domain:youtu.be
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18hr ago
Because lots of government debt is bad, so less debt is good... Yes but the logical conclusion to this train of thought is that government should never do anything, lest it gets undone in a few years. That sounds like a fucking awful society.
The part you are failing to engage with is that "fiscal responsibility" is electorally unpopular, while "fiscal irresponsibility" is electorally popular. Implementing "fiscal responsibility" will obviously cost one political power, while implementing "fiscal responsibility" will obviously gain one political power. So long as this is the case, actual fiscal responsibility is not a possible outcome in any but the shortest of terms.
To the extent that this is fucking awful, I direct you to the litany of Tarsky.
This is true but again if this stance was held at all levels of power you're basically just advocating for anarchy?
No. I am positing that political power is a scarce resource, and it should be used where it plausibly might deliver positive results. "Fiscal Responsibility" fails that test. If you don't like that fact, well, legibly admitting that it is a fact might just be the first step to changing it.
Western nations have gotten pretty cooked, but seriously man you should consider therapy or something because your outlook is profoundly nihilistic, pessimistic, and defeatist.
Aiming to secure what value might be gained under the conditions that observably exist is not nihilism, pessimism or defeatism, but rather realism and applied rationality.
Because perpetual defecits that exceed GDP growth eventually lead to massive inflation, economic collapse, or both? This is bad.
Does the Democratic party agree? What's their plan for solving this problem? Is that plan realistic?
Kind of? You're incredibly negative and myopic though, which is a lens you are viewing reality through.
Perhaps. Can you lay out an equally-realistic assessment that's less myopic and more positive?
It's not, but I think the deficits feel worse coming from them, hence the focus. They did love going absolutely ape shit over any/all democrat spending during the 2000s/2010s, so it feels hypocritical.
Yes, and we also spearheaded the GWOT, which added trillions to the debt. But notably, we have since exiled the faction that spearheaded the GWOT, and are trying to an isolationism that is the best possible path to reduced defense spending.
Unfortunately not really, I'm honestly kind of worried about our societies inability to deal with anything, but if we give up then we go from "maybe fucked" to "definitely fucked" and I don't see that as an improvement.
Alternatively, maybe making it clear that the Republican Party does not consider the debt to be a problem we're in charge of fixing will make it clear that someone else has to step up. Or else, we all accept that there is no fixing it, and at least we have the maximum warning possible that disaster is not, in fact, going to be avoided.
Unfortunately not really
Then your plan is that Republicans should sacrifice their scarce political power for nothing, correct? Why would you expect Republicans to do that willingly?
You have many harsh words for my perspective, and many admonitions for why I ought to think differently, but no actual corrections about what is, no more credible account of the realities actually facing us. It appears to me that you are objecting to me pointing out obvious facts about how things actually are, and would prefer that I argue based on fantasy. I decline to do so.
bonsaii
18hr ago
What do you think makes someone good at drawing? I’ve always been terrible at it despite relatively strong visuospatial skills (in the mental shape rotating sense) and decent manual dexterity. For whatever reason, this doesn’t translate at all to my ability to imagine the distances, angles, and ratios of objects well enough to recreate them accurately on a page. Sometimes it feels like I only imagine things topologically.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19hr ago
I think it's at least worth considering the other direction too. "What jobs are not currently worth paying a human to do, so nobody does them?"
One place that IMO would be unsurprising (and is probably happening, if quietly) is ML for trash sorting. It's not really worth paying someone to pick recyclable cans from the trash can (something something minimum wage and homeless people redeeming bottle deposits, but that isn't really at-scale anyway), but it seems like something AI could do without hazard pay.
LateMechanic
19hr ago
I've said this before, but I'm pretty sure a lot of members of congress have learned at least some MMT stuff about banking & government finance accounting. They pretty much all still use the deficit, debt, and fear of large numbers as rhetorical weapons against their opponents when out of power. But we seem to see fewer people than ever signing up for the mistaken sucker play of being in power and actually crashing the economy with austerity. Maybe more senators than house members understand the reality; surely more democrats than republicans have been incentivized; and definitely more congressional aides and rank&file treasury/fed people know how the financial plumbing works compared to elected & appointed officials (but in the US in particular, these types seem to effectively be able to get the word out to stop politicians from wrecking things usually). This time around, Trump even potentially had Elon as a perfect fall guy to take any blame, if Trump actually wanted to cut the deficit (luckily he didn't).
To be economically literate, one would have to know that saying the government deficit should be cut is identical to saying the non-government surplus should be cut. Or that the government's debt is not "our" debt, it's our asset: the government is just a balance sheet entity we made up, which we use to emit IOUs that we (the actual people) get to hold & use. It's much more akin to a scorekeeper, tracking the points everyone has. The national debt is essentially the net money supply, and that money is being created by running a deficit (constantly for hundreds of years, with no reason to stop if the people keep wanting to accumulate monetary savings). Government deficit & debt are good things, and the only problem is along the lines of 'too much of a good thing' (inflation, which is the self-correction mechanism).
I think MMT was especially catching on amongst politicians around like 2018-2019. The inflation of 2022 probably put it on the backburner for awhile. But even back in 2012, here they are talking about how a load of congress members understand things but just can't say anything publicly: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg&t=1h4m25s
Moderator: Can you answer the question of why does the system not adopt what you're saying?
Mosler: Yeah so last year we had the debt ceiling drama. Remember that last summer? And right after the State of the Union, Paul Ryan got up and said 'Look the US could be the next Greece, we're going to be on our knees to the IMF, interest rates are going to spike, we might get downgraded, we might default, we have to take $1 trillion out of the deficit, and we're not going to vote for the debt ceiling increase unless we do that'. And Obama actually agreed! The president agreed, and he had a plan to take 6 trillion out, but they didn't like what each other was doing, they got right down to the wire, they kicked the can down the road with a compromise... Interest rates had gone up in anticipation of something terrible happening, the stock market was crashing, and we got downgraded by S&P... And what happened? Okay, interest rates went down instead of up. 3-month treasury bills were going through at 0%. Everybody was like 'what's going on, how is this possible?' No move on the deficit, we're up over 16 trillion...and, you know this is supposed to be the end of the world. And then suddenly it started sort of coming out: you had Alan Greenspan come out and say 'well you know, we print our own money'. And Warren Buffett came on and said 'we're 4A not 3A, because the Federal Reserve prints the money'.
So I compare this to the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans. The Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over. So what's happened is that moment when they came out realized that we weren't going to be the next Greece...okay the US was not going to be at its knees, that deficits don't drive interest rates up (and there's absolutely no reason to think they would when you understand monetary operations--they never do)... the war was over! Okay, we had won the war. The reason for deficit reduction was gone. It disappeared. All the reasons that, you know, Ryan and Obama..."we've run out of money", all these things were over! Okay, but they kept fighting the war anyway! And it's kind of the strangest thing. They just started pushing ahead with, 'okay, now we got to do it towards the end of the year...'. And nobody talked about Greece for a while, and then now all of a sudden in the last few months you're starting to hear Greece sneak into it again. Okay, that war is over, you're right, it should be over! Okay we know that deficits don't cause any default risks, they don't cause interest rates to go up, they don't cause any of that. Now, they might cause inflation, if we overspend. But let me say two things on that.
Japan's been trying to inflate as hard as it can for 20 years, and hasn't managed to get out of deflation. The Federal Reserve has been trying to inflate with everything it's got, every trick in the book, every tool it can imagine, for four years and hasn't done it, it's utterly failed. It's not that easy. I've been writing for years that central banks cannot cause inflation no matter what they do. And I think we've seen that proven out. So #1, inflation is not that easy. (The causes of these other things were all special circumstances, all the hyperinflations I won't get into that). But if there is any reason to think that we do need deficit reduction, that we should cut spending or raise taxes, it has to be inflation. Because none of the other things are a factor. So let's look at our inflation forecast: there isn't one analyst out there who has a reputation to defend that's forecasting any kind of inflation. The treasury index bonds, 30-years, are forecasting very very low inflation. There's not a single inflation forecast out there.
So I talked to representative, what's his name, Hollen--he's on the deficit reduction committee from Virginia, he's a progressive Democrat. I said "okay the war is over, why are you pushing for cuts in social security, cuts in Medicare? Isn't the burden of proof on the other side to tell you that we have to cut or else is going to be inflation? Maybe they have to do a little research, and prove to you that there could could be inflation and therefore we have to cut Social Security and Medicare? Because there's certainly no forecast out there. Why are you just voluntarily (the left, the Progressive Democrats) out there proposing these cuts?" He goes, "well, it's a pretty large number and I think we need to do something about it." It's like 'What??'
Okay there's something very wrong with the political process. And I think what's happened is they become victims of their own propaganda. They've gotten it so instilled in people that we have to do something about the deficit, they can't even begin to talk otherwise. Even though they know the war is over, even though they know they've lost any possible reason for it, even though they know the burden of proof is on the other side now to show that spending needs to be cut or taxes need to be raised for some reason... The polls show and the reactions show that if they come out and aren't for deficit reduction, they get laughed off the stage and they they lose their spot. So this is the the Battle of New Orleans being fought after the war is over because people don't realize the war is over. So even though the policy members might know that, they're dealing with a population that doesn't know...and is just an economic disaster, a real tragedy.
Let me say one more thing about taxes, if I can, and the size of government because I want to make this entirely apolitical (which it should be). The size of government is a political question. How many teachers do we want in the classrooms, how many soldiers do we want in the army -- if you take too many there'll be nobody left to grow the food and we're going to starve, if you take too few we're going to lose the war. These are all political decisions of what resources we want to move from the private sector to the public sector. And you'll have differences of opinion: some people think we need more government, some people think we want less government. But once we've settled politically on the right size government, then there is an appropriate level of taxes that allows the right size deficit, so we have the right amount of savings, to offset our pension needs and stay at full employment. So given that the size of the government is a political decision that shouldn't be based on whether the economy is good or bad -- 'we need a a legal system, how many judges and clerks do we need?' Well you know if there's a 10year wait, maybe we need more. If they're calling you up asking you to see 'why don't you go out and sue somebody, we have people waiting around to have a trial', maybe we've got too many of them. See, you've got to come up with the right size legal system and everything else.
But once you've done that, taxes are the thermostat on the wall. If the economy is ice cold and unemployment's high: you're taking too much money out for the size government we have, and you need lower taxes for that size government. If on the other hand it's overheating, there's too much spending, and prices are going up too fast, and unemployment is too low (whatever that means): then taxes have to be raised because for the size government we have, taxes aren't high enough (we're not taking enough money out). So for this right size government, taxes are the thermostat on the wall. They're not there to balance a budget, to bring in money. We're just changing numbers down, we're changing numbers up. The deficit is a residual. You find out afterwards if it was a right size deficit by counting the bodies in the unemployment line. Not by worrying about 'paying it back' or 'becoming Greece' and all that nonsense -- there is no such thing.
So your question now is "why can't the political process get us there?" And now that you know all this, I'm going to ask you for the answer. Because it's becoming more of a mystery every day. Because the more people I know who know the right answer.... you know, it's almost like the less willing they are. I talked for hours to Senator Blumenthal who read my book Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds (you get it free online, it's an easy read). And he gets the whole thing and he won't do anything -- just sits there. Same with Lieberman from Connecticut (I ran for Senate from Connecticut a couple years ago). Talked to these people, I talked to Hollen, I talked to all kinds of people over the years... and they're not going to be the ones to move us off the dime on this. We've got the academic community starting to get some of the right answers and through the blogs. And it's called mmt: modern monetary theory (somebody gave it a name, wouldn't be the name we chose). It's been expanding rapidly. But it's not there yet: that the only thing between us and full employment and prosperity beyond what anyone can imagine, is the space between our ears. There's nothing else in the way right now: there's no food shortage, there's no shortage of housing, we have surpluses of everything.
Kelton: Warren, remember. I won't say who it was, but Warren and I met with a member of Congress together. And we went through all of this with this person, and when we got done, this person looked at us and said "I can't say that". Not "I don't believe that", "I disagree with that", "you're wrong", "you're crazy" -- "I can't say that"! We have to make it increasingly safe for these folks to say that, to take these positions. And wasn't it FDR who said 'I can't do things, you have to make me do things'.
Mosler: And this is pro-agenda for all of them. The Republicans would love to cut taxes and not have to cut spending. They could agree to that. But they can't...if they cut taxes, they've got to cut spending even more because they think they have to balance the budget, so they don't even do their own tax cuts. Democrats would like to increase spending.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
19hr ago
Right. Making paperwork easier to handle just meant the major constraint on the increase of paperwork was lost, so paperwork increased vastly.
GBRK
19hr ago
but that a good number of people would renounce citizenship and simply go to a place with good infrastructure and low taxes.
That's trivially (although I admit not easily) fixable. Just make it a US government policy to seize noncitizen wealth in or outside its borders. Make lettes of marque great again!
fmac
19hr ago
In the first place, it is not obvious to me how implementing "fiscal responsibility" measures actually results in the country being better-off in any meaningful sense.
Because lots of government debt is bad, so less debt is good
What can be implemented by one government can be overridden by the next government.
Yes but the logical conclusion to this train of thought is that government should never do anything, lest it gets undone in a few years. That sounds like a fucking awful society.
Why invest in defense to preserve sovereignty if the Democrats will just cut it later? Why improve the medical system if the Republicans will rip it up later? Why build this bridge to facilitate commerce if the $OTHER_TEAM might tear it down later?
In the second place, it does not seem prudent to maintain a commons that others have no interest in maintaining and benefit greatly from depleting.
This is true but again if this stance was held at all levels of power you're basically just advocating for anarchy? Why collect garbage and take it to a landfill if other people don't bother to dispose of their garbage properly? Because "most garbage goes to the landfill" is infinitely better than "no garbage goes to the landfill"
In the third place, "my country" is a phrase, not a reality. We are well into the "voting on our rights" stage of the split. Large portions of the country are places I will not willingly visit, much less consider moving to. Increased state capacity is not a benefit to me if I believe that state capacity will be used to violate my rights as a human.
Western nations have gotten pretty cooked, but seriously man you should consider therapy or something because your outlook is profoundly nihilistic, pessimistic, and defeatist. It's making me sad to think about how you think about the world.
Also again, if your beliefs were scaled I'm pretty sure it would immediately lead to anarchy.
How does balancing the budget improve the country's long-term well-being, in concrete terms?
Because perpetual defecits that exceed GDP growth eventually lead to massive inflation, economic collapse, or both? This is bad.
Why is securing this long-term well-being solely the responsibility of the Republican party?
It's not, but I think the defecits feel worse coming from them, hence the focus. They did love going absolutely ape shit over any/all democrat spending during the 2000s/2010s, so it feels hypocritical.
It seems my position has more of a connection to bedrock reality.
Kind of? You're incredibly negative and myopic though, which is a lens you are viewing reality through.
You are appealing to ideals. What evidence do you have that these ideals are workable, and that pursuit of them is likely to lead to an improvement of our actual situation?
That's a good question, but I think you should ask it of yourself. If your ideals were implemented at a government scale, would that make the situation better?
Do you think implementing Fiscal Responsibility will improve Republicans' electoral chances?
Unfortunately not really, I'm honestly kind of worried about our societies inability to deal with anything, but if we give up then we go from "maybe fucked" to "definitely fucked" and I don't see that as an improvement.
Do you think Democrats, having won the subsequent elections, will scrupulously maintain those measures?
Unfortunately not really
fmac
19hr ago
I think this is a really cool idea, and I appreciate being introduced to it. Thank you.
How on earth does it work with buying a house vs renting?
If I buy a house for $100,000 and then sell it for $150,000, is the new buyer taxed on the incremental $50,000? How does that change if that $50k comes from land appreciation vs renovation? What about if you sell a house at a loss?
Does this play as an absurd penalty to rent vs buy? Does renting get 30% more expensive while purchasing used housing stock stays the same price?
quiet_NaN
19hr ago
I think that the narrative that LGBT makes the US weak while rejecting LGBT is what makes the Taliban strong rings even less true than the usual version of the Fremen mirage. The US has the Taliban beaten by a mile on every civilizational and capability index I care about, GPD/person, infant mortality, education attainment, military capabilities, freedom of speech, etc pp. The Taliban clearly beat the US in TFR, but that is not all that hard to do if you are willing to subjugate half of your population and ban non-reproductive sex. "Don't sell your 15 yo daughter to some man twice her age who will breed her continuously for her fertile lifespan" is not a trans agenda. It is not even a feminist agenda, unless your definition of feminism is something wholeheartedly embraced by 95-99% of the US population.
I will not claim that transpersons will make superior frontline soldiers, having gone through male puberty and then continuing to produce male sex hormones is clearly advantageous physically, but I do not think that a few percent of trans people matter. Look, the obesity rate in the US is 40%, and even that is not an insurmountable difficulty for military capabilities. The US army tooth to tail ratio in Iraq was 1:8.1. Think about it as a pyramid. At the base, you have a ton of taxpayers. Then, you have people working in arms manufacturing, writing software for guided missiles and all that. Then, you have eight actual members of the military who are supporting one frontline soldier. Obviously you want that person to be fit, where your gender-neutral criteria may end up excluding many cis-males and almost all of the people who are not cis-males for the job, depending on the specifics (a commando has likely different requirements than a tank commander). But below this, your care for raw strength drops rapidly. Perhaps the person driving the supply truck is a cis-woman. And the guy operating the drone from 50km away is wheelchair-bound. And the person who wrote the software for controlling the drone is a trans-woman and so on.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
Surely, there will some productivity gains from all of this.
Why? Going from paper to digital was a much bigger step, and it created almost no productivity gains.
Throwaway05
19hr ago
That significant minority is definitely a Thing in my book, though, and what makes them stick out like sore thumbs to me is the DRAMA.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Good reminder for me that the certain magnitudes and types of pathology are disproportionately noticeable and dangerous and at the same time they are not representative of the "true" range and median of pathology.
Those people have the temperament and social support to be loud, proud and disruptive.
RE: your wife - I can't speak to the therapist end of things but I have noticed that physicians of all specialties are slowly starting to ask more questions and explore more nuance, but the pipleline (med school) is still quite rigid.
I expect us to loosen up in 5-10 years and for adjacent fields to do the same.
Until then....hang in there ugh.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Yes, it caused the crisis of the third century. Imperial China has also bankrupted itself.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
That has not been my experience with elderly people. Many are confused by the conditions on the ground, sincerely don’t know how expensive their benefits are(after all, they’re not paying for it), and think the stock market benefits everyone.
Others feel bad for young people due to the cost of housing these days, and although they won’t sell their paid off houses that’s because they need to live somewhere. I’ve said before that among my extended family in the ArkLaTex region old people with money are expected to spend it helping out younger relatives get started, either by co-signing loans or direct gifts(or occasionally through coresidence). But more generally, I don’t get the hate over boomer consumption because it is, generally, much lower than the consumption of working people who criticize them on the basis that their resources should be reallocated. Cruises are, on the scale of vacations, pretty cheap. Retirees aren’t DoorDashing much. And boomer housing wealth isn’t actually something they can do much about.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
19hr ago
I saw an Nvidia presentation where Ai can be used to simulate an assembly line or an entire factory or warehouse, including even modeling the physics of the entire process of moving and assembling goods. Surely, there will some productivity gains from all of this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
The Republicans haven't been the party of "fiscal responsibility" any more than the Democrats have been the party of the working class in living memory.
I know. I said as much.
Are you just making a somewhat sardonic argument for accelerationism ("we should just loot the treasury since that's what everyone does when they're in power?")
The way you are framing the issue here is illuminating of my point, I think. I did not use the word "looting". Do you personally recognize entitlement spending as "looting" in other contexts? Does the Democratic party generally? I appreciate that many Republicans have considered entitlement spending as "looting", but why should the party as a whole do so now? Why not argue that the Democrats were right, that government spending is good, and make our own case for the best way to do it? Nor would this be pure cynical posturing. The SLS is a national disgrace in terms of achieving the goals the money was earmarked for. In terms of maintaining some sort of "productive" economic activity in a number of geographically-dispersed communities around the country, maybe it's actually the best of a bad set of options? And if not, under what principles, and who are these principles supposed to be championed by? To the extent that "Entitlement spending is looting" is a case that needs to be made, why not openly invite others to make it by legibly abandoning the position oneself? My party actually spearheaded the GWOT, and a lot of the current tumult is us making a serious effort to strip power from those members of our faction responsible. It is not guaranteed that this will actually resolve the problem, but it's something, isn't it?
In any case, whichever angle one chooses to approach the problem from, it seems unlikely to me that the old shibboleths are productive here.
Every other "budget-cutting measure" (including and especially DOGE) is just theatrics.
From my perspective, DOGE's value comes from it attacking Progressive patronage networks that turn federal tax dollars into progressive political influence, with secondary purposes of normalizing the idea of disruption of disruptive reorganization of sclerotic federal bureaucracy. It actually balancing the budget appears to be a novel political tactic called "lying". It will be interesting to see how this new technique alters our political landscape now that its usefulness has been demonstrated.
The actual solution to the debt is what we've discussed many times: entitlements and defense spending, both of which are regarded as more or less untouchable.
This could actually be a very good time to cut defense spending drastically, provided we can be pretty sure we won't have to fight a war in, say, the next decade. An unknown but likely very large percentage of our current equipment is pretty clearly now obsolete, and the new paradigm has not solidified. Until it does solidify, it seems to me very likely that most military spending will be pure waste. Funding for Ukraine is, perversely, probably the exception, as it can at least be argued that it helps establish the new paradigm. One of the major downsides is that it appears to increase our risk of an actual war.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that, in my view, Defense spending should absolutely be as touchable as entitlement spending, maybe even more so.
Here we hear arguments for AGI saving us, or asteroid mining opening up a new frontier, or Modern Monetary Theory being real, all just variations on "Wish for a miracle." Or are we debating how much ruin is actually left in the nation and whether we or our children will outlive it?
Deus Ex Machina or Ruin do appear to be the likely outcomes, with one significantly likelier than the other. But more generally, the question is whether the tactics we've historically relied upon offer any real traction on these probabilities. Republicans have not, in fact, proved themselves capable of "fiscal responsibility" in any meaningful sense, and it seems at least arguable to me that pretending otherwise makes actual fiscal responsibility harder, not easier.
But you do make a compelling case that rather than hoping for actual economic reform even if it does mean I personally will see my retirement amount to less than it should have been, I should be selfish and just try to grab what I can and hope I'm dead before the shit really hits the fan. Sucks for the kids, though.
"We", surely. Looting individually is far less efficient; many hands make light work. But more generally, if this is the situation, what benefit is derived from pretending otherwise?
fmac
19hr ago
but you can tweak the ages of eligibility and uncap the payroll tax and you have pretty much fixed it.
Like yes, but actually no. Just because the government could raise the age of social security doesn't mean they will. In fact, I am deeply and profoundly confident they never will, unless the country is in active meltdown.
I cannot imagine a better way to get BTFO in a western election.
Although France did it, and it's not repealed yet, so maybe it's possible.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
19hr ago
Bitcoin continues to be useless for organized crime due to the transparency and permanence of the blockchain . There is no way to cash out even if the transactions are anonymous and not tied to a person.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
I mean, pro-Americanism in the third world often has a different aesthetic- cowboy hats, pickup trucks, country music…
Approximately everyone, after all, likes dancing, beer, BBQ, sports, etc. But it’s often difficult to see the appeal of socially liberal norms when you don’t already want them.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
But LGBT might be unpopular enough to push them away from the US, especially in Africa but potentially also in Latin America, where the default position is to be part of the U.S. sphere and so changes need to be weighed against the generally favorable baseline.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
20hr ago
Good point. I was thinking in practical terms (where he has nothing to lose), but forgot how ego-driven the man is.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
20hr ago
Buffett ALWAYS talks his book, he wants to sell annuities to people making 200k to 1m a year and knows they could set his tax rate at 200% and he still wouldn't pay taxes (because he almost never does anything that is taxable).
zoink
20hr ago
That got me thinking. Even if a AI robot couldn't be out there swinging a hammer with me a camera that can take in the situation and tell me what to do, pre order the parts,, then walk me through through the work would be really hand in construction, and working on vehicles. Probably cut my 5 trips to Home Depot to replace the water heater to 2. Or that time I wired in heater take into the wrong run of Romex and now it only turns on when the downstairs kitchen light is turned off...
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
The reality is that to balance the budget you have to answer- who do you want to kill? Grandma or our soldiers? And nobody willing to answer that question will ever get elected.
The political realities mean the debt will be paid for by 1) inflation and 2) lying about the debt(your social security checks will not go as far as promised, sorry). The government will bail out load bearing sectors of the economy, maybe at third remove, but the average person will see a decline in purchasing power. Maybe to Western European levels, maybe not. It’ll be a prolonged economic crisis and that will cause political instability but there’s a lot of ruin in a country.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20hr ago
A superpower going bankrupt is very much précédented(Russia in the nineties).
We're talking global reserve currency here. Did Rome ever go bankrupt? That's the closest analogy I could think of.
Oh, I'm not disagreeing with that, even though it would be to my personal detriment. But on the one hand, you are talking about things we could do to improve the economy and the country. On the other hand, you argue that we should not bother to do that because you don't want the other party to have a stronger economy to work with when they come into power. So I am a little confused what you actually want if it's not "Assume everyone is in defect mode and loot what we can."
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