Alan Greenspan has died • Hacker News Board

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#131

Post by brightball » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #35

brightball wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for... - spending cuts - stopping fraud - figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a dir…

There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value. https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650

The average federal budget from 2010 to 2020 was $4 trillion. This year it is $7.5 trillion. There's quite a lot to cut.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#132

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #131

toomuchtodo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing left (edit: discretionary) to cut, and there is no material fraud. Taxes must go up. Only the top 40% of Americans have any income or wealth to tax (bottom 60% of Americans have no federal tax liability). Or, as you mention, we monetize the debt, print dollars, and burn up the currency value. https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650 The average federal budget from 2010 to 2020 was $4 trillion. This year it is $7.5 trillion. There's quite a lot to cut.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-of-the-federal-budget...

> The US government spent $6.2 trillion in total in 2023, with $1.7 trillion on discretionary spending, $3.8 trillion on mandatory spending, and $659 billion on net interest. Discretionary spending includes funding for defense, education, transportation, and scientific research. Approximately half of federal discretionary spending is allocated to defense.

So I suppose I would agree with your assertion that there is a lot to cut if we're talking about cutting defense spending and interest on the debt via more taxes to pay down the debt (to reduce forward debt servicing obligations). Can't keep cutting taxes for the wealthy with the expectation that is going to reduce spending or increase overall federal tax income, as the evidence shows it will not.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#133

Post by conductr » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #70

conductr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no need to make it difficult. All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially. I have homeowners insurance, but if my home burns down today I won’t have any reasonable assistance deposited this week. There’s a claim process and I need to have an emergency fund to get my immediate needs met. Everyone should care. The n…

> All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially. On the contrary, all public experience shows the opposite. The administrative costs of actually checking if only the right people are receiving a benefit very quickly start out weighing the cost of just paying everyone - especially if you don't want to make the process very o…

You’re talking about a simple website with some q and a to determine eligibility. It doesn’t have to do the actual checks, it just tells them it’s illegal to lie. The crime and punishment part is always lagging. Our IRS system works the same btw. It’s just a much more complicated and varied form entry. Lie all you want, it might catch up to you.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#134

Post by conductr » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

chadgpt3 wrote: post #76

conductr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no need to make it difficult. All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially. I have homeowners insurance, but if my home burns down today I won’t have any reasonable assistance deposited this week. There’s a claim process and I need to have an emergency fund to get my immediate needs met. Everyone should care. The n…

Imagine you're a middle class white picket fence guy, and your bank balance is a bit low. You apply for assistance. Now imagine you're homeless. You don't apply for assistance.

These safety net things are usually to help people preserve their place. So, ideally the middle class guy doesn’t become homeless. They are never intended to lift people out of their situation. There’s a lot of other funds and resources available to homeless, no economic downturn required.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#135

Post by up2isomorphism » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

throw0101d wrote: post #15

bhouston wrote: post #5

I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al... The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these…

> He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability: * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch... Further, sticking…

It depends on how inequalities is defined. But from the wealth distribution point of view, today’s wealth distribution skews much more towards the top. Although the lowest living standards improve thanks to the technology advancement.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#136

Post by conductr » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

kakacik wrote: post #103

tsimionescu wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially. On the contrary, all public experience shows the opposite. The administrative costs of actually checking if only the right people are receiving a benefit very quickly start out weighing the cost of just paying everyone - especially if you don't want to make the process very o…

With llms this should be trivial. Government agency has access to tax fillings of individuals, because... why it shouldn't. They see income, they see family situation, age of kids etc, its couple of if-this-then-that and that's it. That can cover 80-90% of the cases precisely enough to make difference. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, nobody expects perfect checks but at least some sanity is much better than n…

LLMs were never needed for any of this. They have all the data and plenty of smart people on payroll.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#137

Post by palmotea » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

Noaidi wrote: post #57

throw0101d wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability: * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch... Further, sticking…

The separation of wealth during the Gilded age was caused by the same thing it is caused by today: rapid industrialization. This rapid industrialization began when the US was off the gold standard during the civil war. The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback. The great depression was triggered in part by imbalanced gold flows when we returned to gold back currencies. https://explaininghistory.or…

> The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback.

Cite? I'm pretty sure that the 1920s, $20 was literally a gold coin of a certain size.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#138

Post by brightball » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #132

brightball wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650 The average federal budget from 2010 to 2020 was $4 trillion. This year it is $7.5 trillion. There's quite a lot to cut.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-of-the-federal-budget... > The US government spent $6.2 trillion in total in 2023, with $1.7 trillion on discretionary spending, $3.8 trillion on mandatory spending, and $659 billion on net interest. Discretionary spending includes funding for defense, education, transportation, and scientific research. Approximately half of federal discretionary spending is allocated to defense…

Per the link you provided https://usafacts.org/government-spending/

2024 - $6.8 trillion in spending

$1.3 trillion Defense, $323 billion of which is veteran support (pensions, retirement, medicare, etc).

Discretionary spending is a misnomer that assumes all of the other spending levels just have to be maintained as is, are without fraud, run efficiently and impossible to reform.

Cut 20% across the board from every agency for starters (including Defense). That gets us back from $7.5 trillion to $6 trillion. Then do it again 2 years later and get us back to $4.8 trillion. Then do it again.

States have limited budgets and must balance it all the time. Companies as well. There's no reason the federal government cannot do exactly the same thing.

"Wealthy people" didn't cause the US government to spend an extra $3.5 trillion a year over a decade ago and this idea of raising taxes more on those people wouldn't even begin to address the spending problem.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#139

Post by RA_Fisher » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #5

I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al... The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these…

The gold standard and metalism generally, leads to all kinds of unproductive panics bc the quantity of money can’t wisely be adjusted to the situation. It’s a bad trade off, bc it’s well-known in the literature that inflation-targeting works (and that’s the current world-wide central bank policy since 1991).

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#140

Post by clates » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

throw0101d wrote: post #127

4er_transform wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality but the forces pushing inequality today are just much stronger. Technology that creates winner take all markets and incredible leverage with few people being one.

> Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality […] Is there evidence for this? During the Gold Standard era there were many periods of deflation, which is bad for people with debt: back in the day this was often farmers, nowadays it'd be anyone with student loans or a mortgage.

> Is there evidence for this?

A simple and logical pattern.

1) Unconstrained spending without commensurate taxation leads to a required inflation of the money supply

2) An inflation of the money supply with increase the price of assets relative to the value of the currency.

3) Asset owners thus become "more valuable" by measure of currency.

4) Renters / non-asset-owners have to eat the costs of inflation while benefiting by none of the inflationary pressure on assets.

ergo - a gold standard is just a proxy for "constraints on debt" is a force that acts against inequality between asset owners and non-asset owners.