It turns out that I'm not impressed with "we still have a deficit, but it's smaller than under the previous administration". No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable.
Who cares if you’re impressed when you’ve fallen for propaganda (I guess maybe politicians care).
“No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”
Why not? Deficits can be healthy and safe when they’re managed. Literally most persons, businesses, and governments use debt. It helps manage purchases over time, and it’s an inflationary hedge.
The idea that “any deficit is bad” was literally pushed as propaganda to make you fatalistic about managing the deficit. As said, one party raises it, one party lowers it, and the party that raises it claims that lowering it to anything but zero is “just as bad” as their runaway debt growth. Propaganda.
>> “No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”
> Why not?
The household analogy works for some people because it answers a moral question, not an economic one: Why should government be exempt from rules that individuals must follow?
The development of the household budget idea as a way of reasoning about the the federal government's is as old as economics itself. The Greek word for economics is oikonomia, consisting of
- oikos = household
- nomos = management
This analogy broke 90 years ago in the US, when, in the aftermath of the great depression, Keynes argued that governments should do things that households cannot: borrow during recessions, spend when private demand collapses, tolerate deficits until recovery. And that these have a beneficial effect on the economy and its participants because government spending becomes someone else's income, essentially injecting demand into the economy.
During the 1970s, US politicians realized that the household budget analogy was an effective rhetorical tool for arguing for fiscal conservatism. Its effectiveness bore no relation to its reflection of present reality. What it did reflect was a set of values: thrift, responsibility, independence, and skepticism of debt. But most of all, it speaks to a sense of justice - that the rules for me were also the rules for thee. The difference that the government plays by a different set of economic constraints than I do is the fundamental tension that the household analogy attempts to address. This is a moral intuition not an economic intuition. The sentiment still holds power today despite it being a bad intuition pump for economic reasoning.
That is an amazingly flawed idea. By that reasoning, only a neutral budget is acceptable, and a positive debt surplus a boon. Unfortunately, the opposite is empirically true: the only places running total budget surpluses tend to be undemocratic shitholes because they need to promise nothing and do not rely upon the consent of the governed to loan them savings and pay them taxes.
That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.
I’ve been in municipalities and provinces running healthy surpluses and the economy booms during those times. People do better and schools are better run and so on. And for that matter, Canada boomed after the government fixed the budget in the late 90s. We went south again when the new government showed a complete lack of respect for money.
Were those municipalities and provinces receiving any money from the federal government and is that how they had surpluses? That's certainly how it works here in the US.
Not how it worked in my home state growing up. The state intermittently ran budget surpluses and were net givers to the federal budget. Still are today.
I’m also not entirely sure how relevant that is due to states (and provinces) not printing their own currency though. Very different situations.
Well, the goal is not to impress HN user bigstrat2003. The goal is to have a government and country that continue to function. A fiscal deficit by itself is not a bad thing, and I suspect you would have an extraordinarily difficult time coming up with coherent arguments to the contrary.
1. They’re unable to get enough support to pass more taxes (yet), so “balancing the budget” after republicans lower them on the rich would mean killing people by cutting services.
2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.
3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.
4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.
What? That is so not true I don’t even know where to begin. The President, of course, has some input into what the budget will be but we have seen plenty of times that Congress can and will flex their power when the parties of the Congress and President do not match.
The president has a huge say in which bills and budget items are passed, they routinely put enormous pressure on individual senators to whip votes for their agenda. This goes double or even triple for Trump! Congress might literally create the budget, but in our age they're – at the bare minimum – starting from the president's agenda and working with him to pass what he wants first.
Sure, when the party controlling both members of Congress matches the President. Less so when it doesn’t. Some of the biggest reductions in the growth of spending come when the parties do not match for that very reason.
It’s the software. Definitely. We been making bombs for a while now. They used to toss them out the side of biplanes. Oddly, your second paragraph immediately undermines the first.
> Presumably, the world used dumb munitions without any software for a long time.
What do you think “presumably” is accomplishing here? Are you unsure, but willing to assume for purpose of the discussion, that bombs preceded computers?
Did those dumb bombs tossed out of biplanes lack software because the software was difficult to write or because there was no hardware in the world capable of running software? Given that missile guidance systems predate the very notion of software, and the moment better hardware exists there is software ready to take advantage of it, methinks software was not the hard part.
Y’all cowards always implying. Say the thing you think. Just say it. I’ll start: I think getting upset by a pronouns dropdown is literal homophobia, in that y’all are so scared, worried, and bothered by thinking about gay shit that you’re installing software about it.
These are just straight up numbers increasing or decreasing. It’s not complicated shit. Quit equivocating.
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