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Broligarchy does not build civilization

not-a-tech-bro.ghost.io

31–33 of 33 posts

Re: Broligarchy does not build civilization

#32
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole framing is nonsense. The US is the reserve currency of the world, and its influence in both economic and soft power has had massive ROI for the entire economy for decades. There is no other government that plays this role in the global economy, and it's a ridiculously advantageous one. The fact that a balance sheet shows the sum of the investments to achieve and maintain that as a deficit is not a reason t…

What measures do you suggest to take things in a different direction?

Here are some easy ones off the cuff: Kill a massive amount of wasteful private contracts. Remove the entire means-testing bureaucracy from every social program. Put more funding into stuff that actually gets ROI, like the IRS, the FTC, and the CFPB. Don't shoot ourselves in the foot by killing massively beneficial soft-power investments like USAID. That one in particular is essentially handing the mantle of cultural and economic hegemony to China on a silver platter. Maybe you don't believe America should be a hegemonic empire from a moral perspective, but it's hard to argue that it's not a beneficial position

The agenda here is just very clearly not efficiency, but cronyism, enabling autocratic control, and culture war vendettas. It really takes willful ignorance to think this is going to be good for the country overall. It will mostly be good for Elon Musk and his buddies, and maybe only in the short term

More broadly, I'd like to see the US return to a state of regulating finance and enforcing anti-trust in a sane manner. The boom-bust cycle and total crackdown on labor and consumer protection has turned the domestic economy into a casino that impoverishes the vast majority of its citizens, and the effect of bailing out this corrupt financier class every time they crash massive sectors of the economy has been the destruction of the real economy, an enduring public distrust of the government, and a class of insulated plutocrats who have been shielded from the consequences of their mistakes, believe themselves untouchable, and have now orchestrated a total takeover of the political process. We had economic stability before, and it was looted by the greed of our financial and industrial sectors.

Of course this all seems like a pipe dream. Those guys won. They have assumed control and they don't have to give a fuck what people on some forum say about them

Re: Broligarchy does not build civilization

#33
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under Clinton the US was running a surplus. When Bush came in he passed huge tax cuts and turned it into a deficit instead.

The dotcom boom was popping just as Clinton was leaving office. Clinton also lifted the legal restrictions (he signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act of 1933) that would have prevented the banking / mortgage crisis of 2008.

Yea TBH you're not gonna sell me on a president past Kennedy looking out for the US taxpayer or the economy in aggregate. Neoliberalism is one of the worst kinds of parasitic meme
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