domain:acoup.blog
aqouta
1m ago
It is not clear to me that this is absurd, given that revenues rose after the cuts were initially enacted.
revenue was already trending up due to a market boom. Classic economics would say that you should pay down your debts during a market boom, but we opted to run the market even hotter. An argument can be made for this, but not one that pretends to be concerned with government debt load. but this is a slightly different question. It would probably be helpful to look at an actual chart of US tax receipts and a chart of US GDP around the time of the DJT tax cuts(Jan 1 2018) you can see that GDP continue to trend up and the tax receipts stayed stagnant. The GDP trend really doesn't seem to react much if at all to the tax cuts indicating we're not really touching that laffer curve at all.
You're expressing a high degree of confidence that tax hikes won't negatively impact the economy. Why?
Tax hikes do slow the economy, no one really contests that. The question is does it slow it down so much that they actually lower tax receipts, which just there is no real indication of this happening and places with much higher taxes don't really even see this happening. The laffer curve is a theoretical thing and there is no reason to believe we're on the edge of it.
Bartender_Venator
5m ago
Hey, you could be an invertebrate that gets eaten alive by its young or, conversely, an invertebrate that gets to eat the smaller male after mating! I think it's fair to say this book is arguing that, to evolution, nobody and nothing has any "worth" at all except insofar as they can effectively replicate their genes by successful reproduction (except possibly their caloric value to something higher up the food chain). You're anthropomorphizing a blind and utterly callous force of nature, and even anthropomorphizing it as assigning rather modern values to its objects.
KingOfTheBailey
12m ago
Let me spruik Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out in his memory, as well. Its broader thesis around establishing a right-counterculture is interesting, but the stuff about the idiot box was an absolute thunderbolt when I read it:
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
This was one of pieces of writing that really made me interested in selecting better media for the relatives around me, because so much childrens' media is agenda-pushing slop these days. Cheap 3D animation that an N64 dev would be embarrassed to ship, all sorts of horrid behavior, and studiously compliant with current-yearism (how exactly did your token wheelchair-bound character make it into the rocky field?).
aqouta
17m ago
There are many more factors that go into tax receipts than just the tax rate. The economy itself was booming, a trend that predated the tax cuts, and inflation juiced the nominal rate. The straightforward reduction in revenue is that we would have collected substantially more revenue without the cuts to the tune of trillions of dollars.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
22m ago
According to diplomatic memoirs and record, Hocha arrived to March 1939 negotiations because they were demanded by Germans. In the "negotiations", the Germans threatened Hocha with outright shooting war and bombing of Prague unless he surrendered without fight. that is called an "ultimatum", not negotiation.
Germans and Hungarians had the troops who proceeded with full occupation of the country within a day after the negotiations concluded, so the ultimatum was backed by force.
More damning, existing treaties had guaranteed independence of a Czhechoslovakia. Second round of negotiations on the topic of cessation of remaining independent Czechoslovakia and its annexation to Germany was a blatant aggression. The annexation was equally as voluntary as annexation of the Baltics to the U.S.S.R in 1940, which is, not at all.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
30m ago
It doesn't seem that absurd to me. The guards outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.
This might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen you write. Of course even if there were 1 billion prisoners and 150 guards the guards would outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.
There's no statements to the effect that 100% of the security force or garrison was involved in managing the prisoners- quite the opposite, with the vast majority of the work was said to have been done and orchestrated by the unarmed Jewish "Sonderkommando" with little guard presence.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
30m ago
Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue. No it is absurd to suggest we are on the side of the Laffer curve where higher taxes would reduce total tax revenue, we're not even close to that point and no one seriously suggests we are.
It is not clear to me that this is absurd, given that revenues rose after the cuts were initially enacted. The thing about the Laffer curve is that it's only ever a post-hoc explanation. You're expressing a high degree of confidence that tax hikes won't negatively impact the economy. Why?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
31m ago
Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue.
...If tax receipts did in fact increase, how is this a straightforward reduction in revenue?
faceh
33m ago
Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.
having a lower debt burden is in fact a way us tax payers are benefiting.
Yeah, so tying tax increases with actual entitlement spending cuts would in theory be palatable. But you're going to piss off the groups who rely on that spending, who can then vote for people who promise to restore the spending and keep the taxes high.
So the promise of "I'm raising your taxes, but don't worry I'm only using it to decrease the debt" is not intrinsically reliable.
That's the Gordian knot, as it were.
aqouta
40m ago
Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue. No it is absurd to suggest we are on the side of the Laffer curve where higher taxes would reduce total tax revenue, we're not even close to that point and no one seriously suggests we are. They are not justified as a means to maximize tax revenue, only on the grounds that people like to have more money and they will if they are taxed less. A position I think is reasonable but it's at direct odds with a desire to pay off the national debt. If we're serious about paying down the national debt we have to raise taxes and there is no real alternative, even if you cut entitlements to the bone.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
43m ago
At some point, student loans are mostly bad debt and bad debt does have to be dealt with. I'm curious what makes student loan forgiveness a 'disastrous' as opposed to merely sub-optimal policy.
Expected downstream effects. After the first round of forgiveness, universities will jack tuition prices at an even more exhorbitant rate than the last 50 years, blow the money on stupid amenities and inspid activism, while telling every potential student "It's free money! Just don't pay it back and tthe next time a Dem is in office it'll be forgiven!"
TIRM
46m ago
these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far
I would say the opposite. An escalating purity spiral could result in which people keep one upping each other in how extreme they are and punishing those who don't keep up. Like the worst parts of the Cultural Revolution.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
46m ago
The "Sonderkommando" were not armed and there would have been a danger of them joining in on the riot. The idea that <150 guards (assuming every single guard and SS officer was at every single transport, which is not attested to) would be sufficient for the task of forcing 2,000 people to walk to their deaths without resistance is absurd.
It doesn't seem that absurd to me. The guards outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.
At Treblinka it's claimed the perimeter was secured merely with a barbed wire fence interwoven with tree branches. US prisons keep prisoners in very secure conditions, the ratio of guards to prisoners assumes most prisoners are secured in a cell. More importantly, US prisoners do not exterminate crowds of prisoners, and if they did they would not rely on a 4:1 ratio.
Arm the guards with automatic weapons and make it clear that they're ready and willing to use them and will suffer no consequences for doing so, and I bet we could get American prisons down to considerably less that a 14:1 ratio.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
48m ago
Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.
Wasn't that an extension of the previous tax cuts? After which tax revenues went up, suggesting we were on the good side of the Laffer curve? Were there different cuts, or do you have a reason to expect no negative consequences to tax hikes?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
50m ago
Not so with Trump. He is acting with a self-interest that would make most kleptocrats blush. He will happily burn 100$ of commons to earn 1$ for himself.
This seems silly. Trump almost certainly lost money going into politics, no? What parts of his governance look like that to you? The most obvious ways for politicians to arrange such things are foreign adventurism, warmongering, and massive trillion dollar boondoggle bills for easily embezzled projects, and Trump has been pretty opposed to all of those things.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
53m ago
No, I was saying that Liberals, not the 'classical liberals' but the ones that vote Dem and are very performatively anti-Trump for reasons independent of his actual policies
This is why I make a point of calling them progressives. It's more true and causes less confusion when there are libertarians about.
If I ended up in a situation where I found myself trying to land a 747, I wouldn't be doing things for "no reason" in the cockpit, but it would be a mistake to think that I had a coherent plan to land the plane except to the extent that I'm aware that landing the plane requires reducing speed and reducing altitude.
If you didn't understand how the controls work or how to read the instruments, it would be pretty close to just flailing around in there. I mean, you might not crash the plane right away, but all you can do intentionally is experiment to figure out the controls, or radio for assistance. Maybe we could say you have "the concepts of a plan" though!
But sure. You could analogize that to Trump 1.
I think its somewhat evident that Trump 2 has an idea of how the 'controls' of his office work and is better at reading the 'instruments' in terms of how he is progressing.
Do you actually think that Trump is going to make a dent in the debt crisis?
Yes. I think there's a >50% chance that the Debt-to-GDP ratio is lower when Trump officially exits office than it was when he came in.
If I want to hedge a bit, I'd say that the average Debt to GDP ratio for the 4 years Trump is President will end up being lower than the 4 preceding years of Biden. But that's cheating a bit considering the massive hike that occurred in 2020.
If I'm correct, would that make the problem 'solved?' Hell no not by a long shot. But its a start.
and much more interested in putting down some actual predictions about the debt to GDP ratio and seeing who's right in three years, because I don't think that either of us is going to convince the other.
Ayyy this is very fair. NOTE, my position is based more on my belief that certain economic developments in e.g., Robotics, or Space industry, or continued AI progress will boost economic growth in the meantime. Trump's role will be more in removing the barriers that have hampered such industries, rather than him actually passing new laws.
This is ALREADY happening in Argentina! Milei's plan of just cutting as much red tape as possible as quickly as possible has worked!
So, not discounting that black swans could happen, I think its reasonable that similar changes will occur in the U.S.
So yeah, Debt to GDP will work for me, but I'll be much more finicky on the size of the shift in three years.
aqouta
57m ago
The position I'm responding to is that Trump cracking a few eggs of norms is worth it if that's what it takes to get the debt under control I'm pointing out that we're getting eggs cracked and the debt is not being taken under control. I'm sure we could have some debate about how best to get the debt under control, I agree some reductions in entitlements, particularly the absurd wealth transfer from the young to the old that is medicare and to a slightly less absurd degree social security come to mind. But as far as I can tell we have a bunch of cracked eggs and rather than a balanced budget omelet we have nothing to show for it. Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.
Or, alternatively, explain to the various taxpayers why THEY should be on the hook for programs they generally don't receive a direct benefit from.
I would like the extra costs to be put towards paying down the debt, having a lower debt burden is in fact a way us tax payers are benefiting.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1hr ago
You were taught that every Jew killed in the camps was herded through gas chambers believing they were taking a shower?
I say, it is a scissor: no, median history textbook probably was not supposed to teach that. But it is quite likely the textbook was similar to what I recall: there were some numbers of total deaths, some images and descriptive text of situation of concentration camps, naming the most famous one. Add "explanations" by a teacher who was not very detail-oriented, apply some non-classroom sources such as documentaries and lazy newspaper articles concentrating on making Nazis look bad than getting details right, people easily leap to making connections between most salient details they misremember and think they were thought ("6 million murdered in Auschwitz gas chambers that look exactly like shower rooms" sums up my understanding as a pre-teen).
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
Yes? Specifically for mouseworld the nearest example doesn't involve being dashingly wounded,
That is fascinating, in an uncanny valley kind of way. The wounding is the key part, imo, and the resulting reverse expression of concern. I remember conversations when I was younger where the boys all agreed that the ideal dream was for a woman to gently touch the scars/wounds you'd heroically earned and dramatically gasp. I feel like I've seen that moment in a hundred action movies, and it's the pivotal one for establishing the relationship between the love interest and male protagonist. It a moment where a man is allowed to be vulnerable without it ever counting against him.
Altogether, it makes this code as a female fantasy to me, because the locus of concern is on her, but I can't discount that I'm seeing what I expect to see, because I already know the boy mouse is a transman. I might post those three images together without any explanation, and just ask the boys what they make of it.
To give the more general argument: if you believe "FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity", how does this explain the presence of transman who present (perhaps depressed) masculinity, but like femininity in others around them, such as by having (cis, femme) female romantic and/or sexual partners, close female platonic friends, or (if sexually attracted to men) liking feminine men?
I don't have enough personal experience to say anything particularly relevant aboout their internal states. I'll just say this: observed from a distance, though clips and articles and the one "boy" my daughter was friends with, the way they approach masculinity/manliness does not seem congruent with my own experience (which I often find to be broadly applicable when conversing with other cis men). From my distant POV, I don't see much reason to think there's a similar internal experience to what I experience, or my son experiences.
Is there an explanation that can separate itself from the trans-internal claim of just not liking being/being seen as feminine?
Honestly, I figured this was a lot of it. The few transmen I've encountered IRL had a strong tendency to an unfortunate "It's Pat!" type of presentation. I assumed there was a fair bit of "You can't fire me, femininity, I quit!".
But that's why I asked.
In my experience, people manage to exit and enter subway cars and airplanes with bare minimum of cooperation
Do you have any experience with large crowds of thousands of people walking orderly towards confined imminent danger and death? Obviously people coordinate disembarking an airplane because they want to travel. At Auschwitz it's claimed that 2,000+ Jews at a time were crammed in a 7m x 30m room, over 9 people per square meter. LLM estimates the density of people is 1-1.5 people per square meter in a full airplane. You are unwilling or unable to grasp the scale of what you are claiming happened. Marching people into such a confined space in which they knew they were going to be killed would be an extremely difficult task, if not outright impossible. You physically cannot fit enough guards in the structure to force the crowd to do anything, the process would entirely rely on the cooperation of the victims to achieve this process we are told was virtually seamless and routine.
Yad Vashem estimates that Treblinka received typically a single trainload of 60 cars with 7,000 prisoners, with max 20 cars brought into camp at single time, with some fraction dead during transport, yielding 2,000 prisoners herded through enclosed route to their deaths.
The "Sonderkommando" were not armed and there would have been a danger of them joining in on the riot. The idea that <150 guards (assuming every single guard and SS officer was at every single transport, which is not attested to) would be sufficient for the task of forcing 2,000 people to walk to their deaths without resistance is absurd. At Treblinka it's claimed the perimeter was secured merely with a barbed wire fence interwoven with tree branches. US prisons keep prisoners in very secure conditions, the ratio of guards to prisoners assumes most prisoners are secured in a cell. More importantly, US prisoners do not exterminate crowds of prisoners, and if they did they would not rely on a 4:1 ratio.
When it comes to the execution of a single prisoner, there is a huge number of personnel and security to manage the execution of a single prisoner. Comparing security in general population to security in the execution of 2,000 people is apples and oranges.
The mainstream position includes several factors: the prisoners were starved and dehydrated after days in unsanitary train cars
Does starvation and dehydration explain a crowd of people so diligently cooperating in their own mass execution? Of course it doesn't. Look at the picture of the claimed density of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It is absurd to believe that those people put so much effort to allow the Germans to kill them instead of panicking and ruining the entire operation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
Then those people are rewarding effective corruption. Further, how do their opinions change now that more and more of the spying and hoaxing are being revealed with actual documentation?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
I would narrow it to "Consider that perhaps a plan exists rather than think he's flailing around and screwing with things for no reason.
Talking about Trump doing things for "no reason" is basically a strawman of the anti-Trump position. If I ended up in a situation where I found myself trying to land a 747, I wouldn't be doing things for "no reason" in the cockpit, but it would be a mistake to think that I had a coherent plan to land the plane except to the extent that I'm aware that landing the plane requires reducing speed and reducing altitude.
And as I mentioned, it's not a given that Trump is actually trying to land the plane at all. He may be content to let the next guy try to land it instead.
If you don't think there's a plan, then what exactly are we seeing? And why does it often seem to work out for him?
Very astute, and this ties in to your final point. "The plan," to the extent that it exists, is mostly around Trump increasing his status and self image rather than helping the country. And I think that works perfectly - Trump is certainly better off than he was before he took office. Is the country? Not so sure about that.
I'm guessing that he's aiming/hoping for unleashed economic growth
Yeah, sure, everyone loves economic growth, or at least, they say they do. However, the problem is that not every policy actually increases economic growth, and for people like Trump who have a multi-decade bee in their bonnet about certain policies (like tariffs), it's implementing the policy that's the focus rather than achieving economic growth.
Let's get down to brass tacks here. Do you actually think that Trump is going to make a dent in the debt crisis? Or is this all just playing devil's advocate? Because if you really do think that he's going to make an impact, I'm much less interested in discussing the 4D chess moves that may or may not suddenly come down the pipe without warning and much more interested in putting down some actual predictions about the debt to GDP ratio and seeing who's right in three years, because I don't think that either of us is going to convince the other.
And if you don't actually believe, then this whole conversation is pointless.
FeepingCreature
1hr ago
How would we prove if Republican presidents have in fact been getting worse by this metric? The comment kinda only applies if there isn't a trend.
You don't have to actually cut entitlements at all. You can just raise taxes and use that money to pay down the debt(or at least close the deficit so you aren't creating more debt). The guy in the the white house can make that call. My point is we're currently breaking eggs and receiving no omelet.
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