Buffett claimed you could solve the deficit problem instantly by firing congress when they run deficits. Obviously, untenable (they'll cheat, admin overhead, etc).
You could very easily force congress to balance the budget (both parties and the media have complained endlessly about this for exactly no good reason). You could also freeze spending at current levels and force congress to do it's job: allocate our limited resources most productively.
Hard to get re elected doing the right thing, but maybe we just need a throw away set of leaders to do the hard work?
Working is an interesting term (which I agree with btw) because place like Japan with debt at 200%+ of gdp, rates rising are going to annihilate spending in other important areas.
Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?
> vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly
I wish you luck. Endless promises and short term thinking are the main things the system incentivizes. Each politician is temporarily renting their seat, paid for by other people. Each bureaucrat is studiously, steadfastly avoiding learning anything that threatens their continued employment, which is paid for by other people.
Eliminate candidates who promise to lower taxes (slows down debt repayment substantially) and those who promise new or expanded services. Who's left? "I'll tax you a little more and not spend that money" is a tough pitch, even if it would be helpful for the debt.
I think Clinton was the last us president to balance the budget and start reducing the deficit so I guess see what he did.
See what Clinton did? Well, he said he'd create a plan to balance the budget. And he did. It was a ten-year plan, and it involved doing very little for the first eight years, and then doing the real work in years nine and ten - that is, after Clinton was out of office, even if he got a second term.
Then 1994 happened, and the Contract With America. The Republicans took both the House and the Senate, and they passed a balanced budget , then, whether Clinton liked it or not.
So that's what "Clinton" did. He pretended he was going to do something, and the Republicans called his bluff, and made him do it.
Note well: Republican majorities in any other set of circumstances have not yielded a balanced budget. I'm not saying that they're the answer (what they did under Trump shows that they very clearly are not the answer for fiscal responsibility). All I'm saying is that "Clinton balanced the budget", while technically true, isn't really the way that played out.
> The Republicans took both the House and the Senate, and they passed a balanced budget
And Clinton signed it, which is what matters. Now the Republicans have both the House and the Senate plus the WH, where's the "balanced budget"? Nowhere, don't ask for it, nobody is going to sign it either - ask for $ 1.5 T Mil Bill and record deficits if you want it to pass.
Do you know what the 1995 Mil Bill asked for?
The Contract With America was a one-off stunt, in other words - mud in the eyes of the electorate. Old glory stories are worthless when they contradict the present reality,
“Promise endlessly” is an oft touted criticism of social safety net programs, when the reality is that reducing vast tranches of corporate welfare is typically more than enough to solve budget shortfalls.
You have to consider the fact that the populists are only popular because all the other parties in the last 20 years have made endless promises to the voters and failed to accomplish a tenth (if I am being generous) of what said they would do.
At some point, the blame as to lie also with whoever came before them too.
Some green parties. Their primary goals might seem unrelated, but turns out caring for the environment and climate change is correlated with long-term thinking.
Note I said "some", before rushing to mention all the examples of green parties engaging in misguided policies. Those also exist
In the anglosphere it's more difficult because first-past-the-post voting makes such parties unlikely to succeed or be relevant
In my country people voted in a party as majority that, not once left their terms peacefully in the past. AFTER our genZ ousted the other party, that came to power as a majority 17 years ago, changed constituency and controlled the parliament using majority, and turned into an autocracy
Now this party is shaping everything up using their majority for their favor (no surprise), ignoring all the agreements agreed upon by all the parties before election, under the interim government.
I think democracy is perhaps a fundamentally unstable system. It requires constant corrective force, and a lot of it, from a lot of people. When the members of that democracy start to get a little too comfortable it fails.
Humans are designed to operate in smallish clans with benevolent dictators whose right to rule is based on social currency with people they personally know. Anything else is a house of cards on unstable foundation.
I'm not sure how you fix that, but democracy so far has maybe been the least bad patch.
That was Churchill's view, as he said during a speech in the House of Commons in 1947:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time . . ."
The American founders predicted all these problems, which is why they formed a representative democracy. However over the years we have chipped away at that aspect and ended up with an election systems that encourage populism.
It had to be a joke. Conservative policies have made things much worse. It’s hard to believe they have a party that gets 60 million people to vote for them.
Turns out, that was just a lie that some people told fiscally conservative people to get them to vote against their interests, just like other "wedge" issues like abortion or trans people.
Response to sister comment: conservatism, and the groups that claim to support it, are separate. Same with liberals, and socialists, and the Democrat Party.
So name one. These politicans have names, do they not?
We do have the name of one politician who balanced the New York City budget though. Its probably not going to please a lot of people to hear that guy's name though. But that's what people want, right? Balanced budgets?
But no. That's not what people want and we all know it.
So what is he? A Democrat, and what else? Parties are groups of people, ideologies are pure ideals.
They are distinct, with overlaps in their demographics.
One aspect of that balanced budget that should be noted is that it does rely on a sizable funding increase from the state government.
Now, that state is legally required to have a balanced budget itself, so perhaps this is a small side note rather than a major change in perspective. I just think it’s not spoken about enough when discussing how that budget process went.
Trump, sitting on top of a Republican government, is responsible for 10Trn of the debt, about a quarter.
Conservatives gave up on principles long ago and have settled for simply lying about everything, including what's happening and who's responsible for it.
The words are so overloaded. Republican is just generic right wing. I think the "conservative" the parent is talking about is the neoliberalism like what Milton Friedman would propose. He would have wanted half of the government gone, next to no market intervention (he even argued against seatbelts in one lecture). That would actually be the "conservative" someone you stereotypically imagine like Ron Swanson would adopt, who describes the perfect government as just a person in a tiny white room. The Republicans are a joke, just like the Democrats. They're both there for themselves, and have no actual agenda, manifesto, ideals, or values. They've got all the junk identity politics, religion, abortion, immigration crap mixed in such that you're either picking crap or crap. There's nothing "liberal" about the Democrats and nothing "conservative" about the Republicans. The Republicans were even the ones who freed the slaves! Make of that what you will.
Rates going higher increases interest expense materially. You either rack new debt or you cut in places that are uncomfortable. The point is: responsible leadership in the developed world has gone mia for decades. There's a price to be paid that's real.
Accounting for the asset holding, Japan's net debt is even lower than UK/US.
>The key lies in the Japanese public sector’s operation of a de facto sovereign
wealth fund. Unlike countries such as Norway and Saudi Arabia, which fund such
vehicles with national savings from natural resources, Japan finances its investments
largely through domestic borrowing at very low floating interest rates
.... >In the case of Japan, evaluating fiscal
positions solely through the lens of gross government debt can present a highly
distorted picture of the overall fiscal health of the country.
The US’s most important export for many years was treasury bonds. As de-dollarization occurs, the United States is bound to face some economic reckoning.
It should be noted that even still almost all US debt is held locally.
> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?
These people do not exists. If a politician ran on such a platform, they would never get elected.
The fact is in modern democracies like in the EU or in the US there are simply too many people who rely on the status quo directly or indirectly.
Its almost comical, in France politicians have run, got elected and have swept the debt problem under the rug for the last 40 years, then they leave office and suddenly decide that the debt is a massive problem but that there was nothing they could do about while in office so they never did anything but now they speak about it.
And they all do it. Left, right, center, it's all the same.
> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?
Conservatives:
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| President Name | Deficit Increase (+) or Decrease (-) |
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| Donald Trump (2nd term) | N/A |
| Donald Trump (1st term) | +11.1% |
| George W. Bush | +4.3% |
| George H. W. Bush | +1.8% |
| Ronald Reagan | +0.5% |
| Gerald Ford | +0.8% |
| Richard Nixon | +0.7% |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | -1.8% |
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
Liberals:
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| President Name | Deficit Increase (+) or Decrease (-) |
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| Joe Biden | -5.7% |
| Barack Obama | -6.7% |
| Bill Clinton | -6.1% |
| Jimmy Carter | -0.1% |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | +1.9% |
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
Deficit rate = (federal outlays - federal receipts) / GDP. Change = deficit rate in final fiscal year - deficit rate in first fiscal year. The % symbol below means percentage points of GDP, not relative percent change. The first and last fiscal years whose end dates occurred during each presidency
are used. Transition fiscal years can therefore span two administrations. Figures are OMB actuals through FY2025 and are rounded to 0.1%.
This is kind of a fool's errand given that sample sizes are small and there are large exogenous causes. But the pattern is consistent and agrees with theory, so I think the comparison is worth making anyway.
You really don't want to accept that our deficit expansion has been overwhelmingly due to Republican largesse, do you?
Democrats aren't fiscal conservatives, but the last time they were able to expand the deficit in pursuit of social spending was LBJ. Deficit expansion during my lifetime has been overwhelmingly driven by regressive tax cuts, regressive bailouts, and wars in the middle east.
Yeah, in 2020 we let Trump print $4T in a single election year and then he spent the next four years successfully convincing the weak minded that Biden caused the pandemic inflation by printing $2T over the next four years, running the printer at 1/8th the rate.
The reason schooling is hard to change - here in the US - is because the teachers unions and politicians work together to reduce hours, reliance on standards, eliminate "work" (homework isn't good for them!), and increase spend and pay. Government is incredibly inefficient at most tasks - on average things the government does cost twice as much - but it's incredibly terrible at education. Spending has increased - performance decreased ad infinium.
Many, perhaps most, of the teachers are underpaid. If spending more money isn't helping, there are probably too many middle-managers sucking up the money. Remove some of the middle-managers and divert their money to the teachers.
I keep hearing this. I have yet to find a teacher or a school district or a government employee or department or organization of any kind that didn't clamour for more more more funds.
We spend twice what we did in 1970's in real terms; results ... the same.
"Deep defense cuts. Since the 1980s, the Pentagon budget has fallen from 6% to 3% of GDP—not far above Europe’s target of 2%. Cutting U.S. defense spending to the levels pledged by European members of NATO would save 1% of GDP, or less than one-fifth of the Social Security and Medicare noninterest shortfall by the 2040s and 2050s."
Read the budget. Learn something. None of the partisan mantras solve the problem. The only solution is to trim ss, trim medicare, and raise taxes across the board.
Since the 1960s, revenue from total taxation as a percent of gdp is unchanged. Not also the difference in tax revenue between Europe and America stems mostly from policies that tax the middle class not the "rich":
The U.S. already taxes the rich—measured by both tax rates and tax revenues—at levels roughly equal to the OECD average. Yes, the other 38 OECD nations collect tax revenues that, on average, exceed the U.S. by 7.5% of GDP (at all levels of government). However, nearly this entire difference results from the other 38 OECD nations hitting their middle class with value-added taxes (VATs) that raise an average of 7.2% of GDP. And while the progressive avatars of Finland, Norway, and Sweden exceed U.S. tax revenues by 16% of GDP, that gap virtually disappears after accounting for the 14.5% of GDP in higher payroll and VAT revenues that broadly hit the Nordic middle class. Europe finances its progressive spending levels on the backs of the middle class, not the wealthy.[37]
This plan should be a must read for people from any spot along the American political spectrum.
This is naive and wrong. An example of this is Google Fiber and ironically Tesla. When Google Fiber came out, ISPs lobbied to sue Google and local governments to prevent Fiber from being available in their areas instead of competing. When Tesla tried to sell direct to consumer, dealerships sued to prevent it. Entrenched companies will always use the system to prevent competition. Regulatory capture is a term for a reason.
...which even my local CSA seems to manage. Not saying there isn't a burden, but it's nothing like laying fiber or laws which specifically ban direct sales of automobiles.
If there was big money to be made undercutting Big Potato, someone would do it. Even my CSA grows potatoes.
The OP asked for examples of things that prevent ethical companies from outcompeting unethical ones and I provided a few. Hyper-focusing on potatoes doesn't invalidate that.
Your local CSA is also unlikely to be audited by the FDA unless they tried to go larger than your community.
Correct, which is why they agglomerated in the first place. Sectors where you see lots of agglomeration are ones where there are significant advantages to agglomeration.
And yeah, it’s hard to do once, but obviously it’s dramatically harder to do after someone has already done it.
Its interesting how the benefits seem to be dependent on market context. Go to the ralphs, its big potato no doubt. Go to the farmers market and people are there arguably to avoid big potato and big anything else for that matter.
Oh sure: billions of dollars in cash? Hundreds of lawyers? Lobbyists on Capitol Hill? A buddy at USDA or EPA? Lower unit prices on just about every single thing they need to buy? Brand recognition? Strong negotiating positions in 100% of their deals?
Burroughs is the most visual author I know, but neither he nor the reader are fully in control of what's painted. He has the process. I think he works for people with a rich inner monologue, which is leveraged against you. Dredge up some odd childhood memories, rotate some shapes, and then give him another go.
You could very easily force congress to balance the budget (both parties and the media have complained endlessly about this for exactly no good reason). You could also freeze spending at current levels and force congress to do it's job: allocate our limited resources most productively.
Hard to get re elected doing the right thing, but maybe we just need a throw away set of leaders to do the hard work?
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