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Alan Greenspan has died
161–170 of 274 posts
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#162For many Americans, Greenspan was the only Fed Chair known widely by name by the general public.
I'm not from the US and was born after Greenspan took up the position but I thought Paul Volcker was a pretty well known name during his tenure?
Maybe GP meant Americans alive today. Volcker is probably memorable mostly to an age bracket swiftly shrinking.
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Iran War spending is staggering but still not enough to cover Medicare for All, even for a single year. Maybe the ENTIRE defense budget would cover it.
The US spends ~$1.1T/year on Medicare today. US health care spending is estimated to continue rising and will reach nearly $6T a year by 2027. That means according to the federal government, the US will spend around $42.9T on health care over the next decade if we maintain the status quo. A recent study by Yale epidemiologists found that Medicare for All would save around 68k lives a year while reducing U.S. health c…
From the cfrb link the cost of Medicare for All would be $2.5T to $3.5T per year.
So the entire defense budget would not cover it.
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#164I'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…
> So he was in favour of the gold standard because it prevented massive unconstrained expansion of credit and that seems sensible.
That's because it permanently cripples economies by creating an artificial constraint and pretending it's useful. All it does is create another speculation market in gold and cripple credit markets.
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#165Here is an old clip of Alan Greenspan explaining to Paul Ryan why the social security system can't go bankrupt. https://youtu.be/DNCZHAQnfGU?is=CWQS-QUJB0z4EfSM
A very Economist answer to Ryan's question. So basically, no.
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#166Earlier 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…
EDIT: I see several comments suggesting that there is nothing left to cut. I'm not sure how anyone squares that perspective with this federal budget growth chart. The federal budget over time... 2026 - $7.5 trillion 2020 - $4.8 trillion 2015 - $3.9 trillion 2010 - $3.7 trillion https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. There's no reason that the US federal go…
That’s different than saying there’s a lot of “waste” to cut as many argue.
The benefits agencies that make up the bulk of the spending have very low overhead and are run very efficiently. The vast majority of funds go directly to beneficiaries.
Balancing the budget will require massive cuts to very popular programs.
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ag…
>"Wealthy people" didn't cause the US government to spend an extra $3.5 trillion a year over a decade ago
But... They did. Who do you think wanted Trump's tax cuts on wealthy businesses?
Who do you think pushed for Reagan's tax cuts on wealthy businesses while also drastically increasing defense spending?
Who do you think still is pushing reduced taxes for wealthy businesses?
"We've cut all taxes from the wealthy and the tax number keeps going down, what can we possibly do?"
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#168Earlier 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…
EDIT: I see several comments suggesting that there is nothing left to cut. I'm not sure how anyone squares that perspective with this federal budget growth chart. The federal budget over time... 2026 - $7.5 trillion 2020 - $4.8 trillion 2015 - $3.9 trillion 2010 - $3.7 trillion https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. There's no reason that the US federal go…
You should leave Social Security out of the calculations. It's supposed to be a self-funding program that has no impact on budget balance. That accounts for ~$0.5 trillion of the growth since 2020.
Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher interest payments.
A large fraction of the budget consists of wages and actual spending. Inflation is 25–30% since 2020.
Then there is healthcare spending, which can be expected to grow faster than inflation, as the population is growing older.
The US is basically running into the same issues as European welfare states. While government spending remains qualitatively the same, demographic changes make it grow faster than tax revenue. Those who couldn't maintain a balanced budget in the past are finding the situation particularly difficult. In some sense, the situation is even worse in the US. Healthcare (old age spending) is particularly expensive, while individuals have greater responsibility for childhood expenses.
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have come around to gold. Money shouldn't be dual purposes, we should apply single responsibility principal. Money should refer to some stable (albeit slightly growing by nature) account of measure. Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technol…
> Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down That world results in a lot of people individually deciding "why buy now, when I can buy for less later" and sitting on their money. That in aggregate makes the economy much worse. You're up against human nature here. Money may be an arbitrary numerical denomination of value, but people's behavior around it and how that affects the economy at large need to be accoun…
>That in aggregate makes the economy much worse.
Does it really? A lot of our problems seem to stem from conspicuous consumption. People will still need things (food shelter clothing) and that will motivate purchasing. "Oh n0es people won't buy flavor of the month consumer garbage, what ever will we do" just doesn't track.
Re: Alan Greenspan has died
#170Earlier 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.
So-called fiat money didn't become a thing until after FDR became president, which was after 1932.