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.
(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)
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.
Remember to call it SI ("Super Intelligence"), not AI otherwise you make yourself enemy of the United States of America.
* 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).
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.
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.
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.
2. Prompt Claude for a balanced budget.
...
??? Profit!
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.
I'm half joking but I think we keep being saved from our bad decisions at the ballot box so we don't learn.
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 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.
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).
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.
There was also the dot-com boom, which of course wouldn't have happened without Al Gore inventing the Internet.
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> 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.
The lion doesn't concern itself with the opinion of sheep.
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.
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.
> 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.
These are just straight up numbers increasing or decreasing. It’s not complicated shit. Quit equivocating.
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 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.
“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.
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.)
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.)
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 lots of profit for military contractors and other insiders, which is the entire point!
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.
ck2•2h ago
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
Kevin_Flynn•56m ago
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.
smallerize•42m ago
msdz•41m ago
ck2•13m ago
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?
pjc50•40m ago
I hope everyone is enjoying American Yanukovich, and looking forward to Amerimaidan to get rid of him.