From what I've read, the deficit looked like a huge problem and turned out to not be a problem from WWII to 2008. That's the situation most economists, finance leaders and regulators grew up in.
But, the demographic crisis means that moving forward our growth in entitlement spending for the growing population of seniors is far outpacing our growth in GDP from our slowing population of workers.
We can't tax or cut out way out of this. Elon's cuts are going to be performative at best. Real cuts would put tens of millions of seniors, vets and disabled people into destitution. Taxing the billionaires more would be nice. But, taxing them to zero would only paper over a few years of the problem.
The only way out I see is through massive investment to increase per-capita GDP long term. As a super duper liberal, I'm gung ho on "Bring manufacturing back!" in the form of
1. Re-prioritize trade schools and trade skills so we can actually perform high-skill work in factories if/when we build them.
2. Do everything we can to catch up with China making locally-built green energy tech dirt-cheap and highly effective.
3. Figure out how to incentivize the market to local build the interconnected web of advanced manufacturing capabilities needed to produce high tech goods fast and cheap.
I see the work of https://www.hadrian.co/ as an example of what I'm talking about. I'm starting to see some senators act like they need to stop talking about it and actually do something about it. But, the "best" I've heard from Trump is "Drill, baby. Drill!" and "Tariffs are magic."
If Trump laid out a plan for how to target tariffs surgically and use those proceeds to build up manufacturing, I'd be on board. But, he hasn't. Instead, he has made it clear his only plan is to create chaos, achieve performative concessions, and declare personal triumph while netting great harm for everyone in the end.
I agree with your numbers. If we're seeing this much resistance to cutting down mostly foreign-focused programs, would you really be making this comment if Elon/Trump were trying to cut social security, medicare/aid, etc?
I would be 10X as concerned and so would everyone else because mishandling those programs could absolutely wreck the lives of tens of millions of people.
My point is that a lot of people seem to be in an "ends justify the means" mindset here where it's OK to rubber-stamp over laws, security, any sort of requirements for competence, or even basic understanding of what's being destroyed because in the end, this is chaos is going to have such a tremendous impact.
But, it's not. It mathematically can't. Even if it all turns out amazing it will be a small dent in the problem it's claiming to solve.
So, in the end, all of this is actually just chaos for sake of chaos. In the process, a whole lot of real people will be hurt in real ways. It's not bad at the same scale that "Turn off Medicare until we understand how it works" would be. But, it's nonsensically destructive in exactly the same way.
Exactly my point. This is (one of the reasons) why Trump is cutting these small programs. People would really flip out if he cut social programs for Americans
I applaud the goal of rooting out the pork. But, "We have to do something. This is something." doesn't excuse how it's being done.
Turning off the entire flow of money is unnecessary, even counter-productive, to understanding how the money is flowing. Even if half of the money is waste, turning off the other half is causing tremendous real harm for no reason.
It is completely unnecessary and horrific to rubber stamp around national security protocol for something as incomprehensibly impactful as the federal payments system.
And, in the end, what are we going to get out of all of it? What I'm seeing out of Elon is propaganda about programs like "studying shrimp on treadmills" which was an microscopic piece of a very sensible study on marine safety and security. That's exactly the kind of work the government is supposed to be doing. But, if you frame it badly enough, you can destroy it for everyone and claim it as a victory.
Or we could repeal the Bush and Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, that are largely responsible for the deficit exploding in the first place?
Yes and it is fine. That’s a scary number with zero context, but given the borrowing rate and the investments we’re making in future GDP, this is good borrowing!
it isn’t good when a group of people tries to destroy the entity that’s making those investments. These shitheads are basically corporate raiders coming in to tear things apart for personal gain.
Ironically, it is the “fiscally responsible”, “WhY nOt RuN gOvErNmEnT lIkE a BuSiNeSs” gang who want to destroy any fiscally responsible investment.
If they want to reduce spending meaningfully, they need to cut defense, social security, and Medicare. They won’t, because it’s political suicide.
Most government spending is just keeping old people alive and happy, and paying the interest on debt. Say what you want about, but its not an investment in the future.
This is like building a computer, getting it mostly done, and declaring it useless because it doesn’t turn on yet. Or complaining the Manhattan Project had produced zero nukes by early 1945.
It’s a decade long project, with phases and 50 different state governments doing the actual contracting. The Fed side is mostly funding and establishing the Tesla charger as the national standard - which required quite a bit of diplomacy to get all the car manufacturers onboard.
Ah, so if they had the extra year they would have had charging stations everywhere. What a pity. All that money wasted because we didn't wait till August.
They invented a novel weapon in half the time your heroes dreamed of building a charging station.
> They invented a novel weapon in half the time your heroes dreamed of building a charging station.
It's a plan to build tens of thousands of charging stations, by 2030.
In all 50 states, with the states and local administrations being responsible for contracting, permiting, buying land, utility work, etc. Most of the work is not on the Feds here.
It should not be at all surprising that 10k+ little building projects take some time to get going. Even from the folks who credulously believed the President could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
But we have a plan, ceejayoz. We've got a plan. And ten years from now we'll have a plan and maybe one shed where we can build a teleporter, but always remember the bomb: in early 1945 there was no bomb.
The Interstate Highway System took like 36 years to build, wouldn't that be a better analogy, since it's an entity that exists in many different places at once? Whereas the bomb was built on eminent domain-seized property so you didn't have to deal with local jurisdictions or landowners.
That is a better analogy, yeah, and much more convincing. If this is delivering at an equivalent pace (same year had a state complete their I-70) then I am convinced.
I think your other comment about it being harder because it's an overly complicated plan doesn't convince me. The complexity and feasibility of a plan are also characteristics of its quality.
I didn't mean it was overly complicated so much as it's probably got more bickering stakeholders, as it involves private industry who presumably don't want Tesla to be able to dictate the standard.
Coming up with one would have been a reasonable outcome. Using Tesla's would also have been reasonable. They managed to sort out who to give EUV tech. But in any case the space of disagreement here isn't large enough to be worth arguing.
There’s also the matter that the Manhattan Project was under one authority. As an ancestral comment mentioned, there’s multiple automakers involved. It would be trying to build a bomb and dealing with not only the gun type design vs. the implosion design but a bevy of others, whose proponents all have equal influence over Oppenheimer to stymie the effort.
> There are currently 214 operational chargers in 12 states that have been funded through the law, with 24,800 projects underway across the country, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
I'll give you a general tip for reading opinion pieces / fact checks (from generally reputable sources):
Any "fact" it claims which is bad for it's case, you can believe with > 90% probability
Any "fact" it uses to support it's case should be taken with a tablespoon of sodium.
For example in this case: 24,800 projects underway. I assume if many were mostly built then they would say "10,000 chargers expected to be operational by March".
If they were under construction at all, they would probably say "under construction" This is a statement from the Federal Highway Administration! it's PR! (as it should be, nothing wrong with tooting your own horn) and the most they claim is "underway".
Of course we won't get an investigative story about this, but I'd wager the vast majority is in the earliest possible stage (before even permits to build)
So, the criticism of Buttigieg is well founded, and the "misinformation" is more directionally correct then the "fact check"
I think it's the price per charger that's the important value here, and the original claim "billions of dollars for 8 EV charging stations" is indeed provably false (even if you amend it to 243 or 214 EV charging stations). The money hasn't been spent yet.
The only potential problem here is that "we owe ourselves" simplifies things given that some individuals are owed much more than others, i.e. there's inequality. Other than that? The whole debt charade is just political groups weaponizing (and perpetuating) the lack of fairly basic macro-economic understanding in the population.
Turns out that having a 100% guaranteed return is attractive to a lot of large-scale investors, even if the yields don't make the money machine go brrr.
This is one thing that worries me about the current administration. A lot of trust is built on the fact that the US gov't has never defaulted on a debt in its history. I feel like some people don't place enough weight into what that really means for both ourselves and the world.
It's institutions who are investing on behalf of their elderly clients (for example pension funds and such).
That 100% return is guaranteed by the whip that the government so willingly cracks over the backs of productive young people. Why would it be in the interest of the non-entitled to have a government which keeps swinging that whip? To guarantee the investments of the elderly who only have bottomless hate towards the young?
There is a reason why third world countries choose IMF funding even with the strings attached even though default is always an option. It turns out having credit is very valuable to stability and progress and therefore defaulting is a very bad thing.
The reason being that the ruling class benefits from selling out their subjects to financial vultures?
Being rich in a first world countries is very neat, even great. Being rich in a third world country is like thirteen levels above that. For you and for your family.
If a balanced budget led to a flat or negative GDP, reduced the USA’s power and influence globally, and/or lowered standards of living, then would it still be desirable? What exactly is the argument against a deficit besides that it might be giving some groups leverage over the USA, which is dubious?
The argument is that it inevitably gets you to a state like Argentina was in, where the government repeatedly defaults until eventually you're forced to crash the economy for years to escape the loop. I'd rather have a flat GDP than 95% annual inflation.
I hate threads like this because of all the misinformed debt hysteria.
People like to bring up places like Argentina and Venezuela, but their debts weren't denominated in their own currencies, so they had to collect dollars in order to repay debts in dollars. As a currency issuer, since we create dollars, we can never run out of them. Nor do we have to round up dollars and take them back from currency holders before we can repay a debt. Doing so just takes those dollars away from the non-government so that the issuer can zero out a ledger somewhere. The interest is interest we choose to pay, for some reason. The only way we could default on our debt is if we decide to. The only way to "pay off" the "debt" is to take all the dollars away from the non-government, which is _us_.
Respectfully, it's you who's been misinformed by viral but false monetary theories. It's true that the US government can't run out of dollars in the same way that you or I might run out of dollars. It's not true that the government has no fiscal constraints, or that taxes and spending are unrelated parameters.
> The interest is interest we choose to pay, for some reason.
Perhaps this is the best point to talk about, because the precise way in which it's untrue is very concrete. The US government doesn't choose how much interest it feels like paying; it sells securities which promise a specific payout schedule according to an auction-set interest rate. If investors want to buy at a high interest rate, there's no mechanism for the government to demand they accept a lower one.
I never said that we have no fiscal constraints, just that the common misconception is backwards. I also never said that the government chooses the rate. It chooses to pay interest when it chooses to sell securities.
I think the popular misunderstanding is more harmful than some of the misunderstandings you point out (which some people may indeed have) because it leads to people pushing austerity because of their monetarist dogma.
Nobody ever asks who's going to pay for stuff when it's so-called "defense" spending. But if we want health care or education then it's all apoplectic "debt, hyperinflation, enslavement of future generations, where's the money going to come from!?"
I’m not advocating for war but one thing this deficit pays for is being a military superpower, which is the main way our debt is “guaranteed”. As in, call in the debt at your own peril.
US government debt doesn't exist as a line-of-credit agreement that someone could choose whether or not to "call in". It's primarily represented by Treasury bonds, securities which represent a promise by the US government to pay a specific amount of money at a specific point in time. It's true that the US can decide one day to default on these promises, but this doesn't have anything to do with military strength, nor can military strength mitigate the negative consequences for the (mostly domestic) investors.
He's not advocating it. But it's simply the reality of the US as a superpower.
Just look at Panama this very week. They were threatened to be invaded if they didn't give up economic deals with China and go back to being a servant colony of the US.
The odds of citizens cashing in and demanding all their money at once is pretty slim. The odds of countries that hold US debt doing it are better. But there's a strong deterrent for countries doing that. And it's the reality that the US has no issue with invading, and they've done it countless times this past century to the applause of the voters.
To put it another way, the private sector gets an income of $1 trillion every 100 days. Now suppose you stop that income. What happens to the private sector?
Sometimes following rules leads to an unrecoverable state, and then you have no choice but to reboot. Compound interest leads to either stagnation and decline, or else to jubilee. It's an inherently unstable system that has felled many civilizations before ours. Debt grows exponentially while real economies saturate in an S-curve. Eventually something has to give.
Stop unaudited government spending? Ukraine says it’s received only about half of what the Biden admin said it gave it.
It's looking like this was at least larping as a 40+ billion dollar slush fund. There may have been some legitimate (useful) spending, and they will find out after auditing the system, but it also looks like there was lots of waste and once-removed (one degree of separation) self-dealing.
How exactly is this approach an improvement over the status quo? Elon is not auditing spending. He’s pursuing political grudges and generating chaos for its own sake. The outcome will not be less government waste and fraud.
