I would settle for "not actively cutting taxes while claiming you're balancing the budget."

The DOGE cuts last year were paired with, yes, massive tax cuts for the rich: [0]

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...

We won't solve the problem by raising taxes. Let me be clear that I agree that raising taxes should be part of the solution, I just don't think the people will vote for that. People will at most take a token increase on the "rich" that will bring in a lot less money than planned because they will find a way to dodge it.

Most likely, the bulk of the solution will come through debasement and stealth default. Real inflation plus manipulating the official inflation numbers to default on a part of inflation adjusted obligations like TIPS and social security.

Huh? From what I heard, no combination of groups in the beltway bothered to expend the political capital to actually force through across the board cuts. Not even a meagre 5% cut per annum from the total budget.

They all backed out when it came to walk the talk.

(Or to cut $1 billion here and there, hundreds of times per annum, which would have needed like a dozen DOGEs and iron discipline in Congress)

You don’t make meaningful progress when you focus on a rounding error part of the budget. It’s like targeting private jet use for climate change. It’s for the feels so you can pretend you’re on the right side of things while doing absolutely nothing that matters in final effect even if 100% successful.

If you want to solve the budget deficit you need to go after the things that matter which is mandatory social spending these days. That and the revenue side combined are all that matter. Even the military is starting to become more and more irrelevant as social spending and debt service eats up all the air in the room. You could end it entirely tomorrow and you’d still have a deficit. It’s not the 1990s anymore.

Anything else can be immediately written off as unserious action brought by unserious people. The bike shedding of budgetary politics.

The Two Santas strategy <https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santa...> is the American implementation of the famous Alexander Fraser Tytler quote: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”

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https://amarkfoundation.org/reports/u-s-presidents-and-the-f..., though you could just google the topic and click exactly any link, clearly shows that Republican admins grow the deficit, Democratic admins shrink it.

These are just straight up numbers increasing or decreasing. It’s not complicated shit. Quit equivocating.

The Democratic plan to fix the deficit is clear and practical. Tax the rich and stop the war.

Clinton and Gingrich balanced the budget. is it coincidence that those are now two of the most hated last names in politics? perhaps not.

The administration has said it out loud. Printing press.

The deficit get consistently worst under republican leadership. Again amd again.

that's yet another "both sides are the same!" fallacy

you are right in that neither can fix it entirely

only one party consistently raises the debt->deficit

and only one party consistently lowers it

hint: you cannot spend $21 TRILLION on militarizing the country and going to war without exploding the deficit, there's no profit in war, only massive expense

* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...

and that $21 Trillion was before the Iran War which is going to go on for years and cost another trillion to replace all the weapons and ships, remember all those bases and planes that were destroyed which this administration is covering up

Doing the both sides thing here is so, so frustrating… Obama and Biden both spent big to avoid/alleviate recession conditions, that is true. But it’s just not comparable at all:

1. First off: the deficit article were commenting under right now. This is unusual and terrible and 100% due to GOP norm breaking.

2. The BBB raised the debt astronomically, so this will continue well past the end of the war.

3. We’re engaged in a war of choice with a huge country with no end in sight and no stated objective, and the pentagon is getting more money than ever.

4. The corruption and graft is so rank and blatant that it might actually make a dent here, which is absurd. God forbid they carry out their ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and then we pay for Trump City, there. Not to mention all the subordinate graft.

5. Only one party has divorced itself from reason entirely. Democrats are deeply flawed and I disagree with many of them on many things, but none of them dare try the ‘nuh uh shut up’ approach that is central to the GOP in the days of Trump. Imagine if they said anything as absurd as “Haitians are eating our cats and dogs” or “I’ll give everyone $5k” or “I didn’t lose the election that every single watchdog said I did” — they would be lambasted and forgotten within days.

6. Only one party is planning for the other party to ever be in power ever again. That is, assuming you don’t take Miller’s word for it that there are seven bajillion illegal aliens that the democrats ship in to win elections, which just hasn’t happened to work yet because the GOP is just too popular, and hasn’t been uncovered in any actual investigations because they’re just too darn tricky.

Sorry. Presumably this whole thread will be wiped anyway. But this is not a “both parties” thing! We’ve had a balanced budget and a positive treasury balance in my lifetime, and I’m a baby person!

(People said it was impossible then as well, FWIW.)

Bullshit on the lazy “both parties are the same” framing. Bill Clinton actually balanced the federal budget and ran a $236 billion surplus in 2000. His 1993 deficit-reduction package passed without a single Republican vote. You just keep eating up the Republican bullshit...

It take a hero to dive on the grenade.

Such dives tend to be fatal.

Until AI can produce a blast-management plan to ensure the hero's survival, the necessary courage shall remain elusive.

they will raise taxes while cutting the budget. in a multiparty system there are ways to achieve politically unpalatable things. in Italy we have what we call "technical governments", we don't vote for the government, only for parliament, and they elect the government, when nobody has a clear majority they vote for a "compromise" government where they elect a prime minister that is from no party, usually an economist or someone like that, which carries out the politically unpalatable reforms, in France they will do it with a split parliament/presidency

No political will is akin to the parent giving into the child’s tantrum

"The US federal deficit is growing at an alarming rate; if nothing is done, it will solve itself with inflation. "

AKA: Take on massive loans. Buy assets fast or stick into HSA.

There is no political will to increase taxes in the U.S.

>Also, US tax rates are relatively low, US can pay the debt by increasing tax rate if there is political will.

The whole point of debt is that it never gets paid. Not. a. single. country. has ever paid it off (and the few times it did happen, hundreds of thousands died). It keeps rolling forward, and gets eaten by inflation. The vast majority of "first world" countries have a 50%+ debt to GDP ratio (except when you do like Germany and manipulate the eurozone currency to your advantage) and are doing just fine. Countries have debt because people want to lend to them, because it's where things happen. Bhutan doesn't have debt, because it doesn't have the money to build it up.

>EU must rescue France in next 4-5 years.

zzzz

Can the american bots worry about their own country and their deeply ingrained problems before repeating the propaganda you read in the atlantic ? It's getting a bit boring.

It's the biggest most beautiful deficit ever. If the democrats were in charge they would have spent far more on sex changes for kids, it's the TRUTH!

I assume you're being satirical.

Edit: I don't really need it explained to me, I literally just said I assumed it's satire. Also who would downvote this? Calm down.

So the solution is to annex Spain. ;)

49 million people live in Spain. and it's a non industrial economy.

So ... low?

It’s okay, it’s all part of the political cycle:

1. Republicans start a war and cause a recession

2. Democrats get swept into power, barely.

3. Democrats clean up the mess but key reforms are blocked by some lone asshole like Joe Lieberman.

4. Everyone complains that Democrats didn’t do enough, it’s all the immigrants’ fault, and put Republicans back in power.

5. Return to step 1.

obama nearly doubled the national debt in 8 years ($11T -> $22T). this is not a problem specific to a party or a president

The problem is is that whatever party does this will never win again, at any level of government.

Oddly enough, there are plenty of European countries with lower taxes holistically, higher entitlements, and lower debt / deficit levels.

As far as I can tell, the solution isn't nearly that hamfisted. It requires:

- Reinstituting rule-of-law (not just Trump; the whole system)

- Instituting basic proper management of funds

In Europe, I can walk into a government agency and be done in 15 minutes, with a smile from the administrator, for what would take months of fighting in the US. If a part of the government is breaking a rule, I can point them to it, and they'll follow it. Courts are slow, but follow clear laws; I don't see black robe syndrome. And police follow and enforce laws.

US used to be closer to that too; it actually led the world in good governance for much of history.

That's hard work of diving in and cleaning up every piece of the administration. There's no stomach for that. Until there is, the deficit will keep going up.

Targeting "entitlements" as a universal fix ignores both the fiscal math and the human costs. Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending; cutting it just shifts uncompensated care burdens onto hospitals and inflates private premiums. Cutting programs like SNAP and WIC means pulling food support from children, which causes long-term economic damage.

If the goal is deficit reduction through spending cuts, policy needs to evaluate actual economic ROI. Programs like nutritional and income supports have positive fiscal multipliers, which is why blunt austerity measures trigger negative feedback loops and contract growth.

Spending cuts have a place, but treating entitlements as a slush fund without accounting for the economic return or impact on people isn’t a productive policy proposal.

There's no "entitlements" you can cut that wouldn't cause more harm to the economy than they would save up in federal spending. And there isn't enough income that taxing it to pay off the debt would be practical. You have to tax capital, that's where the entire world's wealth has been sucked up in the last decades. That's the only solution that doesn't involve the country defaulting on its debts.

Billionaires know that and are already starting to speak against such taxes[0], before there's even any real possibility of them being adopted. They would rather see everything turn to shit than give back a single cent.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/winc.html

If you print you cause more inflation and all the debt you need to renew requires higher yield to shift. So in practice printing yourself out of trouble is in itself a cause of trouble

It doesn’t just print money. It raises money or backs it by assets. It amazes me that people have no understanding of basic economics, or what qualitative easing is. Study the 2008 financial crisis to understand the power of modern monetary theory.

It bought a whole ballroom!

I hope everyone is enjoying American Yanukovich, and looking forward to Amerimaidan to get rid of him.

Theres noone in charge.

Algorithm for surviving "rats on a sinking ship":

1. Watch the program execute

2. Examine behavior patterns

3. Best guess where they point

4. Prepare for that, whatever that is.

5. Error correct and repeat step 1.

ps. If enough rats adopt the algorithm the ship won't sink.

$1 billion/day way the initial estimate, but it was never actually that high. CBO estimates $38B through August 1, or ~ $7B/month. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62756

I've tried this ~2 months ago with GPT pro and lost the chat. Basically assumming a scenario where it has technocratic control over the budget and it has to manage it.

It really didn't come up with anything crazy. It was basically cutting spending and raising and creating new taxes. With the plan being to spread the pain based on tolerability and medium to long term sustainability. With actions like a fedral consumption tax with planned rebates depending on household wealth.

Its also tried to be careful around things that might create long term problems like dramatic education cuts and what not.

The reforms it gives are altogether pretty numerically radical but its not radical in the internet way where its a polarized solution. It's not a reddit style eat the rich or a business trickle down wealth solution.

Paperclips are famously not that expensive to maintain

Isn't Anthropic on some sort of a blacklist?

3. Prompt it to make no mistakes

You're half joking but that is what will happen. We don't dare interfere with the military or police or the comfort of billionaires so obviously we need to make life even worse for poor people and old people.

I think the downvotes are mostly due to the gold thing. it sounds...deranged