Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
When has austerity ever been anything but disastrous for a country, O student of history?
Answer: never. It is not the answer and not a solution.
I didn’t think my comment was unpleasant. Not sure why we’re slipping in that direction.
Austerity has a time and place. Spending cuts have a lower impact on GDP in relation to tax increases.
Both will hurt the economy but eventually not as much as an ever increasing portion of the budget allocated to interest payments on debt.
Both tax and cut are necessary. Suggesting that we can gov spend our way to an increased GDP that will pay for those programs in increased tax revenue without altering tax policy is no different than the age old Republican fallacy that tax cuts will pay for themselves.
Everyone is going to need to bleed to avoid hoisting our cost of growth on to future generations.
I understand that it’s not particularly palatable to many people who benefit from government programs and their virtuous guardians but empathy on the micro level shouldn’t cloud judgement on the macro level.
The American bottom 10% live a higher quality of life than any nation’s poor in human history save for modern Scandinavia, a bit of an unfair comparison. The rich will feel it less even with heavy tax increases at the top and it stings knowing we’ll still see them choppering to yachts in the med.
The approach and the legality of this administrations playbook aside. I fail to see why a dinosaur federal government that is slow to adopt innovation, is consistently wasteful, and gifts taxpayer dollars to charitable causes outside the nation while in debt isn’t worth curbing. Especially if it’s the will of the (however slim) majority of people who pay those taxes.
I’m assuming you started the austerity thread. I should have put this there. Apologies to those looking for the DC juice.
1) I think everyone can agree that there are parts of the government that could be run more efficiently. Every government employee I know tells me about that one person in the office who has been there forever and does nothing. I am pretty sure that you could get buy-in to terminate that one person in the office (who is in many offices). However, indiscriminately cutting all people who are on their probationary period makes no sense at all. You are terminating the least expensive workers and you are terminating people who are likely in areas of need (hence why they were hired). That seems more likely to lead to both poor performance and inefficiency. Frankly, the biggest problem with the cuts that are being undertaken is that they are performative rather than substantive.
2) I agree completely that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory. The problem is that cutting federal government workers is INSUFFICIENT to address the problem. The unsustainable fiscal trajectory has two major problems and it is NOT federal worker bloat - (a) the growth of the so-called entitlement programs (e.g., social security, medicare, medicaid) as well as similar growth in Defense Department related entitled programs (e.g., veterans benefits and retirement costs, Tricare) and (b) successive tax cuts by different Republican administrations (see both Bush-era and Trump-era taxes).
(a) is really hard to fix because it's a byproduct of the U.S. being an aging population (who are living longer than the underlying programs were expecting) and a growing Veteran population in the aftermath of long-running wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While I am sure that there is some fraud/waste/abuse in the entitlement programs, cutting fraud/waste/abuse is NOT enough to slow down the growth in spending. Did you know that social security was intended to only cover 5 years of living expenses? My own parents and my spouse's parents have been on social security now for 10+ years. I have tried to explain this to both sets of parents and how they are actually getting more in benefits than they paid for, which is going to result in my generation and my kids' generation getting less than we are paying for. Their response is that "We did the right thing and we paid all of our social security taxes over the years." I understand the sentiment but unfortunately the numbers do not lie and they did not actually pay enough.
(b) is something that we could control, except for the fact that every Republican administration feels that it is their God-given obligation to cut taxes. If the Bush-era and Trump-era tax cuts never took place, we likely would have had a balanced budget, along with a surplus in the earlier years. Does anyone remember the late 1990s budget surpluses, which led to the Bush-era tax cuts? Those happened because we had a large number of people in their prime working years and relatively fewer retirees. We currently have the flip in demographics with fewer people in their prime working years and more retirees.
3) On top of (a) and (b), neither political party has any desire to either cut spending or increase taxes. The Republicans claim to care about deficits and debt and then they do a massive tax cut without enough spending cuts (see the proposed House budget plan, which has $4.5 trillion tax cut, paired with a $1.5 trillion spending decrease). That is the great irony about people cheering on DOGE for cutting spending -- it's all going to provide a tax cut, which disproportionately benefits people in the top 1-5% of the income ladder. The Democrats don't claim to care about deficits and debt, but they are far too happy with maintaining the status quo. Instead of suggesting an alternative to Trump's half-baked proposals, they just assail Trump as being crazy and talk about the importance of democracy and maintaining institutions. I do think Biden tried to direct spending to more productive efforts (e.g., Building semiconductor factories and Electric Vehicle infrastructure), which ironically was copying what Asian countries (e.g., China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore) have been doing forever and quite successfully, but which is hard to build a political constituency for in the U.S.
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