What's really striking is the current administration performed one of the most brutal cost cutting programs in recent memory. And despite the massive amount of disruption caused (and to be caused) there is almost nothing to show for it financially. Just pennies in the ashtray of a Lamborghini.
Obviously the people behind it were not serious, and did nothing to actually address government waste or reform the welfare system. But the result is the same - the idea of cost cutting as a means of addressing the deficit is effectively dead. There is no dry powder on the "slash budgets" side of the ledger. All that's left is raising taxes. (Or do nothing until there's an actual hyperinflation event).
At some point I realized: there is no plan to fix it. Both of the parties are just hoping that the upcoming crisis happens while the other party is in power.
The Two Santas strategy <https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santa...> is the American implementation of the famous Alexander Fraser Tytler quote: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Good times have made weak men. People unwilling to stand up for our values. Afraid to even declare what we stand for. Afraid to be proud of our traditions and what makes our way of life superior and worth defending and fighting for. These weak people will vote for candidates who demoralise us and weaken us and ensure our demise.
One characteristic of democracy is that it is ever-rewritten by those who strive to change it and vote. (Also, occasionally assassination, in Long's case)
That is extraordinary insightful. It's frightening to see how correct it is, and to recognise that Europe and the US are both well past the abundance phase.
There would be abundance if the trillionaires were happy with 5% returns and invested in housing instead of gambling (and being bailed out eventually) on "Super Intelligence".
> The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Sounds like total bullshit. I briefly googled it and apart from AI also telling me that it was total bullshit, the first list I found split the Roman empire in two so it would neatly match the hypothesis!
Someone just thought of that and then found data to fit their neat idea.
>> The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
> Sounds like total bullshit.
You're right. It more like an avg of 118 years (median 73), not 200, depending on what you mean by "greatest" ofc. The Ancient Romans, US, and Dutch pulling that average up and 1/3 of historically modern continuing democracies having a short lifespan being founded around WW2, pulling it down.
The Roman Empire was not stable for an uninterrupted period of time. It's conceptually called a single state for simplicity, because such a large period of time and area of land naturally had instability (less than current Europe, granted). The Roman Empire democratic government lasted about 487 years before falling into autocratic rule.
It turns out that I'm not impressed with "we still have a deficit, but it's smaller than under the previous administration". No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable.
Who cares if you’re impressed when you’ve fallen for propaganda (I guess maybe politicians care).
“No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”
Why not? Deficits can be healthy and safe when they’re managed. Literally most persons, businesses, and governments use debt. It helps manage purchases over time, and it’s an inflationary hedge.
The idea that “any deficit is bad” was literally pushed as propaganda to make you fatalistic about managing the deficit. As said, one party raises it, one party lowers it, and the party that raises it claims that lowering it to anything but zero is “just as bad” as their runaway debt growth. Propaganda.
That is an amazingly flawed idea. By that reasoning, only a neutral budget is acceptable, and a positive debt surplus a boon. Unfortunately, the opposite is empirically true: the only places running total budget surpluses tend to be undemocratic shitholes because they need to promise nothing and do not rely upon the consent of the governed to loan them savings and pay them taxes.
That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.
I’ve been in municipalities and provinces running healthy surpluses and the economy booms during those times. People do better and schools are better run and so on. And for that matter, Canada boomed after the government fixed the budget in the late 90s. We went south again when the new government showed a complete lack of respect for money.
Were those municipalities and provinces receiving any money from the federal government and is that how they had surpluses? That's certainly how it works here in the US.
Well, the goal is not to impress HN user bigstrat2003. The goal is to have a government and country that continue to function. A fiscal deficit by itself is not a bad thing, and I suspect you would have an extraordinarily difficult time coming up with coherent arguments to the contrary.
1. They’re unable to get enough support to pass more taxes (yet), so “balancing the budget” after republicans lower them on the rich would mean killing people by cutting services.
2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.
3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.
4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.
that's yet another "both sides are the same!" fallacy
you are right in that neither can fix it entirely
only one party consistently raises the debt->deficit
and only one party consistently lowers it
hint: you cannot spend $21 TRILLION on militarizing the country and going to war without exploding the deficit, there's no profit in war, only massive expense
and that $21 Trillion was before the Iran War which is going to go on for years and cost another trillion to replace all the weapons and ships, remember all those bases and planes that were destroyed which this administration is covering up
Doing the both sides thing here is so, so frustrating… Obama and Biden both spent big to avoid/alleviate recession conditions, that is true. But it’s just not comparable at all:
1. First off: the deficit article were commenting under right now. This is unusual and terrible and 100% due to GOP norm breaking.
2. The BBB raised the debt astronomically, so this will continue well past the end of the war.
3. We’re engaged in a war of choice with a huge country with no end in sight and no stated objective, and the pentagon is getting more money than ever.
4. The corruption and graft is so rank and blatant that it might actually make a dent here, which is absurd. God forbid they carry out their ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and then we pay for Trump City, there. Not to mention all the subordinate graft.
5. Only one party has divorced itself from reason entirely. Democrats are deeply flawed and I disagree with many of them on many things, but none of them dare try the ‘nuh uh shut up’ approach that is central to the GOP in the days of Trump. Imagine if they said anything as absurd as “Haitians are eating our cats and dogs” or “I’ll give everyone $5k” or “I didn’t lose the election that every single watchdog said I did” — they would be lambasted and forgotten within days.
6. Only one party is planning for the other party to ever be in power ever again. That is, assuming you don’t take Miller’s word for it that there are seven bajillion illegal aliens that the democrats ship in to win elections, which just hasn’t happened to work yet because the GOP is just too popular, and hasn’t been uncovered in any actual investigations because they’re just too darn tricky.
Sorry. Presumably this whole thread will be wiped anyway. But this is not a “both parties” thing! We’ve had a balanced budget and a positive treasury balance in my lifetime, and I’m a baby person!
(People said it was impossible then as well, FWIW.)
It’s important to remember that Obama and Biden’s predecessors also both spent big to alleviate those economic problems.
I’m convinced that a big part of our political woes come from the fact that major elections are at the end of the year. Obama election, 2008. Great financial crisis, 2008. So who oversaw the big bailouts and massively spiked the deficit dealing with the crisis? Obama, of course. Except it wasn’t, it was Bush.
Likewise, Biden 2020. Pandemic 2020. Who oversaw lockdowns and massive federal payroll loans and big government checks sent out? Biden! (No, Trump.)
Bullshit on the lazy “both parties are the same” framing. Bill Clinton actually balanced the federal budget and ran a $236 billion surplus in 2000. His 1993 deficit-reduction package passed without a single Republican vote. You just keep eating up the Republican bullshit...
It's overly simplistic to say that Clinton balanced the budget. While the 1993 bill raised taxes and reduced defense spending, there would not have been a surplus without further cuts driven by Republicans in 1997.
There was also the dot-com boom, which of course wouldn't have happened without Al Gore inventing the Internet.
The pattern is extremely clear. During my lifetime, the deficit had increased under Republican presidents and decreased under Democrats. This has held steady for decades. That’s the more important thing than the question of exactly why one of them managed to get it to zero one time.
I agree that Republicans are probably worse on this topic, but as far as I can tell, the parties are closer to parity on this than they were in 1993. The Democratic party doesn't seem have people like Bill any more.
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Thanks I agree its very relevant to a lot of things too especially societal/political paradigms that will never end without a gigantic shift that is AI. Glad you can see through the noise and understand that too
The US federal deficit is growing at an alarming rate; if nothing is done, it will solve itself with inflation. US debt is denominated in USD, so the US will not default; the value of money just steadily declines until the debt burden matches the capacity of the US economy to pay for it. Also, US tax rates are relatively low, US can pay the debt by increasing tax rate if there is political will.
The country with the worst debt crisis is France. Their tax rate is 40%, they don't have their own currency (It's EUR), they have a large primary deficit and it's politically impossible to cut spending. EU must rescue France in next 4-5 years.
Some mitigating circumstances are COVID in his first term (also effecting Biden), but there's also a lot of 'self-inflicted' damage, especially the last two years.
It turns out tax cuts may not actually pay for themselves (never mind ill-considered military adventures).
> obama nearly doubled the national debt in 8 years ($11T -> $22T).
Helping to recover from the GFC (which happened under the GOP). Notice how the deficit in Obama's second term was way lower than his first term? Notice how Obama2 isn't that much more than Bush2 (who started all sorts of military adventures)?
Way to change the goal post when we are discussing budget deficits. Even then Obama added around $10 trillion to debt in eight years. Trump added close to $8 trillion in just four years in his first term.
In 2009, the budget deficit had risen to $1.42 trillion thanks to the massive bailouts of financial institutions. By 2016, when Obama left the office, it was down to $0.59 trillion.[1]
> obama nearly doubled the national debt in 8 years ($11T -> $22T). this is not a problem specific to a party or a president
It's almost like there was a Republican-policy-created crisis that called for massive spending in his term. And then he expanded healthcare for many people who'd never get it otherwise!
But that pales in comparison to the Russian diesel that's going to bring down my gas prices, and my private investment in arms manufacture that's growing quite well these days. So yes, we're doing much better with the debts incurred by the current administration.
>It's almost like there was a Republican-policy-created crisis that called for massive spending in his term.
As an European it's pretty funny to read this thread. "Your party debt was reckless and incompetent. My party debt was necessary and caused by your party anyway". Seriously, having just two parties looks like nightmare for democracy.
Having said that, before I get crucified as a centrist, there are bad and worse, and Trump is clearly worse.
The level of debt is an issue when the revenue doesn't cover the spending, leading to a budget deficit. Obama reduced the deficit even after he increased the debt. Trump increased the debt and reduced the revenue widening the deficit. That's not the same thing.
The deficit is an illusion. We owe most of it to ourselves. The real problem is balance of trade and steady deindustrialization, which no administration has been able to tackle yet.
It’s a question of inputs and outputs.
Right now we’re moving towards more balanced trade by shipping gold overseas. Nonmonetary gold and metals are our largest export YTD. That’s not going to work forever.
We need to take one on the chin and allow the currency to devalue versus gold, then revalue the gold reserves which haven’t been revalued since 1973. It will result in some short term pain, but it doesn’t have to fall in the usual distribution. (Distribution of financial pain is a policy choice.)
Only after the currency is weakened will manufacturing return home. Gold revaluation can be used to buy back some bonds to reduce the interest expense.
Edit: to the drive by downvotes, if you’ve got a better idea then free to share it. This is the only option I’ve seen recently that may work before we’re in a total crisis. I don’t love it either, but this actually puts the process in our control rather than having it happen involuntarily. Continued devaluation of the dollar is guaranteed at this point.
If you print you cause more inflation and all the debt you need to renew requires higher yield to shift. So in practice printing yourself out of trouble is in itself a cause of trouble
It doesn’t just print money. It raises money or backs it by assets. It amazes me that people have no understanding of basic economics, or what qualitative easing is. Study the 2008 financial crisis to understand the power of modern monetary theory.
It works great, right up until it doesn't, according to historians.
According to anthropologists, we are all still the same barbarians we've ever been.
According to biology, scarcity ( the ultimate downstream effect outcome of money printing in the US since at least 1971 ) promotes aggression and reduced breeding.
According to Confucious, it's good to live in interesting times, unless that was meant as a curse ?
$1 billion/day way the initial estimate, but it was never actually that high. CBO estimates $38B through August 1, or ~ $7B/month. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62756
I've tried this ~2 months ago with GPT pro and lost the chat. Basically assumming a scenario where it has technocratic control over the budget and it has to manage it.
It really didn't come up with anything crazy. It was basically cutting spending and raising and creating new taxes. With the plan being to spread the pain based on tolerability and medium to long term sustainability. With actions like a fedral consumption tax with planned rebates depending on household wealth.
Its also tried to be careful around things that might create long term problems like dramatic education cuts and what not.
The reforms it gives are altogether pretty numerically radical but its not radical in the internet way where its a polarized solution. It's not a reddit style eat the rich or a business trickle down wealth solution.
You're half joking but that is what will happen. We don't dare interfere with the military or police or the comfort of billionaires so obviously we need to make life even worse for poor people and old people.
The smart thing to do would be to raise taxes (not just on the wealthy) and cut entitlements. Reducing the deficit would indeed slow down inflation, give the Fed room to cut interest rates, and boost business investment. The economy would be in a much healthier place.
There's no "entitlements" you can cut that wouldn't cause more harm to the economy than they would save up in federal spending. And there isn't enough income that taxing it to pay off the debt would be practical. You have to tax capital, that's where the entire world's wealth has been sucked up in the last decades. That's the only solution that doesn't involve the country defaulting on its debts.
Billionaires know that and are already starting to speak against such taxes[0], before there's even any real possibility of them being adopted. They would rather see everything turn to shit than give back a single cent.
Targeting "entitlements" as a universal fix ignores both the fiscal math and the human costs. Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending; cutting it just shifts uncompensated care burdens onto hospitals and inflates private premiums. Cutting programs like SNAP and WIC means pulling food support from children, which causes long-term economic damage.
If the goal is deficit reduction through spending cuts, policy needs to evaluate actual economic ROI. Programs like nutritional and income supports have positive fiscal multipliers, which is why blunt austerity measures trigger negative feedback loops and contract growth.
Spending cuts have a place, but treating entitlements as a slush fund without accounting for the economic return or impact on people isn’t a productive policy proposal.
>Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending;
I heard US healthcare, rather famously, spends more per capita than any country in the world, despite still being rather terrible. Maybe the solution is actually reforming it in an European way (including universal free healthcare)? Your other points are very interesting to me, especially negative feedback loops of austerity - I never thought about that before.
What's really striking is the current administration performed one of the most brutal cost cutting programs in recent memory. And despite the massive amount of disruption caused (and to be caused) there is almost nothing to show for it financially. Just pennies in the ashtray of a Lamborghini.
Obviously the people behind it were not serious, and did nothing to actually address government waste or reform the welfare system. But the result is the same - the idea of cost cutting as a means of addressing the deficit is effectively dead. There is no dry powder on the "slash budgets" side of the ledger. All that's left is raising taxes. (Or do nothing until there's an actual hyperinflation event).
I would settle for "not actively cutting taxes while claiming you're balancing the budget."
The DOGE cuts last year were paired with, yes, massive tax cuts for the rich: [0]
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...
At some point I realized: there is no plan to fix it. Both of the parties are just hoping that the upcoming crisis happens while the other party is in power.
The Two Santas strategy <https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santa...> is the American implementation of the famous Alexander Fraser Tytler quote: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
-
It reminds me of the quote from G. Michael Hopf:
> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Good times have made weak men. People unwilling to stand up for our values. Afraid to even declare what we stand for. Afraid to be proud of our traditions and what makes our way of life superior and worth defending and fighting for. These weak people will vote for candidates who demoralise us and weaken us and ensure our demise.
It feels like we're seeing a bit of a turn in things... we'll see.
I was struck yesterday by reading Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth" proposals from the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_Our_Wealth#Proposed_legi...
One characteristic of democracy is that it is ever-rewritten by those who strive to change it and vote. (Also, occasionally assassination, in Long's case)
Today we are dominated by weak men afraid of what a greater mass of weak men might say about them or accuse them of.
The lion doesn't concern itself with the opinion of sheep.
That is extraordinary insightful. It's frightening to see how correct it is, and to recognise that Europe and the US are both well past the abundance phase.
There would be abundance if the trillionaires were happy with 5% returns and invested in housing instead of gambling (and being bailed out eventually) on "Super Intelligence".
Cultural inability to advance?
Otherwise known as anacyclosis. It's a cycle.
This is some quaint editorial work, and compelling, but this totalizing historical assertion is smuggling a lot it assumptions into the conversation.
Plus I don’t think history plays this a-to-b. Counter examples are out there, Ottoman empire, Assyrian empire, Spartans.
> they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.
It isn't 2024 any more and you cannot repeat that election campaign.
Under the Trump administration, nothing goes to the voters and everything goes to BigTech, the MIC and Trump's friends.
Yeah, the quote comes across as the rich + elites upset that the poors want government programs too.
> The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Sounds like total bullshit. I briefly googled it and apart from AI also telling me that it was total bullshit, the first list I found split the Roman empire in two so it would neatly match the hypothesis!
Someone just thought of that and then found data to fit their neat idea.
>> The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
> Sounds like total bullshit.
You're right. It more like an avg of 118 years (median 73), not 200, depending on what you mean by "greatest" ofc. The Ancient Romans, US, and Dutch pulling that average up and 1/3 of historically modern continuing democracies having a short lifespan being founded around WW2, pulling it down.
The Roman Empire was not stable for an uninterrupted period of time. It's conceptually called a single state for simplicity, because such a large period of time and area of land naturally had instability (less than current Europe, granted). The Roman Empire democratic government lasted about 487 years before falling into autocratic rule.
https://amarkfoundation.org/reports/u-s-presidents-and-the-f..., though you could just google the topic and click exactly any link, clearly shows that Republican admins grow the deficit, Democratic admins shrink it.
These are just straight up numbers increasing or decreasing. It’s not complicated shit. Quit equivocating.
And this might mean something if the President created the budget.
The president effectively does because of Veto. They inly cant control the most bipartisan aspects which is very limited today.
It turns out that I'm not impressed with "we still have a deficit, but it's smaller than under the previous administration". No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable.
Who cares if you’re impressed when you’ve fallen for propaganda (I guess maybe politicians care).
“No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”
Why not? Deficits can be healthy and safe when they’re managed. Literally most persons, businesses, and governments use debt. It helps manage purchases over time, and it’s an inflationary hedge.
The idea that “any deficit is bad” was literally pushed as propaganda to make you fatalistic about managing the deficit. As said, one party raises it, one party lowers it, and the party that raises it claims that lowering it to anything but zero is “just as bad” as their runaway debt growth. Propaganda.
That is an amazingly flawed idea. By that reasoning, only a neutral budget is acceptable, and a positive debt surplus a boon. Unfortunately, the opposite is empirically true: the only places running total budget surpluses tend to be undemocratic shitholes because they need to promise nothing and do not rely upon the consent of the governed to loan them savings and pay them taxes.
That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.
I’ve been in municipalities and provinces running healthy surpluses and the economy booms during those times. People do better and schools are better run and so on. And for that matter, Canada boomed after the government fixed the budget in the late 90s. We went south again when the new government showed a complete lack of respect for money.
Were those municipalities and provinces receiving any money from the federal government and is that how they had surpluses? That's certainly how it works here in the US.
Ah.
So you don’t understand the concept of sovereignty then.
Well, the goal is not to impress HN user bigstrat2003. The goal is to have a government and country that continue to function. A fiscal deficit by itself is not a bad thing, and I suspect you would have an extraordinarily difficult time coming up with coherent arguments to the contrary.
If you keep shrinking it then eventually it will go away. The only reason it hasn’t gone to zero is that the shrinking keeps getting interrupted.
1. They’re unable to get enough support to pass more taxes (yet), so “balancing the budget” after republicans lower them on the rich would mean killing people by cutting services.
2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.
3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.
4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.
The deficit get consistently worst under republican leadership. Again amd again.
The Democratic plan to fix the deficit is clear and practical. Tax the rich and stop the war.
The administration has said it out loud. Printing press.
that's yet another "both sides are the same!" fallacy
you are right in that neither can fix it entirely
only one party consistently raises the debt->deficit
and only one party consistently lowers it
hint: you cannot spend $21 TRILLION on militarizing the country and going to war without exploding the deficit, there's no profit in war, only massive expense
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
and that $21 Trillion was before the Iran War which is going to go on for years and cost another trillion to replace all the weapons and ships, remember all those bases and planes that were destroyed which this administration is covering up
> there's no profit in war
* There's lots of profit for military contractors and other insiders, which is the entire point!
Doing the both sides thing here is so, so frustrating… Obama and Biden both spent big to avoid/alleviate recession conditions, that is true. But it’s just not comparable at all:
1. First off: the deficit article were commenting under right now. This is unusual and terrible and 100% due to GOP norm breaking.
2. The BBB raised the debt astronomically, so this will continue well past the end of the war.
3. We’re engaged in a war of choice with a huge country with no end in sight and no stated objective, and the pentagon is getting more money than ever.
4. The corruption and graft is so rank and blatant that it might actually make a dent here, which is absurd. God forbid they carry out their ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and then we pay for Trump City, there. Not to mention all the subordinate graft.
5. Only one party has divorced itself from reason entirely. Democrats are deeply flawed and I disagree with many of them on many things, but none of them dare try the ‘nuh uh shut up’ approach that is central to the GOP in the days of Trump. Imagine if they said anything as absurd as “Haitians are eating our cats and dogs” or “I’ll give everyone $5k” or “I didn’t lose the election that every single watchdog said I did” — they would be lambasted and forgotten within days.
6. Only one party is planning for the other party to ever be in power ever again. That is, assuming you don’t take Miller’s word for it that there are seven bajillion illegal aliens that the democrats ship in to win elections, which just hasn’t happened to work yet because the GOP is just too popular, and hasn’t been uncovered in any actual investigations because they’re just too darn tricky.
Sorry. Presumably this whole thread will be wiped anyway. But this is not a “both parties” thing! We’ve had a balanced budget and a positive treasury balance in my lifetime, and I’m a baby person!
(People said it was impossible then as well, FWIW.)
It’s important to remember that Obama and Biden’s predecessors also both spent big to alleviate those economic problems.
I’m convinced that a big part of our political woes come from the fact that major elections are at the end of the year. Obama election, 2008. Great financial crisis, 2008. So who oversaw the big bailouts and massively spiked the deficit dealing with the crisis? Obama, of course. Except it wasn’t, it was Bush.
Likewise, Biden 2020. Pandemic 2020. Who oversaw lockdowns and massive federal payroll loans and big government checks sent out? Biden! (No, Trump.)
Bullshit on the lazy “both parties are the same” framing. Bill Clinton actually balanced the federal budget and ran a $236 billion surplus in 2000. His 1993 deficit-reduction package passed without a single Republican vote. You just keep eating up the Republican bullshit...
It's overly simplistic to say that Clinton balanced the budget. While the 1993 bill raised taxes and reduced defense spending, there would not have been a surplus without further cuts driven by Republicans in 1997.
There was also the dot-com boom, which of course wouldn't have happened without Al Gore inventing the Internet.
The pattern is extremely clear. During my lifetime, the deficit had increased under Republican presidents and decreased under Democrats. This has held steady for decades. That’s the more important thing than the question of exactly why one of them managed to get it to zero one time.
The mental gymnastics one must do to believe in what they write is unbelievable. The answer lies right in front and you skipped over it with grace.
I agree that Republicans are probably worse on this topic, but as far as I can tell, the parties are closer to parity on this than they were in 1993. The Democratic party doesn't seem have people like Bill any more.
okay? and Obama? and Biden? why are you pointing back 30 years ago for this argument I wonder?
Both reduced the deficit substantially during their time in office.
Obama inherited a housing crisis and two wars.
Biden had to deal the tail end of a pandemic and the financial fallout of that.
Not saying both couldn't have done much better on the budget but, if you compare them to Bush and Trump, they honestly do look quite competent.
Neither of those excuse having a budget in the negative.
It take a hero to dive on the grenade.
Such dives tend to be fatal.
Until AI can produce a blast-management plan to ensure the hero's survival, the necessary courage shall remain elusive.
I just want to congratulate the users of this website on shoehorning AI into literally every damn thing.
Please check out my startup, SmartHorn. We have integrated superintelligence technology into a "Smart Shoehorn" that will collect data and provide recommendations to footwear purchasers at the point of sale. Think of it like Pocket for the shoe or boot buyer. Use to increase profits, provide discounts to loyal customers, or increase profits.
Thanks I agree its very relevant to a lot of things too especially societal/political paradigms that will never end without a gigantic shift that is AI. Glad you can see through the noise and understand that too
Just a friendly reminder, mainly for your own safety.
Remember to call it SI ("Super Intelligence"), not AI otherwise you make yourself enemy of the United States of America.
The US federal deficit is growing at an alarming rate; if nothing is done, it will solve itself with inflation. US debt is denominated in USD, so the US will not default; the value of money just steadily declines until the debt burden matches the capacity of the US economy to pay for it. Also, US tax rates are relatively low, US can pay the debt by increasing tax rate if there is political will.
The country with the worst debt crisis is France. Their tax rate is 40%, they don't have their own currency (It's EUR), they have a large primary deficit and it's politically impossible to cut spending. EU must rescue France in next 4-5 years.
There is no political will to increase taxes in the U.S.
Category error. These comments are only relevant with a democratic administration.
It's the biggest most beautiful deficit ever. If the democrats were in charge they would have spent far more on sex changes for kids, it's the TRUTH!
For all of the sex changes not being laid by federal dollars!
I assume you're being satirical.
Edit: I don't really need it explained to me, I literally just said I assumed it's satire. Also who would downvote this? Calm down.
It's the unironic view of most of the US media as well.
(The UK media are similar, but we did manage to get rid of the most disastrous budgetary Prime Minister Liz Truss in a couple of months)
The GOP only defines a deficit as bad when Democrats hold power.
They appear to be stating what’s essentially the official position of one of the parties if that’s evaluated based on actions. So is it really satire?
The cabal of elitist here at HN love a good down vote on anything questioning thier fence riding agenda.
That's about the nominal GDP of Spain.
So the solution is to annex Spain. ;)
So ... low?
Over his 1.5 presidential terms, Trump has accumulated over a quarter of the US debt ($11T / $40T):
* https://www.us-debt-clock.com/presidents
Some mitigating circumstances are COVID in his first term (also effecting Biden), but there's also a lot of 'self-inflicted' damage, especially the last two years.
It turns out tax cuts may not actually pay for themselves (never mind ill-considered military adventures).
It’s okay, it’s all part of the political cycle:
1. Republicans start a war and cause a recession
2. Democrats get swept into power, barely.
3. Democrats clean up the mess but key reforms are blocked by some lone asshole like Joe Lieberman.
4. Everyone complains that Democrats didn’t do enough, it’s all the immigrants’ fault, and put Republicans back in power.
5. Return to step 1.
Also, how long has it been since the Democrats have had unobstructed power like the Republicans have assembled? Both houses and the supreme Court?
Not sure if they ever had it in modern history.
obama nearly doubled the national debt in 8 years ($11T -> $22T). this is not a problem specific to a party or a president
> obama nearly doubled the national debt in 8 years ($11T -> $22T).
Helping to recover from the GFC (which happened under the GOP). Notice how the deficit in Obama's second term was way lower than his first term? Notice how Obama2 isn't that much more than Bush2 (who started all sorts of military adventures)?
* https://www.us-debt-clock.com/presidents
Way to change the goal post when we are discussing budget deficits. Even then Obama added around $10 trillion to debt in eight years. Trump added close to $8 trillion in just four years in his first term.
In 2009, the budget deficit had risen to $1.42 trillion thanks to the massive bailouts of financial institutions. By 2016, when Obama left the office, it was down to $0.59 trillion.[1]
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
> obama nearly doubled the national debt in 8 years ($11T -> $22T). this is not a problem specific to a party or a president
It's almost like there was a Republican-policy-created crisis that called for massive spending in his term. And then he expanded healthcare for many people who'd never get it otherwise!
But that pales in comparison to the Russian diesel that's going to bring down my gas prices, and my private investment in arms manufacture that's growing quite well these days. So yes, we're doing much better with the debts incurred by the current administration.
>It's almost like there was a Republican-policy-created crisis that called for massive spending in his term.
As an European it's pretty funny to read this thread. "Your party debt was reckless and incompetent. My party debt was necessary and caused by your party anyway". Seriously, having just two parties looks like nightmare for democracy.
Having said that, before I get crucified as a centrist, there are bad and worse, and Trump is clearly worse.
The level of debt is an issue when the revenue doesn't cover the spending, leading to a budget deficit. Obama reduced the deficit even after he increased the debt. Trump increased the debt and reduced the revenue widening the deficit. That's not the same thing.
Sir, we are discussing feelings and anecdotes here. Please be respectful of those
The deficit is an illusion. We owe most of it to ourselves. The real problem is balance of trade and steady deindustrialization, which no administration has been able to tackle yet.
It’s a question of inputs and outputs.
Right now we’re moving towards more balanced trade by shipping gold overseas. Nonmonetary gold and metals are our largest export YTD. That’s not going to work forever.
We need to take one on the chin and allow the currency to devalue versus gold, then revalue the gold reserves which haven’t been revalued since 1973. It will result in some short term pain, but it doesn’t have to fall in the usual distribution. (Distribution of financial pain is a policy choice.)
Only after the currency is weakened will manufacturing return home. Gold revaluation can be used to buy back some bonds to reduce the interest expense.
Edit: to the drive by downvotes, if you’ve got a better idea then free to share it. This is the only option I’ve seen recently that may work before we’re in a total crisis. I don’t love it either, but this actually puts the process in our control rather than having it happen involuntarily. Continued devaluation of the dollar is guaranteed at this point.
This is expected. Every Republican administration increases the deficit, every Democrat administration lowers it
The US is in debt to itself, in a currency it can print. What could go wrong?
If you print you cause more inflation and all the debt you need to renew requires higher yield to shift. So in practice printing yourself out of trouble is in itself a cause of trouble
It doesn’t just print money. It raises money or backs it by assets. It amazes me that people have no understanding of basic economics, or what qualitative easing is. Study the 2008 financial crisis to understand the power of modern monetary theory.
It works great, right up until it doesn't, according to historians.
According to anthropologists, we are all still the same barbarians we've ever been.
According to biology, scarcity ( the ultimate downstream effect outcome of money printing in the US since at least 1971 ) promotes aggression and reduced breeding.
According to Confucious, it's good to live in interesting times, unless that was meant as a curse ?
> The red ink has led to dire warnings from economists that the US now routinely runs annual deficits that were previously seen only during recessions
imagine what's going down after two more years of this
Iran War will still be happening at a BILLION dollars a day
gas will still be draining an extra BILLION dollars a day from everyone's pockets
how much healthcare and homes could have been bought with that
Theres noone in charge.
Algorithm for surviving "rats on a sinking ship":
1. Watch the program execute
2. Examine behavior patterns
3. Best guess where they point
4. Prepare for that, whatever that is.
5. Error correct and repeat step 1.
ps. If enough rats adopt the algorithm the ship won't sink.
It bought a whole ballroom!
I hope everyone is enjoying American Yanukovich, and looking forward to Amerimaidan to get rid of him.
$1 billion/day way the initial estimate, but it was never actually that high. CBO estimates $38B through August 1, or ~ $7B/month. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62756
Ah, much better, then – I mean it’s not like the US is already in debt or anything.
exhausting the entire supply of Tomahawks and Patriot missiles will cost exponentially more than $38 billion to replace
CBO is not told about all the military bases destroyed in the middle-east, it's a secret by this administration, so they cannot expense that
and this is not going to end before February 2029
and there is still a billion dollars EVERY day being taken out of the US economy by excessive gas and diesel prices even for those that don't drive
I aced economics in college but I don't get how we are not in a recession
Everyone is putting gas and groceries on their credit cards now, how does that end?
I’m with you. How many more quarters of declining savings before the music stops?
1. Elect Claude.
2. Prompt Claude for a balanced budget.
...
??? Profit!
I've tried this ~2 months ago with GPT pro and lost the chat. Basically assumming a scenario where it has technocratic control over the budget and it has to manage it.
It really didn't come up with anything crazy. It was basically cutting spending and raising and creating new taxes. With the plan being to spread the pain based on tolerability and medium to long term sustainability. With actions like a fedral consumption tax with planned rebates depending on household wealth.
Its also tried to be careful around things that might create long term problems like dramatic education cuts and what not.
The reforms it gives are altogether pretty numerically radical but its not radical in the internet way where its a polarized solution. It's not a reddit style eat the rich or a business trickle down wealth solution.
Paperclips are famously not that expensive to maintain
Isn't Anthropic on some sort of a blacklist?
3. Prompt it to make no mistakes
what matter is he printed money to send people in rest of world to hell.
Abolish medicare medicaid social security and welfare. The system will sort itself out by mass unrest.
I'm half joking but I think we keep being saved from our bad decisions at the ballot box so we don't learn.
You're half joking but that is what will happen. We don't dare interfere with the military or police or the comfort of billionaires so obviously we need to make life even worse for poor people and old people.
The smart thing to do would be to raise taxes (not just on the wealthy) and cut entitlements. Reducing the deficit would indeed slow down inflation, give the Fed room to cut interest rates, and boost business investment. The economy would be in a much healthier place.
There's no "entitlements" you can cut that wouldn't cause more harm to the economy than they would save up in federal spending. And there isn't enough income that taxing it to pay off the debt would be practical. You have to tax capital, that's where the entire world's wealth has been sucked up in the last decades. That's the only solution that doesn't involve the country defaulting on its debts.
Billionaires know that and are already starting to speak against such taxes[0], before there's even any real possibility of them being adopted. They would rather see everything turn to shit than give back a single cent.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/winc.html
Targeting "entitlements" as a universal fix ignores both the fiscal math and the human costs. Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending; cutting it just shifts uncompensated care burdens onto hospitals and inflates private premiums. Cutting programs like SNAP and WIC means pulling food support from children, which causes long-term economic damage.
If the goal is deficit reduction through spending cuts, policy needs to evaluate actual economic ROI. Programs like nutritional and income supports have positive fiscal multipliers, which is why blunt austerity measures trigger negative feedback loops and contract growth.
Spending cuts have a place, but treating entitlements as a slush fund without accounting for the economic return or impact on people isn’t a productive policy proposal.
>Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending;
I heard US healthcare, rather famously, spends more per capita than any country in the world, despite still being rather terrible. Maybe the solution is actually reforming it in an European way (including universal free healthcare)? Your other points are very interesting to me, especially negative feedback loops of austerity - I never thought about that before.