America is just completely broken

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many things have gotten so much worse. Shrinkflation and skimpflation. Customer service being replaced by AI that sends you in endless loops and never solves the problem. Endless subscriptions and paywalls. Climate change, global instability, and constant supply chain disruptions causing shortages. Younger people increasingly accept that it’s normal to pay the same price and receive less and less, because they don’t remember what things were like before.

Regardless of the fact that our living standards are still better than a 14th century peasant (for now, until the billionaires have their way), we’ve lost something very vital: optimism. People used to look forward to the future. For a moment after WWII, it seemed like things were possible. Rights were expanding, schools were desegregating, opportunities were opening up for more and more people, and the moral arc of the universe was bending (slowly) in the right direction. The middle class was expanding. Flying cars were just around the corner. Families could get by comfortably on one income. A college education unlocked doors. Kids could just be kids without having to grind year round at sports just to make the high school team. Minority groups started to see themselves represented on TV and in the movies. Workers could get together and demand better conditions. Journalists did their job and reported instead of fawning. We weren’t being constantly surveilled by smart technology.

Greedy rich people, religious leaders, and racists all concluded that this was a bad thing, joined forces, and now here we are, being driven off the cliff by people who very much do not have your best interests at heart.

This is an important misunderstanding of history. America’s post WWII economic dominance which afforded us so much was always going to be temporary. America raced out ahead of the world after the war because much of the industrial base of the world was destroyed. We won because nobody else could compete, not because rod the superiority of our model.

As countries rebuilt their economic bases, they slowly eroded our economic dominance. Slowly at first but then all at once. We helped squander that lead, but it was always going to come to an end. A simple and understandable example is the Japanese automakers eventually outcompeting and destroying the model that made labor unions so powerful and important in the USA after WWII.

A lot of tiger things contributed to the decline, from both the Democrats and Republicans, but the post WII American economy was always going to be a temporary thing.

You’re talking about economic superiority which is just one aspect of what PP was talking about. We didn’t need to cut education and infrastructure spending and export jobs like we did. We didn’t need to allow corporate interests to take over our government.

What do you think pays for the education and infrastructure spending? The economy! The two are linked and the inevitable end of American economic dominance was always going to be felt in everything else about American society.

Wealth hoarding is a problem, but it is not *the* problem. In 1970 Social Security and Medicare spending amounted to just under 4% of GDP (or about 20% of the federal budget). Today it is around 9% of GDP (or almost 40% of the federal budget). That is a delta of about $1.5 trillion per year in incremental spending over 1970.

If you make the extremely aggressive assumption that you can achieve 100% tax efficiency and taxed all the wealth of American billionaires, you would collect about $8.5 trillion, or just about 5.5 years of the incremental spend on Social Security and Medicare(again, this is just 20% of the federal budget). See the problem? The math here is just absolutely brutal.

And while it is easy to blame this on billionaires and greed, it is clear the fix won’t be from taxing them. I think there are good policy reasons for these proposed taxes, but it isn’t going to fix what politicians are promising it will fix.

Note: I don’t mean to suggest social security or Medicare are *the* problem or any other specific issue. We have an aggregate spending problem that cannot be solved with additional revenue.

A 100% wealth tax would crash asset values and the collections from such a tax would be a fraction of curren wealth values so the money would be a much smaller amount that would actually only pay for fewer years worth of expenditures.

The thing is our government revenue problem was mostly self inflicted. The math here is brutal we spend half of our taxes on interest. These don't go towards services. They go into bond holders bank accounts.

This is just fiscal mismanagement. Frankly those that have the most access to lawmakers are the most responsible for this situation. So even if such wealth taxes are merely punitive. There is some value in punishing those that have so poorly managed the finances.

Though having said that. Taxing wealth directly has some economic upsides. It doesn't punish capitalists for producing goods efficiently in the way of profits. It would ensure that the wealthy keep their assets gainfully employed. If their assets are producing profits then they will evaporate, which I am fine with. You don't get to have a massive company that drives every other out of business then just milk the monopoly cow 1% profit or whatever.

This is partially correct. Revenue since 1970 has hovered around 15-20% of GDP. We are currently at a relative low on the bottom end of that range.

A huge part of the problem has been that when times have been flush we have expended spending rather than cleaning up the balance sheet. This is also observed at the local level where blue states are struggling with spending they expanded during COVID.

Frankly, it is one of the reasons I am anti tax raising. Raising taxes to clean up the mess would be great. But guys like Bernie Sanders are proposing higher taxes and expanded entitlements. Will only make the problem worse in the long run.

I don’t quite understand your last paragraph.

This has manifested as the GOP crashes the economy (bush, bush Trump) and the democrats clean it up (clinton, Obama, Biden) - if the dems had ever had sustained control of the government, our debt would have been reduced, not just the rate of spending. Bu the American public was suckered into believe the GOP was the party of fiscal restrain...how LOL is that?

Yes and no. The only one who deserves any credit for being fiscally responsible is George HW Bush. The defense draw down and base closures of the 1990s were deeply unpopular but absolutely necessary. It reset the defense spending baseline much lower and set the stage for “peace dividend” boom of the 1990s. It also likely cost him reelection but he did the right thing for the country.

Al Gore as VP cast the deciding vote in the senate to use SS revenues in the general budget so a Clinton absolutely gets no credit on his budget work in my book. Bush 43 burned through cash in Iraq. Rham “don’t let a good crisis go to waste” Emmanuel pushed Obama to unnecessary spending/expansion. Trump I economy was in good shape with projections to better than expected Fed revenues until COVID. Biden absolutely blew it out. Trump II is a disaster.

At least in my life, Bush 41 is the only one who should get any praise in this area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

This is what Americans don't understand. It's not within their frame of reference to be able to make sense of a culture that gives not a crap about others.

It's like the Native Americans when the Pilgrims first arrived. They helped the Pilgrims. They showed them how to plant corn, how to harvest food, how to survive in the new world. Then the Pilgrims turned around and killed off the Native Americans. The Native Americans opened up their hearts to the newcomers, and the thanks they got was annihilation. Same thing is happening here. Not outright disease or genocide. Replacement, far more subtle but just as effective.

That's a third-grade version of what happened. The first few contacts wrote home, "avoid north America, poison tipped armor piercing arrows, go to the Caribbean instead", Only after diseases spread did Europeans get a foot hold on North America. At that point the land was very sparsely populated, so the Natives had more land than they knew what to do with, most of the tribes that remained were extremely rural and remote.

So you are saying the people who were on the land didn't have the right to defend themselves to random newcomers who, as it turned out, wiped them out?

I'm just saying we saw what the foreigners did before to the Natives and took notes. The Natives knew about borders just like we do they are to be defended with arrows, but the diseases didn't. Now that it's our land we won't be fooled by the dirty Old World blankets these Asians have such a reputation for trading.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

This is what Americans don't understand. It's not within their frame of reference to be able to make sense of a culture that gives not a crap about others.

It's like the Native Americans when the Pilgrims first arrived. They helped the Pilgrims. They showed them how to plant corn, how to harvest food, how to survive in the new world. Then the Pilgrims turned around and killed off the Native Americans. The Native Americans opened up their hearts to the newcomers, and the thanks they got was annihilation. Same thing is happening here. Not outright disease or genocide. Replacement, far more subtle but just as effective.

That's a third-grade version of what happened. The first few contacts wrote home, "avoid north America, poison tipped armor piercing arrows, go to the Caribbean instead", Only after diseases spread did Europeans get a foot hold on North America. At that point the land was very sparsely populated, so the Natives had more land than they knew what to do with, most of the tribes that remained were extremely rural and remote.

So you are saying the people who were on the land didn't have the right to defend themselves to random newcomers who, as it turned out, wiped them out?

This is the point. PP before you is just an apologist trying to minimize the reality of immigration today.

[Anonymous]

Inshallah America will survive and thrive. Whatever issues we go through, this is home and we must stand together to make it a better place for our kids and grandkids.

[Anonymous]

Here's the next level of ensh*ttification of the USA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/local_gas_station_removed_price_tags_and_replaced/


The greed of American captialism has no bounds. There will be no prices anymore. All of your personal info will be sold and used by stores to dynamically price every single item. If you make more, you pay more for the same groceries. They'll scan your face using AI when you enter the store.

We are are the precipice of a dystopian cyberpunk hell hole.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Here's the next level of ensh*ttification of the USA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/local_gas_station_removed_price_tags_and_replaced/


The greed of American captialism has no bounds. There will be no prices anymore. All of your personal info will be sold and used by stores to dynamically price every single item. If you make more, you pay more for the same groceries. They'll scan your face using AI when you enter the store.

We are are the precipice of a dystopian cyberpunk hell hole.

I think that's illegal. Instacart just got caught pricing goods at different prices for different customers.

I may ba wrong on the legality.

But I do remember some legislatures trying to set different fine amounts for different convictions based on ability to pay. That's definitely illegal, but democrats love to suggest it again and again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many things have gotten so much worse. Shrinkflation and skimpflation. Customer service being replaced by AI that sends you in endless loops and never solves the problem. Endless subscriptions and paywalls. Climate change, global instability, and constant supply chain disruptions causing shortages. Younger people increasingly accept that it’s normal to pay the same price and receive less and less, because they don’t remember what things were like before.

Regardless of the fact that our living standards are still better than a 14th century peasant (for now, until the billionaires have their way), we’ve lost something very vital: optimism. People used to look forward to the future. For a moment after WWII, it seemed like things were possible. Rights were expanding, schools were desegregating, opportunities were opening up for more and more people, and the moral arc of the universe was bending (slowly) in the right direction. The middle class was expanding. Flying cars were just around the corner. Families could get by comfortably on one income. A college education unlocked doors. Kids could just be kids without having to grind year round at sports just to make the high school team. Minority groups started to see themselves represented on TV and in the movies. Workers could get together and demand better conditions. Journalists did their job and reported instead of fawning. We weren’t being constantly surveilled by smart technology.

Greedy rich people, religious leaders, and racists all concluded that this was a bad thing, joined forces, and now here we are, being driven off the cliff by people who very much do not have your best interests at heart.

This is an important misunderstanding of history. America’s post WWII economic dominance which afforded us so much was always going to be temporary. America raced out ahead of the world after the war because much of the industrial base of the world was destroyed. We won because nobody else could compete, not because rod the superiority of our model.

As countries rebuilt their economic bases, they slowly eroded our economic dominance. Slowly at first but then all at once. We helped squander that lead, but it was always going to come to an end. A simple and understandable example is the Japanese automakers eventually outcompeting and destroying the model that made labor unions so powerful and important in the USA after WWII.

A lot of tiger things contributed to the decline, from both the Democrats and Republicans, but the post WII American economy was always going to be a temporary thing.

You’re talking about economic superiority which is just one aspect of what PP was talking about. We didn’t need to cut education and infrastructure spending and export jobs like we did. We didn’t need to allow corporate interests to take over our government.

What do you think pays for the education and infrastructure spending? The economy! The two are linked and the inevitable end of American economic dominance was always going to be felt in everything else about American society.

Wealth hoarding is a problem, but it is not *the* problem. In 1970 Social Security and Medicare spending amounted to just under 4% of GDP (or about 20% of the federal budget). Today it is around 9% of GDP (or almost 40% of the federal budget). That is a delta of about $1.5 trillion per year in incremental spending over 1970.

If you make the extremely aggressive assumption that you can achieve 100% tax efficiency and taxed all the wealth of American billionaires, you would collect about $8.5 trillion, or just about 5.5 years of the incremental spend on Social Security and Medicare(again, this is just 20% of the federal budget). See the problem? The math here is just absolutely brutal.

And while it is easy to blame this on billionaires and greed, it is clear the fix won’t be from taxing them. I think there are good policy reasons for these proposed taxes, but it isn’t going to fix what politicians are promising it will fix.

Note: I don’t mean to suggest social security or Medicare are *the* problem or any other specific issue. We have an aggregate spending problem that cannot be solved with additional revenue.

A 100% wealth tax would crash asset values and the collections from such a tax would be a fraction of curren wealth values so the money would be a much smaller amount that would actually only pay for fewer years worth of expenditures.

The thing is our government revenue problem was mostly self inflicted. The math here is brutal we spend half of our taxes on interest. These don't go towards services. They go into bond holders bank accounts.

This is just fiscal mismanagement. Frankly those that have the most access to lawmakers are the most responsible for this situation. So even if such wealth taxes are merely punitive. There is some value in punishing those that have so poorly managed the finances.

Though having said that. Taxing wealth directly has some economic upsides. It doesn't punish capitalists for producing goods efficiently in the way of profits. It would ensure that the wealthy keep their assets gainfully employed. If their assets are producing profits then they will evaporate, which I am fine with. You don't get to have a massive company that drives every other out of business then just milk the monopoly cow 1% profit or whatever.

This is partially correct. Revenue since 1970 has hovered around 15-20% of GDP. We are currently at a relative low on the bottom end of that range.

A huge part of the problem has been that when times have been flush we have expended spending rather than cleaning up the balance sheet. This is also observed at the local level where blue states are struggling with spending they expanded during COVID.

Frankly, it is one of the reasons I am anti tax raising. Raising taxes to clean up the mess would be great. But guys like Bernie Sanders are proposing higher taxes and expanded entitlements. Will only make the problem worse in the long run.

I don’t quite understand your last paragraph.

NP - you are correct. We also shouldn't forget two forever wars, largely of choice.

I'm hoping at some point we can start having a real conversation about our defense spending. The Pentagon can't pass an audit. Their budget should stay static and be reduced by 5% a year until they can.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You tend to do less and less for your community if it’s overwhelmed by immigrants. Especially if they look and act different than you.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where my friends were nearly all first generation and parents were immigrants with accents, different cultures, religions, and more, my best friends are from families from Haiti, India, South American countries, and more. And now I work in a super diverse place. Not my personal experience. This xenophobia is a newer trend to me and seems driven by right wing media Charlie Kirk types, etc. Sorry but your narrative contradicts what I actually lived and experience.

Meanwhile, IGNORING your anecdotal data, where is the $20 BILLION lost in fraud, Minnesota???

Of course you would IGNORE the billions Trump and his cronies and families are siphoning off from taxpayers.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Argentina, and they have universal healthcare.

Trump gave BILLIONS to Israel for this unjustified war, not to mention the BILLIONS the US already gives Israel.

BTW, the leader of the fraud in MN is a white women, American born. But, I realize that pathetic people find it easier to blame those who are weaker than themselves for their lot. I believe the Nazis convinced most of the Germans to do just that.

First, this has ZERO to do with Trump.

These are people who do not respect our culture. Take the case of Ladan Mohamad Ali.

She is given money to bribe a jury but before she even tries to bribe them, she takes an 80,000 cut for herself. LOLOL!

These people are tribal. They care nothing about our country, let alone their state or community. They care about only the race of people they belong to or even their immediate family. It doesn't work here.

I have no sympathy for them. Just get out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you
Ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy

This is what Americans don't understand. It's not within their frame of reference to be able to make sense of a culture that gives not a crap about others.

It's like the Native Americans when the Pilgrims first arrived. They helped the Pilgrims. They showed them how to plant corn, how to harvest food, how to survive in the new world. Then the Pilgrims turned around and killed off the Native Americans. The Native Americans opened up their hearts to the newcomers, and the thanks they got was annihilation. Same thing is happening here. Not outright disease or genocide. Replacement, far more subtle but just as effective.

That's a third-grade version of what happened. The first few contacts wrote home, "avoid north America, poison tipped armor piercing arrows, go to the Caribbean instead", Only after diseases spread did Europeans get a foot hold on North America. At that point the land was very sparsely populated, so the Natives had more land than they knew what to do with, most of the tribes that remained were extremely rural and remote.

So you are saying the people who were on the land didn't have the right to defend themselves to random newcomers who, as it turned out, wiped them out?

I'm just saying we saw what the foreigners did before to the Natives and took notes. The Natives knew about borders just like we do they are to be defended with arrows, but the diseases didn't. Now that it's our land we won't be fooled by the dirty Old World blankets these Asians have such a reputation for trading.

They, and Africans for that matter, did not actually have the European concept of fixed borders and that philosophical difference was in large part their undoing.

[Anonymous]

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Or rather the light is from an oncoming train.

With this war it’s over. It’s done. The book is closed. American bases only exist for example in places like South Korea so America can launch attacks on China and South Koreans are human shields for American forces. The US can protect no one. American credibility is in the toilet. They have ruined the entire global economy for Israel.

Re-industrialization is not going to happen. Fixing the deficit, military reform, is not going to happen. All the people who took a shot at trying to save America failed.

Trump will be impeached and sent to jail but nobody will trust us again because we brought this mad king back. It’s over

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here's the next level of ensh*ttification of the USA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/local_gas_station_removed_price_tags_and_replaced/


The greed of American captialism has no bounds. There will be no prices anymore. All of your personal info will be sold and used by stores to dynamically price every single item. If you make more, you pay more for the same groceries. They'll scan your face using AI when you enter the store.

We are are the precipice of a dystopian cyberpunk hell hole.

I think that's illegal. Instacart just got caught pricing goods at different prices for different customers.

I may ba wrong on the legality.

But I do remember some legislatures trying to set different fine amounts for different convictions based on ability to pay. That's definitely illegal, but democrats love to suggest it again and again.

Oh, Harris said she would combat price gouging. MAGA are capitalists all the way. If you want to start adding back regulations, people need to vote straight Dem (the more progressive the better) for the next 10-15 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Or rather the light is from an oncoming train.

With this war it’s over. It’s done. The book is closed. American bases only exist for example in places like South Korea so America can launch attacks on China and South Koreans are human shields for American forces. The US can protect no one. American credibility is in the toilet. They have ruined the entire global economy for Israel.

Re-industrialization is not going to happen. Fixing the deficit, military reform, is not going to happen. All the people who took a shot at trying to save America failed.

Trump will be impeached and sent to jail but nobody will trust us again because we brought this mad king back. It’s over

If the Dems are serious, they will prove that Trump and Elon stole the 2024 election, which I think might help renewal with our allies faster.

[Anonymous]

You’re trying to say it’s one man who did it. We’ve heard this before. Blame Bibi not Israel.

No, we elected this man. Our credibility is done.

[Anonymous]

Our entire financial system is built on our credibility.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many things have gotten so much worse. Shrinkflation and skimpflation. Customer service being replaced by AI that sends you in endless loops and never solves the problem. Endless subscriptions and paywalls. Climate change, global instability, and constant supply chain disruptions causing shortages. Younger people increasingly accept that it’s normal to pay the same price and receive less and less, because they don’t remember what things were like before.

Regardless of the fact that our living standards are still better than a 14th century peasant (for now, until the billionaires have their way), we’ve lost something very vital: optimism. People used to look forward to the future. For a moment after WWII, it seemed like things were possible. Rights were expanding, schools were desegregating, opportunities were opening up for more and more people, and the moral arc of the universe was bending (slowly) in the right direction. The middle class was expanding. Flying cars were just around the corner. Families could get by comfortably on one income. A college education unlocked doors. Kids could just be kids without having to grind year round at sports just to make the high school team. Minority groups started to see themselves represented on TV and in the movies. Workers could get together and demand better conditions. Journalists did their job and reported instead of fawning. We weren’t being constantly surveilled by smart technology.

Greedy rich people, religious leaders, and racists all concluded that this was a bad thing, joined forces, and now here we are, being driven off the cliff by people who very much do not have your best interests at heart.

This is an important misunderstanding of history. America’s post WWII economic dominance which afforded us so much was always going to be temporary. America raced out ahead of the world after the war because much of the industrial base of the world was destroyed. We won because nobody else could compete, not because rod the superiority of our model.

As countries rebuilt their economic bases, they slowly eroded our economic dominance. Slowly at first but then all at once. We helped squander that lead, but it was always going to come to an end. A simple and understandable example is the Japanese automakers eventually outcompeting and destroying the model that made labor unions so powerful and important in the USA after WWII.

A lot of tiger things contributed to the decline, from both the Democrats and Republicans, but the post WII American economy was always going to be a temporary thing.

You’re talking about economic superiority which is just one aspect of what PP was talking about. We didn’t need to cut education and infrastructure spending and export jobs like we did. We didn’t need to allow corporate interests to take over our government.

What do you think pays for the education and infrastructure spending? The economy! The two are linked and the inevitable end of American economic dominance was always going to be felt in everything else about American society.

Wealth hoarding is a problem, but it is not *the* problem. In 1970 Social Security and Medicare spending amounted to just under 4% of GDP (or about 20% of the federal budget). Today it is around 9% of GDP (or almost 40% of the federal budget). That is a delta of about $1.5 trillion per year in incremental spending over 1970.

If you make the extremely aggressive assumption that you can achieve 100% tax efficiency and taxed all the wealth of American billionaires, you would collect about $8.5 trillion, or just about 5.5 years of the incremental spend on Social Security and Medicare(again, this is just 20% of the federal budget). See the problem? The math here is just absolutely brutal.

And while it is easy to blame this on billionaires and greed, it is clear the fix won’t be from taxing them. I think there are good policy reasons for these proposed taxes, but it isn’t going to fix what politicians are promising it will fix.

Note: I don’t mean to suggest social security or Medicare are *the* problem or any other specific issue. We have an aggregate spending problem that cannot be solved with additional revenue.

A 100% wealth tax would crash asset values and the collections from such a tax would be a fraction of curren wealth values so the money would be a much smaller amount that would actually only pay for fewer years worth of expenditures.

The thing is our government revenue problem was mostly self inflicted. The math here is brutal we spend half of our taxes on interest. These don't go towards services. They go into bond holders bank accounts.

This is just fiscal mismanagement. Frankly those that have the most access to lawmakers are the most responsible for this situation. So even if such wealth taxes are merely punitive. There is some value in punishing those that have so poorly managed the finances.

Though having said that. Taxing wealth directly has some economic upsides. It doesn't punish capitalists for producing goods efficiently in the way of profits. It would ensure that the wealthy keep their assets gainfully employed. If their assets are producing profits then they will evaporate, which I am fine with. You don't get to have a massive company that drives every other out of business then just milk the monopoly cow 1% profit or whatever.

This is partially correct. Revenue since 1970 has hovered around 15-20% of GDP. We are currently at a relative low on the bottom end of that range.

A huge part of the problem has been that when times have been flush we have expended spending rather than cleaning up the balance sheet. This is also observed at the local level where blue states are struggling with spending they expanded during COVID.

Frankly, it is one of the reasons I am anti tax raising. Raising taxes to clean up the mess would be great. But guys like Bernie Sanders are proposing higher taxes and expanded entitlements. Will only make the problem worse in the long run.

I don’t quite understand your last paragraph.

NP - you are correct. We also shouldn't forget two forever wars, largely of choice.

I'm hoping at some point we can start having a real conversation about our defense spending. The Pentagon can't pass an audit. Their budget should stay static and be reduced by 5% a year until they can.

I'm hoping we can start to have a real conversation about entitlement spending, the ridiculous strangle hold that health care spending has on us, and whether 75% of the federal budget really needs to be mandatory.

This is a competitive global economy and the US portion is seemingly run from ivory towers by people who are clueless on macro- economics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our entire financial system is built on our credibility.

Paper promises and everyone owing everyone?