1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.
2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.
The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.
"We spend too much" is a political opinion, rather than a statement of fact. Only Congress can change the amount of money spent by the government, so the executive branch's actions are unconstitutional, no matter how large the crowd cheering it on. This is exactly the sort of mob rule that the Founders wanted to prevent.
1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.
2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.
I read about a guy in Turkmenistan who would as a punishment be taxed 20%, and I thought, living in Western Europe or North America is kind of a financial punishment .
If you need more money, you can get another job or get a better paying job. You might even take out a loan to start a small business. Raising your income is an alternative to cutting expenses. And taking on debt is actually a useful way to get the benefits of a purchase without having to save up for it first.
>you can get another job or get a better paying job
For an increasing number of people over an increasing period of time, this isn't an option? Do you think people can snap their fingers and materialize a 6-figure tech salary? I just saw two layed off people on linkedin today, that's two more 5+ years experienced professional software devs on the market...
How much tax is enough? The government would, without playing a deduction game, would love to take 20-30% of my income, while having devalued my dollar by 50-100% in the last 5 years. My salary goes half as far.
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.
It's telling that you didn't even consider that the taxes would come from businesses. The businesses that created the majority of inflation by gouging consumers out and bleeding them dry every tiniest opportunity they legally could.
I mean practically this take is so wrong. If the (US) government is just so hell bent on taxation how the heck did we get to the point where taxes on income went from 90% (~1950) on top bracket to less than 35%? Business tax was (35% 2008) -> 20% (2020).
Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.
Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money.
All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.
Right but until Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Executive Branch has an empty wallet and maxed out credit card. Funding doesn’t go out all at once either. Some programs don’t start until later in the year for example. They typically aim to distribute 1/12th of the yearly allowance per month. Sometimes agencies will over spend early and have to be austere later (like FEMA last year).
Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.
Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.
The debt ceiling is entirely artificial, and ought to be unconstitutional. Congress decides how much to spend. Issuing debt when necessary to pay for those allocations is implied.
Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.
The military is over half of all Fed discretionary spending.
Another huge expense is servicing our debt.
Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.
By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment
One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.
Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)
Musk is stealing data to use for his own gain, and installing back doors so he permanently has control over government. It will take decades to undo the spyware he's installing.
These are the biggest contributors to undoing Clinton's balanced budget in the 90's:
* Bush Jr Tax Cuts
* Useless Iraq war
* Too Big to Fail Bailouts of Banks
* Trumps tax cuts
* COVID spending
When billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations pay episilon to zero in taxes, maybe they should pay their share. Taxing the rich would solve the problem overnight.
Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.
Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.
The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.
It’s quite debatable what the founders intended here. Congress has the power to appropriate funds, it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.
>cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession
This is not correct.
The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.
The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.
That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.
> The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds.
That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:
> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying
There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.
Your conclusion directly contradicts the Code you quoted.
From the Code:
>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...
The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".
However, your conclusion adds:
>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.
The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".
This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.
I actually think that they would still care. It weirdly feels cathartic to know that we are no longer spending federal taxpayer dollars on “zombie apocalypse preparation classes” no matter how insignificant it is to the budget. What is the best way to eat an elephant?
Agree .. but my point is that people will still care, on principle. Throw in any kind of cut, or esp. a helicopter payment, and the effect would be shock and awe
The Impoundment Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the house and unanimous support in the senate. It was a direct rebuke to Nixon deciding he had the presidential authority to not fund programs he didn't like.
It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.
The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.
It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.
As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."
> it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:
"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."
Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.
Forget the Impoundment Act -- this is a Constitutional issue. The Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the President is required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which budget authority is provided by the United States Congress. Shuttering USAID, as Trump and Musk have done, goes way beyond mere line item impoundments.
However, they claim that USAID was spending far too much on projects that were not in line with their objectives. Not even Congress can create an agency that is fully autonomous with zero oversight from anyone within the government.
Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.
That's just one example. Hamas has been receiving funding for years, despite their less than decent track record of using the money for it's intended purpose.
Yeah this was totally debunked, I believe the programs that were said to be "going to terrorists" were actually promoting women's literacy in Afghanistan.
All of these agencies had multiple levels of oversight both within the executive and through congress. Trump eliminated inspectors general positions providing oversight.
The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.
> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.
The current SCOTUS majority isn't afraid to overturn 50 year old precedents. Given they overturned Roe v Wade, why not Train v City of New York too?
But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.
"Can't" here is not a statement of fact. First off, the US government can and is paying the interest on the debt.
Second, the debt is denominated in US dollars. If congress were to authorize it, the US government could print money and pay off one hundred percent of the debt in a single day. This would have negative side effects, but it's clear that "can't" is not the correct term.
So saying that too much is being spent is indeed a qualitative assessment, not a fact.
Taking out a loan is okay, in the short term, if you have a plan to pay back your loan using income that you plan to obtain in the future but do not have available right now. THe US national debt has grown so large that the interest payments alone are like 20% of the federal budget, and that doesn't even touch the principal. It has reached pyramid scheme levels of borrowing, and no pyrmaid scheme can last forever. One day, lenders will lose confidence in their ability to get their money back and everything will collpase all at once.
In order to prevent that, the budget must be cut. People must be fired. Promising projects must be discontinued. The question is where to make the cuts and how, because cuts in the wrong places in the wrong way will end up making the problem worse. For me, working in healthcare/science/research, I see the cuts to the NIH spending as a bad cut, because it sacrifices a lot of future revenue from scientific R&D. Same with cutting USAID and losing a ton of soft power that could be used to persuade developing countries to let in American companies. Or firing, say, IRS employees, since they're the ones who actually bring in the revenue. So there are good cuts and there are bad cuts, but the point is that eventually cuts must be made.
Well, I must admit that is true, but I guess that 20% of the annual budget going toward interest feels likean impossibly large fraction to overcome. But yes, theoretically, if GDP grew by 300% in the next year, the debt would shrink proportionately, and I would feel much better about not needing to make any cuts. I suppose my concern is that with the nature of the business cycle, we will run into a recession sooner or later, and when that happens, if GDP and tax revenues both go down for a sustained period, then I would worry that lenders would become hesitant to provide additional funding. But I suppose that would be a complicated situation with many other factors, so maybe I am worrying too much.
The debt is being paid off when it’s due, every time, as it always has been. If we want to lower the total debt, cutting spending is not the only option. Money that the government spends increases economic activity and in some cases more than pays for itself in returned revenue. Raising taxes that have been lowered or eliminated since the last time we had a surplus (at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency) is step one in getting things under control.
The government's debt is not the same type of thing as household debt. Can you elaborate on how you think they are the same? Do you believe there are not other factors besides just credits being less than debits?
This is a strategy to protect against currency devaluation, but you still need to worry about interest rate risk (as do companies in the public markets, so investing in stocks isn't a sure thing).
Unfortunately, for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, there's not much to be done besides wait for wages to catch up. And in general, wages don't keep immediate pace with inflation. The net result is that lower-income workers suffer the bulk of the consequences of high inflation.
Depends on the lens. Depending on your tolerance for debt, we can argue that we objectively spend too much. Another lens can be that we don't collect enough taxes and therefore we don't have enough to spend.
Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.
This is a silly charade. To actually cut the debt, it requires congress. Not just saving a couple millions dollars and posting on twitter about it. We’ll need to cut Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the military, etc. All the popular stuff that was never easy and will never be easy to cut. We’re not spending 2 trillion per year on condoms.
Won’t wiping all this stuff just lead us into a Great Depression anyway ? I’m not an expert on the topic but my basic understanding was that we (government) just decided we didn’t have any money, so everything just stopped.
Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it back will surely have some dire economic impacts?
Yes. These cuts will set our nation back by decades. Institutions are being destroyed, and with them cultural and institutional knowledge that will never come back.
The government can just print money. So much so that inflation goes crazy and the national debt is pennies. Same with your savings. We have a lot of savers that are old. Wait until they are gone.
Which would probably raise less than a modest wealth tax on billionaires, but we know that will never get traction (even though its an extremely popular policy)
What I don't understand is why they want to cut the debt or the budget. Previous terms have shown that increasing spending and racking up debts isn't leading to loss of polls. Why are Trump and Elon going on this cutting spree instead of doling out tax cuts and increasing pork to their constituents on borrowed money?
Because the Project 2025 plan includes de facto destroying as much of the government as possible to make it easier to replace people with pure cronies.
2 is not a fact in the slightest. The American government is guilty of under-investment in perhaps every area outside of military. The notion of bipartisan climbing public debt is also false. Bill Clinton brought the government into running and Democrats have had consistently better budget responsibility than Republicans, though the reason for this is more that the Dems fund government through taxes where the Republicans fund government through debt to give out tax cuts. The actual levels of spending are not so much changed because it turns out that most of the money spent by government is quite important and you can't just get rid of it.
There are practical limits to the amount of debt a government can take on. Additionally, the government usually collects debt from the wealthy, who then make money back through interest payments. The "fiscal responsibility" of the Democrats is how private individuals actually extract value out of the government. Republicans issue debt, Dems use tax money to pay the interest. I think the wealthy have become more sceptical about the ability of of government to pay back these loans.
There are reasons why both parties allowed the system to remain as it was. I find it's increasingly true that new politicians don't understand the value of the systems they are meant to control. They see Chesterton's Fence and tear it down with abandon. Someone like Trump has no clue why politicians act the way they do. He lies and bullshits and does whatever he wants, and it works in the short term, but the long term effect is disastrous. These people are taking a private equity approach to government. Buy it cheap and load it up with debt, then sell as much as you can and let it crash to zero. This is more looting than governing.
Assuming your general lifestyle when employed is around $100k of expense, the US saving $10m against a $6.9T budget would be the equivalent of you saving $0.14.
Even in the straits you’re in (and I sincerely hope the very best for you), how much effort would you put into saving $0.14? It just doesn’t seem like the best use of effort?
Considering DOGE is ~100 people and the American labor force is 168 million, in your example, I would be willing to expend 0.000000675% of my time and energy to save 14 cents. That’s the difference between saying keep the change or putting it in my pocket.
Before anyone asks, no I don’t round up for the Boys and Girls Club at Taco Bell. I sometimes feel bad about it though.
Correct. No one is denying that Elon loves attention. Everyone knows Elon is really an acronym for 'Elon Loves Ostentatious Notice'. Its GNU'd and everything.
I think you misunderstand the metaphor. The expenditure, here, isn't the time/attention of 100 people; It's the things that have been cut/defunded and the consequences of the way those changes have been implemented.
Hold on, what savings? They said they're giving the "$10M" back to the people in the form of cheques.
So instead of them giving that money to Americans to pay for productivity (USAID buying corn from farmers, tens of thousands of employees paid to promote American standing on the global stage, paid to look after parks, paid to monitor fraud in the US financial system, paid to collect taxes, etc).. they want to send those people home and distribute their would-be salaries to every American for free.
> They said they're giving the "$10M" back to the people in the form of cheques.
They have said that 20% will be distributed directly to the population, 20% will be paid to the national debt, and the remaining 60% will simply not be spent.
“1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English.”
500 dollars when you have 10,000 in the bank is equivalent to roughly 200 billion to a governmental budget. The DoED budget last year is about 50 billion , for reference.
I hope that puts some of these plans in perspective. Musk's millions is wandering the street for loose pennies. Trumps plan to dismnantle the DoED is "saving" the equivent of paying some energy bill, while the US is going into more debt to pay rent.
Do we spend too much? Or do we not take in sufficient revenue?
All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s, but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can’t just be canceled by executive order.
It is more we believe in magic. We hand out tax breaks like they are candy, cripple the government, and believe some DOGE waving a chainsaw will fix the budget. Extending the Trump tax cuts is estimated to cost $4.6 trillion over ten years.
GOP has made it it's mission to ensure the federal government doesn't function my entire adult life. They've been working to destroy the middle class since long before I was born. They continue with this mission now and have really turned up the heat. They're currently working to cut taxes for those who make >$360k/year and also eliminate medicaid while INCREASING the deficit by $4.3 trillion.
The people coming in with a hatchet are not planning to reduce spending. They’re planning to use any money saved to fund an enormous tax cut that will primarily benefit the very rich. https://www.courant.com/2025/02/12/congress-budget-tax-cuts/
Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and should be around 10% instead.
The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.
Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.
I agree but condemning government budget cuts because USAID seems reactionary. I think the spirit of cutting budget is still overall popular, and is impossible to do painlessly.
Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.
~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.
I don't understand why the US is forgetting that it isn't alone in the world. Spending a little money on international aid has been exerting American soft power for decades and likely flowed back multiple times in additional trade.
Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?
USAID is not "international aid". It's an arm of the CIA that uses "international development" as a cover for it's activities.
Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.
That doesn't sound like international aid.
Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".
One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.
The two are not mutually exclusive, providing HIV assistance or maternal aid both is definitionally international aid while also furthering US interests. If you define international aid as purely unconditional or even counterproductive to self-interest then you'd be hard pressed to find any sort of example, nor would it be a definition I would think many agree with.
>Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability
You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.
> You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.
I should rephrase that to "political instability with regards to the perspective of locals".
I agree the US is seeking "political stability" with these activities. But it's on US terms which is often in direct opposition to the locals.
And I'd argue my view is not "dubious paranoia". The purpose of USAID is to use development activities as a cover for interference in other country's politics.
People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first"
The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
> We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.
And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.
We have this myth of the founding fathers as wisened, street smart old men. In reality, many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.
Past a certain point, age has little to do with prudence. There are rational and knowledgable teenagers just as there are middle-aged dullards.
One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.
Of course. Although being self-sufficient does not mean that you have a fully developed brain and cognition, either.
And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.
many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.
really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).
Are we talking about signers of the Declaration of Independence or more broadly.. not sure what Salem has with Declaration or if he's counted as a Founding Father. I'll give you Hamilton though since he was involved and neither did George Washington nor James Madison sign the Declaration but are still counted as Founding Fathers - https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/signers-factsheet
What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past? I don't think there are any, the frenzy of the masses has never ended well, and ironically just ended up in actual dictators taking power in the end. Social media just inflates the problem even more.
> What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past?
I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].
What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.
And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.
>populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people.
I'm asking in retrospect to the overall well-being on the nation in actual policies and results, not in it's political dominance. As recently as the Cultural Revolution we can see what happens the excesses of the mob are released.
>What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals
Well I think you're attacking a strawman here, there will be situtations where their writings are not so relevant, but this situation of populism very much falls into category where their writings are relevant and specfically designed to anticipate for.
If you don't believe that, well then explain what are your alternative solutions to populism and if they are more poltically viable than what the founders proposed. I suspect if you weigh them all, the founders' ideals will come out on top.
Don't underestimate history, don't think you are really that different from our past. Plato might have lived 2000 years ago, but we still influenced by him today precisely due to the timeless quality of his ideas. Same as the Founders, you might disparage them for slavery that was common at the time, but their sincere devotion to republican ideals were acts of extraordinary moral upstanding that were rare both then and today. That's why we greatly respect them, not just in USA but around the world.
You think republican ideas are "greatly respected" in the USA? And tell me not to underestimate history? ... I think we have been reading very different history books.
Are you familiar with Nicaragua's history? Iran's? Italy, Guatemala, Congo? Chile, Argentina, El Salvador? Brazil, Honduras, Haiti? Bolivia? ...
Internally, are you familiar with the history of gerrymandering? Voter suppression? Disinformation campaigns? The fight against campaign finance reform, or against winner takes all voting? Ballot access laws? Legislative and judicial manipulation against third parties and progressive candidates? Debate exclusion across corporate media, unchallenged smears, media blackouts, expensive lawsuits...
They didn't seem to reckon that against representatives who are sent to reflect the will of that same general public. They are not incentivized to contradict their constituents. In particular they do not have the responsibility to represent the demographic of their losing opponent, and in many ways are encouraged to do exactly the opposite.
It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.
“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas.
The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.
At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.
Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.
It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.
“Soft power” as a term of art used by liberal internationalists is bullshit. It’s just a way to proselytize foreign countries in a way that makes them resentful.
E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.
> Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so
This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.
Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?
If you think "soft power" is a fake concept, you have very little understanding of how American foreign policy actually works in other countries.
For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.
No, this is the type of thing that MAGA folks have been fed on their media and social media feeds. They’ve been taught that everything complex in government and in politics and in geopolitics are deep state conspiracies and lies in order for the left to maintain power. They think that what’s going on now is a turn to normalcy and that America was hindered by the policies of the left. They truly believe this stuff. It’s insane how different their world is, they don’t live in the same reality as the “other side”. I’m not sure how to fix this, how do you convince someone of reality when they insist on some hallucinations being real?
They are voting based on their opinions without doing additional research. Getting at that opinion via a poll is informative, and letting them research it would actually be counterproductive.
The booing will start when Americans realize what a delicate web of interconnects they live in. It hasn't really sunk in yet, but these "waste" jobs tend to be there for a reason, and this whole project is the ultimate exercise in flattening Chesterton's Fences and seeing what happens.
(I'm reminded of the Golgafrinchans from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They sent their "useless" third of society into space... The folks who did jobs like telephone cleaner or insurance salesman. The remaining two-thirds of the population died from a plague sourced from a dirty telephone.)
That's one way to frame it. Alternatively, one could argue we don't tax enough, and that's due to large tax cuts, first under Bush and then under Trump. Now Trump wants more tax cuts.
if you take a dollar from government spending, then 60 or 70 cents of that is coming from the bank accounts of retirees, disabled people, and the poor. If you return that dollar as tax cuts, as Trump has proposed, then something like 80 cents go into the bank accounts of the rich.
The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.
I am maybe cynical, but I sincerely doubt there's no fraud or corruption in the government spend. Among trillions of dollars of money being spent by people who can easily siphon some off, etc.
Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.
I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.
I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.
It's also a very hard line to draw, in some cases, since you can have the right things happening for the wrong reasons.
If a bill contains funding to help fix a main street in a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster, is that corruption?
What if there's 500 other destroyed main streets and that one got picked?
What if it was destroyed by decades of the local gov't neglecting it?
What if it was included because you directly bribed the person writing the bill?
What if it was included because you did some horse trading and gave them something they wanted in another bill you wrote?
The intent there is not to argue that defining corruption is impossible or futile, but that some people might reasonably argue different sides of whether something was corruption without either side obviously being morally bankrupt.
his cuts are max 0.1% of government outlays, yet the MAGAs are acting like it's slash and burn and worshipping at the idol of their cult of personality(ies?) . Anyway it's so obvious to anyway who steps back and turns off the political blinders. Just look at the sheer number of lies coming from Musk and Trump about the "savings" ,about millions of people over 100 getting social security checks, that the few million of probably waste of money USAID was spending is evidence to cut without any other proof the entire USAID organization, even though it's a $50 billion dollar outlay. It's so effing sad that people fall for this, and that our education system is such a failure on probably the most necessary modern skill other than literacy--critical thinking.
The insane thing of all this is that the 1% being cut is almost entirely in investments: money for research that drives economic growth, money for the USAID that provides the US influence around the world, cuts to CDC staff that could help mitigate expensive pandemics…the list goes on.
So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.
The government does plenty of things inefficiently, but DOGE is making such a colossal mess with their rushed, uninformed, and frequently illegal actions that they're causing more problems than they solve. Indiscriminately firing people because they were hired or promoted within the last 2 years is incredibly wasteful. It means getting rid of the people who were most successful. It also means getting rid of people who had very specialized skills or who just went through a very expensive training process.
Also consider how much disruption all of this is causing to the federal workforce and the contractors. People are being forced to upend their lives on very short notice to RTO. They were getting daily emails telling them to quit. It's hard to imagine anyone doing good work when they're scared that some indiscriminate process is going to fire them.
This is a stupid comparison. The government is not a business. "Lower costs by making it shittier" has a completely different implication when people are relying on the work for national defense, public safety, health, income, and other life-and-death matters.
These are public goods. They shouldn't be run on the basis of "make them as crappy as we can get away with to save as much money as possible".
That’s a good example of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking: they’ve been asking for funding to modernize for most of this century but Congress chooses not to allocate the money. A big contributing factor is that when money is allocated, it’s often directed towards contractors who cost twice as much and have a higher failure rate so congresspeople can say they “shrunk” the government.
that's why you fix it, not act like you can just destroy it and what it does. It is also why you think practically and tell us, the voter, how much extra it is costing us over your "new and improved" program. Just lying about it and exaggerating the concern is a sad, sad, disingenuous way of governing. I want fixes and unrelenting attempts at efficiency and not "hur-duh-hur I can make a meme out of this on X and not offer a single solution"
Also why does it matter if it's in an underground ex-mining facility or a basement in Washington? It matters how much does this cost vs a modern computerized system. Instead the big brains over at X act like this is how the entire government works. They found maybe 1 or 2% of waste in USAID? "Shut it all down and lose all the experience and relations built over decades" they don't want efficiency. They want to slash and burn all government departments that aren't enriching billionaires.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is worse than Trump. I’m an immigrant from Bangladesh who is in the country because my dad got a job with USAID. In the Bush era, liberals would have been shocked if we found out USAID spent $29 million under Biden interfering with elections in Bangladesh. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/foreign-affairs/3744.... Now you mention it and get some neocon nonsense about “American interests.” Truly disgusting.
In the Obama era, you could have told an average liberal about it and they'd ignore it or apologize for it. It's not Trump Derangement Syndrome, it's just an artefact of substantial policy disagreements between parties in terms of foreign policy goals being low historically, and mass media minimizing imperialism.
Really? 10 years I would have assume the average liberal would have said "Yeah, what else is new? The US has been interfering with other countries since forever. It's a terrible stain on our history and something we should stop.
For some odd reason the average liberal is now arguing for foreign interference by the US. The are using the same neocon talking points the Republicans did 10 years ago - "soft power" and "if we don't do it someone else will".
Buying Greenland, annexing Canada, retaking the Panama Canal, building beachfront resorts in Gaza and squeezing $500B of rare earth minerals out of Ukraine isn't imperialism?
Or does Trump get a pass on what he says he'll do, because it's just trolling to trigger the libs?
I'd much rather have a President who says dumb things for attention than a President who actually tries (usually in secret) to destabilize other countries.
Obviously the trolling is different from actually doing. And what the substance of what Trump did with Panama was accuse it of failing to respect the neutrality provisions of the treaty which transferred control of the canal to Panama. And in Ukraine he’s demanding security for hundreds of billions in support we have provided that country. Exercising America’s rights under treaties or demanding compensation for military support is hardly comparable to bankrolling dissident groups in foreign countries.
I’m from Bangladesh and my dad worked his entire career for USAID contractors, since the 1980s. Many of our family friends are career USAID people. My dad can’t be sure but he strongly suspects Trump is correct. USAID was commonly used as a CIA/State Department front in the past. It became more professional in the 1990s, but according to him Samantha Powers heavily politicized the agency. And the US administration has been going crazy about third world countries aligning themselves with Russia.
Well, whats your point? All spy agencies including russian use similar movements to destabilize enemies, it was true during whole cold era. Is this somehow shocking to anybody?
US agencies did much worse things in pursue of eliminating communism, in US and elsewhere.
Hers a PDF detailing some of the audio and photographic professionals that work "down the mine" in the state of the art digitisation facilities that corporations have there:
So why would it be by definition considered waste that a government has employees working on paper records stored in the same place?
There is absolutely no reason to think this is ridiculous. These types of sites exist all over the world. Yet Elon Musk claims it's ridiculous and people now have to defend that claim?
$29 million in supposed “aid” funding to help destabilize Bangladesh would seem to constitute both fraud and waste, and I’m sure it involves corruption too. Likewise the tens of millions in DEI grants. Also apparently $2 billion to Stacey Abrams: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-sent-2-billion-stacey...
> The $2 billion was used for the "decarbonization of homes" in low-income communities and paid for new household appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities.
Second, the claim that it was given to Stacey Abrams, from the LinkedIn post cited in the article:
> The coalition includes Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), United Way, and Habitat for Humanity International and today, we've applied for $9.5 billion — part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act — to directly fund residential decarbonization and electrification... The application is already supported by 321 partners who have pledged to decarbonize housing units across 46 states and every EPA region. It also includes 156 communities pledging to decarbonize housing units, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities, and rural and Tribal communities.
It appears that Stacey Abrams was in some way involved in organizing a coalition of existing nonprofits to apply for congressionally authorized grant money. There is no evidence I can see that she received any of the money or that any other impropriety was involved.
"$2 billion to Stacey Abrams" is a falsehood, even based on the content of the inflammatory Fox News article.
Those are examples of official Biden policies, and it was his prerogative to pursue them of course. But Trump has the prerogative to pursue the opposite of those policies with equal vigor, and the federal workforce should be working just as hard to implement Trump’s policies.
Biden didn't open the border. This is simply a lie. As furious progressives will tell you, Biden deported more people than Trump and tried to get Congress to pass a broadly restrictive immigration reform bill.
You should look at the CBO's reports on this. Most of the budget is spent maintaining Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. The sleight of hand involved in the idea that the military budget is "most" of the spending is by calling large parts of the government's spending (but none of its military spending) "mandatory," and then slicing up the "discretionary" portion only, most of which is the military.
However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory spending and interest, there would still be a government deficit.
That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4 trillion.
That's because the SS/Medicare are not discretionary which means that those are basically predetermined and not set by Congress every year.
So when we talk about the "budget", what really matters as far as politicians are concerned, is the discretionary part, which they can control (and which in theory voters have some control over through their election of congressmen), and defense takes up at least half of that.
I am bad at addition, but I was going from 2023's numbers, which were indeed close to $6.4 trillion, not $4.4 trillion. Mandatory spending alone was $3.8 trillion.
A lot of people think they government isn't overspending. They're the bond buyers, who loan the US government money at remarkably low interest rates. That's a true market signal, regardless of what people tell pollsters.
Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.
I think you're on a reasonable track, but this isn't the whole picture. Most international treasury demand is the direct result of trade deficits in dollars.
If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business customers selling products internationally in that currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus of USD as well.
So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate" in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash under the mattress.
Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that signal is lit.
Inflation is about 3%. That's higher than optimal but hardly a crisis. It does not suggest a broad negative judgement.
Those dollars instead seem to be going into the stock market. Too many, I would say, and I think the Fed is making a mistake in trying to lower interest rates. But it does suggest that investors do not anticipate a sudden crisis of the government.
Of course it's worth noting that the bond market has massively sold off since inflation hit. The counterpoint is that it's arguably just going back to the mean, but nonetheless, it's a fairly historic move.
US yields at the long end (the part of the curve that is sensitive to long-term stagflation and inflation) don't necessarily indicate that participants believe that the spending isn't a problem either. Once yield started to rise, the U.S. massively twisted issuance back to T-Bills, which are short duration and essentially risk-free. Fragility on the long end is being carefully managed.
To some extent, you are seeing some financial repression, ie the shape of the yield curve is being actively managed. This expectation is built into the bond prices as well. If the long end starts to break down, nobody expects the treasury to start issuing even more long bonds. They naturally would expect them to pull back and start issuing more T-Bills and only term out the debt once the market/liquidity can handle it. There is some conversation right now about leverage limits in the banking system/SLR being expanded, so there is more capacity to warehouse the debt on the banking side. That's pushing in the direction of financial repression (where the banks are "incentivized" to shape the curve in a desired way).
0% interest rates were leveraged against the Fed Put, and it's arguable that there is a Treasury Issuance Put that is currently baked in.
I think that the issue is broader than this though. It's about much more than just the inflationary effects of spending. It's an ideological battle as well. As for bonds, there's also the fact that US bonds are a "there is no alternative" asset to some degree. Remember that bond investors got their faces ripped off in the initial rate hike cycle. There's a good parallel to commodity futures prices here, in that prices of commodity futures are terrible indicators of the actual price in the future. There is a distinction between where a market clears and a bet on future prices. It is a somewhat subtle distinction, but it is grossly underappreciated. That said, of course you can isolate the inflation expectation aspect of the bond market and you are probably correct that this indicator does not red flag inflation driven by excess spending. Of course, growth expectations are also fairly healthy. So it's hard to say what it would look like if inflation expectations stayed high and growth expectations started to fall. Then the bond market might look quite a bit different. We haven't seen a true stagflationary market in 50 years.
1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.
2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.
The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.