Will America's debt doom us? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#211

Post by matchbok » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #197

jmull wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military and homeland security. Also: A half reasonable single-payer health care system should save a lot of money over-all. The fiscal conservatives should be all over that one.

Our government already spends more on its healthcare programs (Medicare and Medicaid) than Germany and UK, and they don’t even cover half of the people. I don’t see how paying for everyone would save any money at all. It might make the per capita costs a bit lower, but total tax expenditure will certainly be higher.

We can't go to a program like the UK that's works out to be cheaper in the long run because our current half-assed program costs more? Not following the logic here. We already "pay" for the people we don't explicitly pay for. (Emergency room, lack of preventive care, etc)

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#212

Post by noobermin » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #201

noobermin wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're proposing goes against normal sensible morality, but the context is true.

Labeling one type of morality as the normal, sensible one is cheating, because normality and sensibility are value judgments. You can say it goes against the modal morality. I think that particular one generally gives older people too much of a pass for harms they inflicted while younger, and for which they never made adequate reparations. If I expand the number of buckets to 100, modeling for 11-year-olds up to 110-…

Sorry, I made this post in haste. I meant what I said as a reason why you're being downvoted without saying it. I share your concern that children have been given the bill by their parents. I personally don't agree with your solution, but we can simply disagree on that point.

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#213

Post by TimPC » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

The big difference between debt taking 18% of budget at historically high interest and 8% of budget at very low interest is that if the low interest ever becomes very high again (say around 9x what it is now, which has happened historically) you're talking about interest taking 72% of budget which would be catastrophic. 18% at the historic high would require 4X the historic high (an 80%+ interest rate, which we have good reasons for believing won't happen in the US).

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#214

Post by ethbro » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

jaypeg25 wrote: post #176

samsonradu wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German infrastructure is top-class, trains work quite well and bridges are not collapsing. May I ask where you got this from? EDIT Please don't turn this into a flame war. I am slightly worried about the effects of mainstream media, as I've seen these kind of posts on Reddit also. People keep hearing about the low/inexistent economic growth of countries like Germany or Japan and start thinking that these countries ar…

Especially compared to America, which has awful infrastructure...

It's interesting how much design tolerances and overbuilding factor into this.

Assuming linear failure to fault (e.g. rust or structural weakening), an overbuilt bridge makes a big difference if one is skimping on maintenance costs.

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#215

Post by electricviolet » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #175

electricviolet wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because of the difference in what's at stake: If the USA falls into a debt crisis the result will be global economic disruption. If the world falls into runaway climate change the result will be the extinction of the human race and possibly all life on earth. Personally I'm more comfortable with the possibility of the first than of the second.

There may not be much difference. Extinction of the human race is an exaggerated prediction, but more importantly, what do you expect the consequences of global economic disruption (to the level of taking the US down) to be? Take a look at history if you may.

Not trying to minimize the human cost of global economic disruption, but it's almost certainly less than total extinction.

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#216

Post by elsewhen » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:33 PM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #128

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to the Republican platform of spending more money while cutting tax revenue?

What do Republicans advertise they are going to spend money on? I'm only familiar with Democrats calling for free health care, free college, universal basic income, etc.

advertise ≠ action. take a look at the general slope by party: https://www.axios.com/federal-budget-deficit-trump-obama-f11...

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#217

Post by theracha » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

alfromspace wrote: post #194

smolder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War and enriching military contractors, creating the TSA, subsidies to businesses that don't need them, etc. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FiW5I95R5xg/hqdefault.jpg

Say what you want about him, but Trump did run an anti-war and anti-military spending campaign. The budgets he's approved are a huge betrayal to his base. There's spending on border security and the wall that's not really happening, but that's chump change compared to entitlements and broader military spending. So it seems like we have the choice of voting for left-wing politicians who run on increasing spending on n…

https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/06/politics/donald-trump-defense... "Donald Trump on Wednesday called for eliminating the sequester on defense spending and increasing military spending to boost troop levels and the number of ships and aircraft."

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#218

Post by ethbro » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

tehabe wrote: post #198

abugheratwork wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ideology to have little or no state debt is hurting the economy and will do so in the future. Ideology can be pretty dangerous. This seems like your main point. Back up, though: > [...] state debt is not like personal or corparate debt. If you cut your spending to pay of a loan, it is usually not a problem. How is it less of a problem for a person, or for a corporation, than for a government, to have to reduce…

Ideologies are not dangerous, they are just the eyes through which we see things. Sometimes you have to be able to see more because your ideology doesn't help you. But you will never really escape that bias. The difference is actually very simple. Persons and corporations are not closed systems. If you safe money, the impact is very small. Even when a big corporation safes money it doesn't really matter. But the stat…

The counterargument to the point you're making would be that taxes are essentially "closing the loop" between private and public services.

Either the state taxes and provides public services, or the state taxes less and private services are provided.

I think the bigger point is about the state's role as a consumer- and lender- of last resort.

Through its ability to deficit spend (enabled by its supposed future ability to tax) or its ability to print currency (through its central bank), there are functions the only states have access to. Which become incredibly valuable when everyone else is economically terrified.

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#219

Post by matthewdgreen » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

alfromspace wrote: post #194

smolder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War and enriching military contractors, creating the TSA, subsidies to businesses that don't need them, etc. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FiW5I95R5xg/hqdefault.jpg

Say what you want about him, but Trump did run an anti-war and anti-military spending campaign. The budgets he's approved are a huge betrayal to his base. There's spending on border security and the wall that's not really happening, but that's chump change compared to entitlements and broader military spending. So it seems like we have the choice of voting for left-wing politicians who run on increasing spending on n…

The Senate is largely tilted towards rural areas, and hence Republicans. This provides a pretty natural check on the spending ambitions of Democratic presidents, except in rare circumstances. No such check exists for Republican presidents, which is why our deficits are soaring despite the current record economic expansion. Take that into account when you vote.

Re: Will America's debt doom us?

#220

Post by ThrustVectoring » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

dpc_pw wrote: post #142

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aggregate amount of savings by a generation is almost entirely irrelevant to the aggregate material conditions that generation has in retirement. They're not canning food and stashing it in their basement like a squirrel, they're generally simply acquiring financial claims on future productivity. And this is exactly what a bubble is - higher prices on financial assets, which means more assets per real dollar of f…

> And this is exactly what a bubble is - higher prices on financial assets, which means more assets per real dollar of future production. Exactly. Deflation (financial asset cost inflation) now, for inflation (financial asset cost deflation) later, right? > Current misspending doesn't particularly impact future retirees. I agree with everything, except this part. Have we used all this surplus productivity to actually…

>But obviously, you can't pull ground breaking discoveries and great bussinesess out of the hat, and make government more efficient, just because there is more money to be invested. Quite the opposite.

I think we agree more than you think here. There weren't any good investments to be made, so the extra money thrown at investments is wasted through malinvestment rather than consumed. The big difference is that I'm explicitly trading off malinvestment with current consumption, rather than the inaccessible hypothetical world in which productive investment opportunities were pulled out of a hat.