191–200 of 587 posts
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So raise taxes. The deficit isn’t a problem of spending it’s a problem of repeated tax cuts.
Interesting approach to competing with China on wireless technology. I would have thought the US having a competitive edge over China in terms of research and development would be important to Republicans.
The federal govt can’t be the majority of technological innovation. If we’re lucky this vacuum will be filled by an even larger private sector innovation hub like Xerox park and bell labs.
This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour. The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at…
> Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about. Personally I'm not sold on their tactics so far, but there is another way to view this than thrashing out. Non-probationary federal employees are protected and not easily fired. If one honestly believes the government is bloated and so far into debt that the budget needs to be balanced at all costs, cutting anyone and anything you can may make sense. Normally you…
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Bearing in mind that this administration won the election and a lot of what they are doing is more-or-less what they campaigned on, I'm not sure democracy is at risk. One can pick around the details, but for example with regard to the firings, voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening. This is essentially democracy in action. Yes, the voters may come to…
Trump specifically ran saying he didn't agree with many of these plans. His actions are consistent with cheaper federal government but not smaller federal government. Just a centralized executive government that does what he says. The method is simple: say what you need to to get approval, do what you always wanted to do after you get it. See also Kennedy walking back his anti-vaccine positions to get crucial votes o…
These days folk getting approved by the senate just have to show up. No one believes RFK when he says he's changed his mind on vax. I mean, these guys are lackeys, not stupid.
Democracy is about letting people who have no understanding, who pay minimal attention, who are easily led by media and populism, choose who should be in charge.
It is working as designed.
Do we need a better system? I'd argue yes. But all the others are worse.
If the population votes him a 3rd term, If they vote for congress who supports that- that is democracy. The people will get what they vote for.
We are literally seeing what "govt by the people" looks like. This is not democracy dying. It's democracy showing its flaws.
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Bearing in mind that this administration won the election and a lot of what they are doing is more-or-less what they campaigned on, I'm not sure democracy is at risk. One can pick around the details, but for example with regard to the firings, voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening. This is essentially democracy in action. Yes, the voters may come to…
This is based on a too literal interpretation of democracy. Democracy had a bad reputation in the ancient world, because unconstrained majority decisions often led to terrible outcomes. In the modern world, democracy usually means liberal democracy, which includes things like the rule of law and constitutional protections. As a rough approximation, a constitution exists to prevent the government from doing what the v…
Attempting to run a democracy in a non-literal way seems like a recipe for disaster.
That seems to imply that citizens get to cast a vote and have their voice heard...unless those in charge decide the citizens don't know what is best for them.
As a country we picked Trump. For better or worse we made that bed and we now have to lie in it.
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Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714 . Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
Have you been paying attention to Republicans over the last 40 years? They don't care if it's useful or important. They don't want government programs to exist. Trump isn't changing that. Don't kid yourself.
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The consequences are inflation. However, as long as there isn't inflation, it's just fine. And there are other sources of inflation, like energy crises, outside of spending based inflation.
Actually it goes the other way. Inflation erodes public debt [1][2]. It is, however, not necessarily good[3]. But at the end of the day, the causes of inflation are not cause and effect. You can print money to save an economy without causing inflation as we did during the 2008 financial crisis[4] or you can print money and cause hyperinflation as in the case of Argentina[5] or Zimbabwe. It’s more about how you do it…
If you print money you will increase the rate of inflation. The question is how much and when. During crisis, often lending is impacted which can lead to a decrease in the supply of available capital. Printing money in this circumstance can head off deflation and thus like you point out you have printed money without causing inflation to increase above the historical baseline rate like we did in the 2008 crisis. Crucially, you cannot rely on this strategy to reliably make up for a budget shortfall as we have seen time and time again (see bullets for two examples). The parent comment is correct that often a perpetual budget shortfall leading to an expansion of public debt can and often does lead to an inflation crisis but you are right that there is a bit more nuance.
To make an analogy: if you eat much more than the average person you will become overweight. You might object that this is factually incorrect and a silly thing to say because there are some exceptions such as if you only eat fresh vegetables, are training for a marathon, have a medical condition etc but in broad strokes this is true. However in the general case, eating too much leads to weight gain (even if it is arguably not the root cause which may be that we have engineered our food supply for financial incentives rather than compatibility with our evolutionary history :D).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#Roman_Empire * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money_of_the_Qing_dynast...
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Is it "sensible oversight" to shoot first and ask questions later—to shut down all payments on a whim and then implement a review process (assuming it actually exists) afterwards which will be immediately overloaded? You might as well starve prisoners and then say sensible calorie management is not in and of itself foolish.
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This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour. The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at…
Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.” This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.
Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714 . Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
Except with the federal government “things” in many instances refers to people’s lives. What’s the acceptable body count to you, as we approach haphazardly and unconstitutionally reducing the deficit?