting unions I expect will have large ripple effects. And I'm still a big fan of chesterton's fence; no need to make bigger changes than necessary. Just getting rid of the unions and slowly reworking contracts is much safer than trying to jump in and firing tons of the pubic sector.

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