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Government spending on these sorts of programs is so huge that anyone old enough to be posting here would not live long enough to see things shake out if things ever switched, assuming they survived the violence that such a transition would probably involve. If we were setting up a society from scratch, then the current system would be something to avoid, certainly. Having come as far down this road as we have, though, any benefits from switching would fall mainly on generations to come. That might be a great thing, but "duty to future generations" is a moral, not an economic argument. I'm not defending the morality of the system, just explaining that it's not the simple math problem OP seems to think it is.
Furthermore, all of the experiments (I assume you're talking about free-market vs socialist countries) have converged on wild government spending. Unless you say that REAL capitalism has never been tried, then maybe 90% of the population recirculating the wealth produced by the remaining 10% is just how it works? Maybe that's the true triumph of post-scarcity industrial victory: welfare grift and BS jobs for the lucky majority and productive, morally-pure, toil for the unfortunate few.
It would take a while to switch over, but definitely not on the order of 60 years.
Small states have definitely been tried, such as the American state before income tax, and it went pretty great from a growth perspective. The fact that no one in the modern age runs a tiny state doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it. We can look at the things run privately and the things run by governments and see which ones contribute more to GDP growth. There are basically no profitable government run enterprises. There are vast private industries serving government priorities, but that’s not really positive sum in the same way. All I’m objecting to is the idea that government spending is somehow essential to the economy and that we would all be poorer without it. Obviously switching costs would be significant if it was done suddenly, but it wouldn’t have to be. Besides “what would happen if this went away tomorrow” is the wrong question. We should be thinking about how things would look in steady state.
I’m actually in favor of a tax and spend redistributive state that fields an army. I just think pretending we get gdp growth because of it is silly.
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The argument isn’t even to end everything right away; it’s to slowly reduce benefits. For example, let’s say you put the subsidies back on for Bill and Shelly. Perhaps you do it at 80% of prior benefit with mandated reductions in subsidy of the 1/4 of the remaining amount for the next four years. This is less of a shock to the Bills and Shelly’s of the world while still cutting off non productive spending.
We could start doing things like eliminating benefit cliffs; start raising slowly the age of SS; do more work requirements, etc.
It doesn’t have to change over night. But the goal ought to be within 10-15 years to drastically reduce these programs.
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"We've created such a monstrosity that if you dare take it down, there will be violence. Also it's such a monstrosity that it will come down eventually" isn't the knock-down argument you think it is. The best time to stop this thing was before it started, the second best time is now. And yes, people posting here would see the advantages, because a lot of people posting here have a lot of working life left. The big losers would be the Boomers and some of the older Xers; I expect the Millennials are going to take away Social Security from the younger Xers anyway.
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