Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why the young should welcome austerity

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#21

Post by ars »

mkramlich wrote: post #14

It's possible both to be against the government debts & deficit spending, and to be against an austerity agenda. For example, one way to reduce the deficit and debt with minimal pain and austerity is to reduce discretionary military spending (which, for the US, is arguably what most of it is, in the form of overseas adventures and bases, and astronomically expensive weapon systems), and to increase taxes and/or other…

> reduce discretionary military spending

Make sure to think about what happens next after you do that. The money spent on military spending is huge part of the economy. Stop that and you'll have massive layoffs.

If this stuff was so simple it would be solved already.

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#22

Post by soren_dahl »

jellicle wrote: post #7

For perspective: the author of this piece is a right-wing ideologue who has called for eliminating Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and all income taxes on the rich. Not sure what this piece has to do with Hacker News either.

Hi, from the HN Guidelines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Also, your comment doesn't engage with any of the issues of the article.

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#23

Post by soren_dahl »

Clotho wrote: post #9

Why should anyone welcome a system - be it austerity or extend and pretend where they or their children pay to line the pockets of the 1%? I understand that the BBC is the voice of the state, but OP, how could you consider anything other than the Iceland solution to be the correct course?

I don't really know enough about the subject to agree or disagree, I just thought the points the author made were interesting.

However, to try and answer your question, I don't think that it can be as simple as taking one country's solution and applying it to another, it seems to be that economics at this scale is maybe close to the complexity of weather systems, and therefore each situation is unique.

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#24

Post by urbanjunkie »

Clotho wrote: post #9

Why should anyone welcome a system - be it austerity or extend and pretend where they or their children pay to line the pockets of the 1%? I understand that the BBC is the voice of the state, but OP, how could you consider anything other than the Iceland solution to be the correct course?

> I understand that the BBC is the voice of the state

You understand incorrectly. The BBC is funded by a compulsory license fee, but it's certainly not a communist era Pravda-like entity.

Each of the UK's political parties generally thinks that the BBC is biased against them. and the BBC is often regarded as being biased against the left wing and the right wing simultaneously.

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#25

Post by protomyth »

gruseom wrote: post #15
protomyth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I find Krugman to be more ideological than reasoned, but I that could be from working on government stuff in the 90s. I would recommend reading about spending changes in 1946, it is quite an interesting era to compare to 1920, 1929, and today.

Do you have the same opinion about Baker? I find him to be less political than Krugman (which doesn't necessarily mean less ideological). His posts are almost always based on data and seem to make a pretty strong case. Plus he called the housing bubble really early (2002 or so), again just by looking at data. Probably the most interesting point that Baker makes (makes ad nauseum, in fact) is that the US's fiscal dile…

I've only read a little bit of Baker from his stuff on housing, and I tend to agree with him. He does a decent job of actually backing up his point without the slight-of-hand graphs Krugman uses. I am not fond of his headline writings to attract attention. His criticism of the regulators is detailed and backed up well.

I really, really wish we had gone another way on health care. Moving health care away from company to individual purchases, health savings accounts, government health disaster insurance (everything over a certain $ amount), massive changes to IHS. Phasing in items and protecting from day one our most vulnerable populations (fix the leaks instead of buying a new boat).

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#26

Post by protomyth »

MaysonL wrote: post #20
protomyth wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I find Krugman to be more ideological than reasoned, but I that could be from working on government stuff in the 90s. I would recommend reading about spending changes in 1946, it is quite an interesting era to compare to 1920, 1929, and today.

I'm curious: do you have any examples where Krugman is flat-out wrong? There are many cases where the people whom he criticizes are. His predictions have been more right than wrong, imho.

Well, that link I posted sure is him being wrong.

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#27

Post by MaysonL »

protomyth wrote: post #26
MaysonL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: do you have any examples where Krugman is flat-out wrong? There are many cases where the people whom he criticizes are. His predictions have been more right than wrong, imho.

Well, that link I posted sure is him being wrong.

Actually, I'll have to disagree with you on that.

Re: Why the young should welcome austerity

#28

Post by protomyth »

MaysonL wrote: post #27
protomyth wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that link I posted sure is him being wrong.

Actually, I'll have to disagree with you on that.

Well, if using deceptive graphs aren't very convincing (see all of the results of his article). Perhaps his criticism of Germany, Estonia, and his writings on the stimulus actions by the USA which turned out to be wrong would do it.
Post reply on HN