121–130 of 618 posts
But we can’t afford universal healthcare. Edit: Y’all, every other OECD country doesn’t have the healthcare challenges the US has, and they also don’t light trillions of $fiat on fire waging useless wars. You should care how tax dollars are spent.
The average 20-year cost of Afghanistan was $100 billion per year. At that cost you’re either getting really crappy healthcare or the program is means tested (which means it’s not so universal.)
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You mean the more we don’t pay back? Carrying debt generally increases credit rating.
Only up to a point, try borrowing say 50 million dollars while making 50k. Before lending money people look at your existing debt load to determine if your likely to pay it back. The same thing happens to countries, though more smoothly as they first require higher interest rates.
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It's really not. If you buy a house with a mortgage, and later sell the house before the note is due, you will not owe the full amount of the accrued interest. Unfortunately the resale value of a secondhand war is very low.
Of course you do, you're just typically rolling it into another mortgage on the next place. Anyway I didn't say and didn't mean it's the only valid interpretation of 'spent', just that it is one.
You might in a state of nature, but the US has laws against prepayment penalties for mortgages. (Well, against the mortgage originator charging prepayment penalties.) You don't owe interest until it accrues.
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I swear dude. I cannot understand just why it is that the average person seems to be so incapable at understanding statistics and large numbers. It's mind boggling. Ever since my freshman engineering stats class, it's like everywhere I look at where there's stupid bullshit happening, a large reason as to why the stupid bullshit is happening is because people have zero understanding of statistics and large numbers. It…
Statistics are not intuitive, and it's the assumption that they are that leads people into error.
However, the simpler parts/beginning of either course... really do seem like they should be intuitive to anybody who made it with a D through middle school math. Basic applied ratios and such. Like the fact near 5 billion covid vaccines have been administered worldwide now and there are still people vehemently arguing about the horrible things that are going to happen to them specifically if they get a vaccine...
This title is completely wrong. The article estimates the US has accumulated around $2 trillion in war debt as of 2020. It goes on to estimate interest payments will equal $2 trillion by 2030 and $6.4 trillion by 2050.
If you buy a house with a mortgage, I think it's reasonable to say you 'spent' the booked value.
Among various things that could happen: I might pay off the $400K next year and pay a grand total of $411K in interest. I might sell the house for $700K and book a $200K profit on my $100K cash. I might lose my job, get foreclosed upon, and then be out $100K plus whatever payments I've already made. I might have had $500K in cash to begin with, but wanted to invest $400K in Ethereum, see it moon for a 20x return, and make a cool $8M profit on top of the house. Or I could carry the mortgage to term, and then I really will have spent $700K.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wages are quite inflated in the USA and $1000/year is not a livable income (i.e. sufficient for cheap housing, cheap food, water, electricity, basic appliances like a fridge and washing machine, heating, and pretty much nothing else) even in Europe where I'm from. Or am I missing the point of a UBI?
$1000 per person is a big deal, and would cover rent or mortgage costs for most of the people I know. Though honestly, a lot my family members would squander it on things like new cars or electronics instead of paying off debt or investing for retirement..
> squander it on things like new cars or electronics instead of paying off debt or investing for retirement
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Absolutely not. Waste fuels the economy. There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal. As for people, spending a couple of years in the military is much better personal development for many young people than going to college at an age when most people can't appreciate it. These things aside, of course the loss of life is horrific and a terrible waste.
> There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal Metal is a non-renewable resource. Cost of extraction does not match market price, more so when unnecessary demand is created for wars. What kind of spin is this?
But in general metals can be recycled quite well and often are recycled due to their price. Also even if you finely shredded it and mixed it with other stuff the resulting mix would still most likely have higher grade than regular ore & mining it would thus be economicaly viable.
Perhaps they should've spent this much on medical research instead. For the same money perhaps we could save a few million people dying of various diseases or cancer. It would take a whole lot of terrorist events to counter the benefits of significant R&D funding for medicine (or maybe a lot of other things).
Climate change will destabilize the world more than any "terrorists" could. Also would've been nice to have seen 6.4 trillion go into renewables tech and investments ~ 20 years ago.
We'd have cheaper energy than we do today, and cheaper energy forever. We could have been looking at current levels of climate change, instead of the far far bigger changes that we are now going to experience.
And why did we spend so much on these countries? It all comes back to oil and the fear of losing access to oil to power the economy.
We really should never forgive those who work for the fossil fuel industry for putting us on this timeline with their active deceipt, lies, and massive propaganda campaign. There should be no forgiveness for what they have cost us.
Deaths 9/11 2,996 Deaths Covid-19 USA 621,000 207x Lack of understanding of large numbers is a flaw in the human mind we have to figure out how to fix.
I swear dude. I cannot understand just why it is that the average person seems to be so incapable at understanding statistics and large numbers. It's mind boggling. Ever since my freshman engineering stats class, it's like everywhere I look at where there's stupid bullshit happening, a large reason as to why the stupid bullshit is happening is because people have zero understanding of statistics and large numbers. It…
I would also argue it’s why humans are bad at estimating risks regarding low probability events. See: spacecraft mishaps that seem obvious in hindsight
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37% federal, 13.3% california = 50.3 Most wealthy people spend another 1-2% of their income on property taxes and a bit on sales taxes, etc. I estimate I pay 53% of my income to taxes. I agree that 55% is unlikely tho
The 37% and 13.3% are on marginal income, as I'm sure you know. The effective tax rate is much lower. California and some other states also have required disability insurance that is taken out with the state income tax. It's 1% in CA. And I would count Social Security and Medicare too, equally 7.65%. But the SS part has a cap so the percentage goes down the more you make. All put together, someone making $250K pays a…