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Our treasured colleague Kulak is at it again with another post on his Substack.
I know that a slow-moving budget crisis is not the spiciest meatball, but the fiscal situation in the United States is looking bad. Debt to GDP is now above the previous high set at the peak of WWII. But whereas the post-wars years saw demographic and technological tailwinds, the current epoch is characterized by low fertility and productivity growth.
It gets worse:
While it might be possible to split a shrinking pie and remain friends, it is definitely IMPOSSIBLE to split a pie when more than 100% of the pie has already been promised to one person or another. Give a person a dollar, they are mildly happy. Take a dollar away and they are FURIOUS.
At this point, I'd encourage you to find a nearby senior citizen. Please explain to them that they don't deserve their social security check. You see, the money that was supposedly SAVED was in fact already SPENT. Far from saving money, their generation actually left a sizeable DEBT to future generations. So not only would seniors have to give up their government checks, they would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional taxes just to get to even.
I'll wait.
Just how irrational are the expectations of our Boomer rulers? Slobodan Milošević understood.
The last politician to even contemplate reforming Social Security was George W. Bush, who claimed to have earned "political capital" shortly after his re-election in 2004. By March of 2006, his approval rating had fallen from the high 50s to just 31. Nowadays, politicians in either party don't even mention Social Security except to praise it effusively and promise to defend it at all costs.
We are well and truly fucked. The Federal government will be forced to default or inflate away its debts within the next 10-20 years. And this is BEFORE the numerous suggestions to somehow EXPAND the welfare state, whether they be student loan forgiveness, payments to favored racial groups, or universal basic income. After all, ours is a great laboratory of democracy. So while the Federal government enters a slow fiscal doom loop, some states like Illinois, California, and New York seem to be attempting a speed run.
How do we get out of this? Kulak has a few ideas, but I'm a little less dramatic.
AI. Maybe we will somehow thread the needle between doom and nothingburger. 🤷
Immigration. The U.S. could escape this problem by cherry picking the best citizens from other countries and telling everyone else to GTFO. We are still, after all, the best country (>10 million population subdivision). This would work, but it would never happen and it's probably a bad thing for the world at large.
Inflation. Many liabilities are indexed to inflation such as Social Security and Medicare. But we could inflate away all the existing debt. Debt to GDP actually decreased in 2022 because of 9% inflation. That level of inflation for a decade or two could make the problem less bad. It would also be helpful if the official inflation numbers were even more fake.
Things are just shittier in the future. Brazil is still a country. This is your future.
Therefore, let's wave through as many million new 'citizens' as possible to drive that number down. If it doesn't work, just keep at it. Quantity has a quality all to itself.
I wish. I have a buddy who is leaving the US to go back home to Brazil. Brazil is hardened and adapted to life with huge deadweight from giant indigenous/oppressed populations. Our thing is something brand new. This is the first time in recorded history a population was in/voluntarily invaded. If anyone can think of another time - please let me know.
Related but equally important: any examples of a people killing themselves to free their own slaves? Yes sometimes the slaves would fight, but are there any other examples of people "rising up" against themselves for their slaves?
What do you mean by in/voluntary invaded? Forgive me if I'm missing something but I assume that refers to immigration? But it seems to me that either way you address it it's not a voluntary invasion. If you want someone to come, it's not an invasion, since there is presumably a notion of mutual benefit. And even on the other hand, there are lots(majorities?) of people in areas that care about too-high legal and illegal immigration, they are doing something about it physically, legally, etc. So in that sense it's not a voluntary invasion either, they're doing lots to resist it. I suppose you could synthesize the ideas to the political reality that /some/ people want it, and /some/ people don't but at that point could say every time a country's ruling or military class did something in history that the majority of the middle and lower classes opposed. In that sense you could probably point to the population and cultural changes(opposed by Anglos and Saxons but not Normans?) after William the Conqueror became king of England.
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