221–230 of 251 posts
Like the housing bubble, our debt hasn't been a problem and it's not going to be a problem right up until it is a problem. It will be a black swan event and afterward everyone will claim that they saw it coming and "the other guy" ignored it.
First it says debt as a percentage of GDP used to be higher so it should have been scarier. Then it says current interest rates are low but doesn't give anywhere near the weight to that statement they should.
Even in the article they state 8% interest was normal 30 years ago but then go on to say sustained 8% interest going forward is crazy talk. WHY? Why wouldn't interest rates go up? They certainly can't go much lower...
If they did go up our debt would take a much higher percentage of the budget than the 18% of the 80's and 90s. This is a very real problem.
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Why is this supposed to be surprising or relevant?
It's a surprise to plenty of people who think that their $70,000/yr income makes them a net tax payer when it actually doesn't. And it's relevant because people will reduce their marginal income, or relocate to more favorable tax jurisdictions, when the tax burden of that income is excessive. It's also relevant because, at a certain point, the productive portion of the population will fall below that necessary to mak…
The cutoff for top 40% is around 40k/year.
PS: Numbers are 5 years old but should be a good ballpark.
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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.
E.g., https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
(BTW, when talking about the overall cost, it doesn't make sense not to count the costs of employer-provided plans.)
The real question is how to we transition from the broken, hodgepodge system we have now to one of those proven better, and cheaper systems.
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> it misses the obligation to pay the principal But you never really have to do that. You can just keep rolling them. If we could keep the debt at the same absolute level inflation and productivity increases would drive it into insignificance. Of course the idea of keeping it at the same level is a fantasy.
”You can just keep rolling them” Only if you can find people or institutions willing to buy the new bonds. _if_ those cannot be found, the ‘easy’ (easy because all it’s debts are in US dollars) way out for the USA is to print money, but a country that has to print money because nobody wants to lend it money will find it hard to buy stuff from other countries.
Ultimately, what is and isn't possible for a state to do stems from the vagaries of what all other states are currently doing.
It's somewhat rooted in economic output, but there are a lot of other independent variables in the pot.
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I don't understand why US having military presence around the globe tilts the free markets in their favour. Realistically, no military outside of perhaps Russian could stand up against the US but I don't think US are outright forcing trade agreements at a gun point, or am I wrong?
The United States has a variety of techniques for making sure its business interests get what they want. Aircraft carriers are one (see Iraq, and possibly Iran if things go south), CIA-sponsored coups another (Guatemala, El Salvador), economic sanctions a third (Iran again, Russia, much of Latin America). Negotiation at gun point often takes the form of crippling sanctions until and unless a US-friendly regime is in…
> Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition.
If you want confirmation bias or arguments to feed your matching viewpoint, sure, but neutral, reasoned analysis? Not so much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Political_views
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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.
The second actually involves the first, and this is the point we lose. If we could have runaway climate change somehow not disrupt global economy, we could eventually tech our way out of it. But the game over point is when the economy stops, and humanity no longer has capability to slow down and mitigate the effects of warming. At that point there isn't much left of humanity anyway.
E.g. how easy would it be for us to bootstrap back to space capabilities after a catastrophic war wiped out a large portion of world economic capability?
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The second actually involves the first, and this is the point we lose. If we could have runaway climate change somehow not disrupt global economy, we could eventually tech our way out of it. But the game over point is when the economy stops, and humanity no longer has capability to slow down and mitigate the effects of warming. At that point there isn't much left of humanity anyway.
I wondered if this was part of the great extraterrestrial life filter: that there were so many "only in this window" chances that a civilization gets. E.g. how easy would it be for us to bootstrap back to space capabilities after a catastrophic war wiped out a large portion of world economic capability?
If something pulled the plug on our economy, all the technology we have today would disappear in few years to decades. Devices wearing out with no way of repairing them or producing new ones. We'd regress to medieval times, because that would be the most advanced things available energy sources would support.
The industrial revolution happened because we had easy access to high-density energy source in the form of coal. Maybe, given enough time, some survivors would figure out how to do a new industrial revolution without it, though I'm not having high hopes. So whatever is left of humanity would have to wait until the Earth recycles enough living matter to create new deposits of high-energy something.
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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.
You can't exhume dead bodies and demand that they pay more tax. And the method for allocating new debt to birthyear-based buckets is probably not in line with where the responsibility actually lies.
Like the housing bubble, our debt hasn't been a problem and it's not going to be a problem right up until it is a problem. It will be a black swan event and afterward everyone will claim that they saw it coming and "the other guy" ignored it.
So you basically didn't read the article, or it passed right over your head if you did...