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The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
My view is slightly different. Sometimes debt is good, you would buy a house on mortgage, for example. But the current debt is purely for buying trinkets, not good. The US is also a very strong economy, the best in the world. Some more debt is not going to bankrupt it. However, excess debt can reduce growth. The fact that the US was growing faster than other developed countries, is no reason to limit this potential. Therefore this debt should be eliminated as it would allow the US to grow even faster.
Now, Musk wants more growth. Everything depends on it. It is a long game he is playing, some moves might be wrong, but it all makes sense.
Current US debt is not for "buying trinkets". It's mostly funding people's lives of questionable leisure, and providing life extension for the aged and self-destructive.
That's what I mean by “buying trinkets”.
That is a very non-standard meaning of "buying trinkets", Mr. Dumpty.
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