At some point I realized: there is no plan to fix it. Both of the parties are just hoping that the upcoming crisis happens while the other party is in power.
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.”
That is extraordinary insightful. It's frightening to see how correct it is, and to recognise that Europe and the US are both well past the abundance phase.
There would be abundance if the trillionaires were happy with 5% returns and invested in housing instead of gambling (and being bailed out eventually) on "Super Intelligence".
> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Good times have made weak men. People unwilling to stand up for our values. Afraid to even declare what we stand for. Afraid to be proud of our traditions and what makes our way of life superior and worth defending and fighting for. These weak people will vote for candidates who demoralise us and weaken us and ensure our demise.
One characteristic of democracy is that it is ever-rewritten by those who strive to change it and vote. (Also, occasionally assassination, in Long's case)
> From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury
Please show me that moment, is it in the room with us right now?
On the contrary, giving money to the public would actually help the economy, but people continuously vote for politicians who are (ostensibly) “careful” with the money.
> The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Sounds like total bullshit. I briefly googled it and apart from AI also telling me that it was total bullshit, the first list I found split the Roman empire in two so it would neatly match the hypothesis!
Someone just thought of that and then found data to fit their neat idea.
>> The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
> Sounds like total bullshit.
You're right. It more like an avg of 118 years (median 73), not 200, depending on what you mean by "greatest" ofc. The Ancient Romans, US, and Dutch pulling that average up and 1/3 of historically modern continuing democracies having a short lifespan being founded around WW2, pulling it down.
The Roman Empire was not stable for an uninterrupted period of time. It's conceptually called a single state for simplicity, because such a large period of time and area of land naturally had instability (less than current Europe, granted). The Roman Empire democratic government lasted about 487 years before falling into autocratic rule.
What? That is so not true I don’t even know where to begin. The President, of course, has some input into what the budget will be but we have seen plenty of times that Congress can and will flex their power when the parties of the Congress and President do not match.
The president proposes the entire budget, and can veto the entire budget regardless of which party is in power. Of course Congress has immense influence and you also can't pass a budget they don't agree with. That doesn't change that not only does the president matter (the claim I'm refuting), they are the most important single person that matters, by design.
The president has a huge say in which bills and budget items are passed, they routinely put enormous pressure on individual senators to whip votes for their agenda. This goes double or even triple for Trump! Congress might literally create the budget, but in our age they're – at the bare minimum – starting from the president's agenda and working with him to pass what he wants first.
Sure, when the party controlling both members of Congress matches the President. Less so when it doesn’t. Some of the biggest reductions in the growth of spending come when the parties do not match for that very reason.
It turns out that I'm not impressed with "we still have a deficit, but it's smaller than under the previous administration". No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable.
Who cares if you’re impressed when you’ve fallen for propaganda (I guess maybe politicians care).
“No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”
Why not? Deficits can be healthy and safe when they’re managed. Literally most persons, businesses, and governments use debt. It helps manage purchases over time, and it’s an inflationary hedge.
The idea that “any deficit is bad” was literally pushed as propaganda to make you fatalistic about managing the deficit. As said, one party raises it, one party lowers it, and the party that raises it claims that lowering it to anything but zero is “just as bad” as their runaway debt growth. Propaganda.
>Why not? Deficits can be healthy and safe when they’re managed. Literally most persons, businesses, and governments use debt.
It probably greatly depends on what debt is spent. If it's used for investment to spur further growth, it's entirely different if it's used for consumption. Is government using depth for future growth?
>> “No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”
> Why not?
The household analogy works for some people because it answers a moral question, not an economic one: Why should government be exempt from rules that individuals must follow?
The development of the household budget idea as a way of reasoning about the the federal government's is as old as economics itself. The Greek word for economics is oikonomia, consisting of
- oikos = household
- nomos = management
This analogy broke 90 years ago in the US, when, in the aftermath of the great depression, Keynes argued that governments should do things that households cannot: borrow during recessions, spend when private demand collapses, tolerate deficits until recovery. And that these have a beneficial effect on the economy and its participants because government spending becomes someone else's income, essentially injecting demand into the economy.
During the 1970s, US politicians realized that the household budget analogy was an effective rhetorical tool for arguing for fiscal conservatism. Its effectiveness bore no relation to its reflection of present reality. What it did reflect was a set of values: thrift, responsibility, independence, and skepticism of debt. But most of all, it speaks to a sense of justice - that the rules for me were also the rules for thee. The difference that the government plays by a different set of economic constraints than I do is the fundamental tension that the household analogy attempts to address. This is a moral intuition not an economic intuition. The sentiment still holds power today despite it being a bad intuition pump for economic reasoning.
That is an amazingly flawed idea. By that reasoning, only a neutral budget is acceptable, and a positive debt surplus a boon. Unfortunately, the opposite is empirically true: the only places running total budget surpluses tend to be undemocratic shitholes because they need to promise nothing and do not rely upon the consent of the governed to loan them savings and pay them taxes.
That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.
I’ve been in municipalities and provinces running healthy surpluses and the economy booms during those times. People do better and schools are better run and so on. And for that matter, Canada boomed after the government fixed the budget in the late 90s. We went south again when the new government showed a complete lack of respect for money.
Were those municipalities and provinces receiving any money from the federal government and is that how they had surpluses? That's certainly how it works here in the US.
Not how it worked in my home state growing up. The state intermittently ran budget surpluses and were net givers to the federal budget. Still are today.
I’m also not entirely sure how relevant that is due to states (and provinces) not printing their own currency though. Very different situations.
Well, the goal is not to impress HN user bigstrat2003. The goal is to have a government and country that continue to function. A fiscal deficit by itself is not a bad thing, and I suspect you would have an extraordinarily difficult time coming up with coherent arguments to the contrary.
1. They’re unable to get enough support to pass more taxes (yet), so “balancing the budget” after republicans lower them on the rich would mean killing people by cutting services.
2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.
3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.
4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.
Entitlements and interest expense are more than 100% of revenue in 2026. That's the before the military, foreign aid, the courts, NASA, and anything beginning with "Department of". The deficit is structural, and while "tax the rich" is easy politics, I don't think you'll find $2T there.
In my opinion the following graph should be mandatory viewing before any discussion on major tax policy changes in the US.
That graph indicates there is a lot of room on the red green and blue segments. And the yellow has 0% from wealth taxes in the US, so it also has room.
That isn’t enough; there would have to be cuts to social security & medicare. The rich don’t have enough money to cover the federal government’s obligations.
That's not true. Doing it with a single tax change is possible but would be a massive hit. With multiple tax changes it's actually fairly small hikes even without entitlement changes. A small wealth tax, eliminate the pass through loophole, increase the top income tax rate and eliminate the social security limit and you'd have a surplus.
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
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.)
It’s important to remember that Obama and Biden’s predecessors also both spent big to alleviate those economic problems.
I’m convinced that a big part of our political woes come from the fact that major elections are at the end of the year. Obama election, 2008. Great financial crisis, 2008. So who oversaw the big bailouts and massively spiked the deficit dealing with the crisis? Obama, of course. Except it wasn’t, it was Bush.
Likewise, Biden 2020. Pandemic 2020. Who oversaw lockdowns and massive federal payroll loans and big government checks sent out? Biden! (No, Trump.)
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...
Not so fast. Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction plan was a 10 year plan. It did cut, a little, but the real cuts were in years 9 and 10 - years when Clinton would be out of office, even with two terms. It was a "kick the can down the road" plan, that left the next president dealing with the real cuts.
Then Republicans took Congress in 1994 with their "Contract With America". They passed a budget that was much closer to balanced, whether Clinton wanted it or not. Eventually, as you say, that led to a surplus in 2000. (That was the first surplus since Andrew Jackson, by the way.) But Clinton by himself wasn't going to do it. He was going to play pretend. It was the Republican Congress that forced him to.
Now, if you think I'm advocating for the Republicans here, I note that Republicans don't believe in anything like a balanced budget when the president is their guy. I'm just saying that, if you're going to point to Clinton, state the record accurately.
(One detail I don't remember: Why did Clinton's 1993 deficit plan get no Republican votes? Was it because they did not want to cut the deficit? Was it because they just wanted to deny Clinton a victory? Or was it because they wanted to actually do something about the deficit, and Clinton's plan was more pretend than real?)
I agree that Republicans are probably worse on this topic, but as far as I can tell, the parties are closer to parity on this than they were in 1993. The Democratic party doesn't seem have people like Bill any more.
It's overly simplistic to say that Clinton balanced the budget. While the 1993 bill raised taxes and reduced defense spending, there would not have been a surplus without further cuts driven by Republicans in 1997.
There was also the dot-com boom, which of course wouldn't have happened without Al Gore inventing the Internet.
The pattern is extremely clear. During my lifetime, the deficit had increased under Republican presidents and decreased under Democrats. This has held steady for decades. That’s the more important thing than the question of exactly why one of them managed to get it to zero one time.
While literally true, this is not very insightful/useful information because Obama entered office at peak deficit spend to counter the mortgage crisis, and Biden entered at peak deficit spend to counter COVID lockdowns. Because both the mortgage crisis and COVID eventually ended, deficit spend came down from those peaks without either president meaningfully reforming the budget.
Structurally, the budget has gotten worse every year since the 1990s. In large part for reasons not attributable to presidents. For example the number of old people (as a % of the population) in the US has doubled since the '90s, thus ballooning medicare and social security spend. Without cutting eligibility to those programs, increased spend was always going to be an inevitability due to seismic underlying demographic trends. Second, the persistent deficit has led to now $2T in annual interest expense. Again, not something an administration can simply "reform" or back out of; that is now structural inherited spend.
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Thanks I agree its very relevant to a lot of things too especially societal/political paradigms that will never end without a gigantic shift that is AI. Glad you can see through the noise and understand that too
