981–990 of 1001 posts
For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…
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> Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. This isn't the question. The question is about the premise of federal spending being "out of control". By what measure is it out of control?
Increasing deficit
https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extend...
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-did-tcja-affec...
So the strategy is to cut taxes and revenue and balloon the deficit, then declare that spending is out of control and constitutes emergency measures to fix.
For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…
1. Is personal spending and wages growing with GDP? Answer in no. How is it fair for government spending to track and exceed GDP, but personal not to follow? GDP itself is a flawed metric that politics push to overstate. 2. This is all true, but much of the fraud takes please "in name" of something good. You will easily find things like funding some NGO to host a party in the "taking care of the elderly" code. Many t…
Personal spending is up relative to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWC7
Household net worth is up relative to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWCd
This might be chalked up to population growth, but then again so could increased GDP or government spending.
I like that the focus is on the issues with the disruptors that have been running for a few weeks, not the egregious spending for decades.
This disruption are not about spending though. In their own words what it is about: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
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I've been posting a lot about this lately. Here are some recent posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 If you (or anyone) will read some of those and follow some of the links i…
>> Whenever there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que ...), the flood of submissions about it quickly exhausts HN's capacity to host substantive discussions. That goes double when a topic is divisive and enraging, like you-know-who is. I thought you-know-who was defeated? Are the Death Eaters assembling again?
For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…
The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax). This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit…
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The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades at many American institutions, such as for-profit companies. Openly selling the country short for personal benefit is just one small step after many hundreds of them to get where we are.
When have the corporations ever not had a short-termist "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality in America?
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The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax). This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit…
> This is much more than any DOGE savings DOGE is an 18 month project. Confidently asserting the end result after a few weeks is bold.
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The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax). This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit…
It's also about weakening the federal government. Cutting regulations and throwing everything into chaos. It took some time for me to buy into the Techno-authoritarian theories, but the evidence is overwhelming.