U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
wsj.com
wsj.com
This article seems like fluff/propaganda.
In case of default, discretionary items can be seize and sold to at least repay part of the debt (while decreasing quality of life).
2008 has shown what seizing houses leads to.
Now think that there is nothing to seize for student debt loans.
If you fail to get a good enough income using the degree you paid using debt, you are as hopeless as if you had used it all on hookers and cocaine. At least with discretionary items you have a big TV which holds some value.
What we need is to make college debt discharable through bankruptcy, same as any other debt. Then the only people who can borrow are those likely to be able to pay it of, which nicely solves the problem of unplayable college debt (while reducing the interest students of medical, science, law etc have to pay, since more money will be chasing fewer students), for profit colleges and useless degrees.
Does it mean some people won't be able to study their favourite subject? In general no[0], in college? Yes.
[0]: Remember the " you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!"? Today it is probably 15 USD on Beeminder, and you won't have a degree, but that degree is worthless in the first place, so overall huge win.
- the ratio of debt to personal income, and
- the ratio of debt to GDP
Households owe more, but they are also making more money and creating more value.
The budget deficit blew out by 17% in 2018 as a result of the tax cuts.
And I am more concerned whether the tax cuts delivered an effective ROI.
During full employment. During what can reasonably be called boomed times. Historic deficits.
This isn't normal.
McConnell is demanding that the Democrats work with Republicans to cut entitlement programs.
Even though they control all three branches and are the ones who passed the very expensive tax cuts.
The real question would be "inflation adjusted per-capita tax receipts over time" but a mid-work googling didn't turn up anything promising; that being said from the above graph _and_ the knowledge that inflation is increasing, your statement doesn't seem to mesh. Feel free to point out if I was really thick and got the wrong data or something.
Aside from cultural issues like abortion the Republican agenda seems so far removed from what their constitancy needs it's hard to fathom.
The next time Democrats are in control you'll be sure to see GOP complaints that the defecit is a problem and entitlements should be on the chopping block.
They are actually doing that right now, even though they created the massive deficit increase.
That's because to them, entitlements are the problem, and the deficit is just the standard excuse.
Voodoo Economics
This is a false equivalence because the government and the private sector spend money on very different things. If the tax cuts end up being funded by reductions in entitlement spending, for example, the private sector won't funnel money into Social Security and Medicare to offset those reductions.
>If the Republicans are right, they'll spur enough economic growth to be a net gain across the board in both new economic activity (wealth)
CBO projections imply that the nearly all of the long-term gains from the tax cuts will flow to foreign investors [0], so it certainly won't be a net gain for the US as a whole.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/05/10/cbo-estim...
I'm not sure a deflation is good for us.
It's obvious to the economic world. That's the reason BOJ keeps buying Japanese stocks and bonds (to keep asset prices high when others have stopped buying) and Japanese people have stopped investing in Nikkei (because holding cash == increasing value)
That's also the reason Japan (notoriously closed society) is admitting defeat and letting in immigrants to work.
Your comment also doesn’t link the deficit to the deflation, only speculates on the effects of and policy response to that deflation.
You need to understand the sequence of events in Japan. They had a massive debt problem (national, local and corporate). That triggered a recession causing asset prices to drop. The caused deflation.
The only way to not have asset prices drop and some inflation was printing money. So they printed. Their population and economic investment dropped further while they kept printing money (two opposite pulls). This kept them going until today. It's a wonder they didn't hyperinflate. They pulled it off. But the expense of this is no GDP growth. Infact, whatever GDP growth they have is because of BOJ selling assets to BOJ who sells assets to BOJ. It's a mirage.
So, yeah, their real economic activity (thus, investments, wages, innovation) has dropped from zero to negative because for the average individual, holding money = gold!
The defecit just keeps ballooning but the only thing stopping the US government from running are self imposed restrictions on debt (the "debt ceiling"). The US is not a company, and it's not a normal household, why does the budget matter?
On the one hand, you are very correct to point out that the US is not a company or household, and that the US is a superpower that prints currency. Too many people ignore this. Another point, shared with less-sovereign governments, is that the US can impose tariffs and fees and other taxes.
On the other hand, the deficit leads to interest payments on debt. Defaulting crashes the economy, as does going to extremes printing money.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
The current administration cuts the tax rate and borrows to make up for the shortfall in tax revenue.
All this is in hopes that the economy grows enough such that the reduce tax rate can support government spending and pay back the debt + interest.
If the economy goes south for whatever reason (e.g. China imploding, another bubble pops) ...
Plus other countries always need to borrow dollars because it's what oil is sold in, which is one of the things that makes US Government debt considered the baseline or "risk-free" investment, with any other investment having increased risk, and accordingly increased reward.
Well, why can't we just print money? We can, but it runs the risk of inflation. Inflation is historically low, so yes -- we could totally just print a bunch of money to pay back our debts with relatively little risk of inflation in the short term.
Essentially, debt doesn't matter, except that we have to pay interest. Interest doesn't matter because we print money, except that it might cause inflation. Taxes "destroy" money to dampen inflation. Thus, we can pay off our loans, but that might cause inflation, which might require us to raise taxes not to repay the loans, but to prevent inflation.
There has been lots of ink spilled with respect to lagging productivity gains and I think the at this point concern about the budget may be a factor. There are enough big problems that can be addressed (infrastructure, health care, homes, etc.) if there was enough government spending to spark to investment and growth.
I'm starting to believe that the real balancing act is a matter of controlling inflation rather than controlling the defecit.
Of course there are some head-scratching rationalizations going around about why gargantuan deficits are good now, a decade into one of the longest economic expansions in living memory, but would have been bad to do when proposed in response to one of the deepest recessions in living memory.
But how would those creditors respond? They would refuse to lend in US dollars in future, and the US government and private companies would be forced to borrow in a foreign currency. Net result is that the US loses a valuable asset - the ability to borrow in its own currency - and becomes more like Turkey or Argentina.
And that's not considering that the same would happen with any alternative investments, nor the fact that risk is an important part of an investment calculation, and US debt is considered "risk-free".
Also, there's the question of who owns all that debt that the US relies on for its continued existence. For example, China owns a big chunk of it, like ~$1.2 trillion. They buy tons of US Treasury bonds because they're considered a safe investment. China gives the US a bunch of money up front, and the US has to give China a bunch more money back in the future, like over the course of 10 years. A lot of Americans also own US bonds, which help fund the debt, but they own them because they're a safe investment, not because they want to lend the government money.
So, as long as the US is in debt, it's forced to rely on other countries and its own credit rating to keep it going. That's a problem. And at some point, the sheer amount of debt will lower that credit rating, making those US bonds less of a safe investment, and that would be the tipping point at which everything starts falling apart. It will be much harder to fund deficit spending, which could snowball into printing money, then fast forward 5 years and boom, zombie apocalypse (or at least a potential Venezuela or Weimar Republic type situation).
TL;DR: the deficit is an existential threat the US if it's not kept under control.
China owns just 5.3% of US debt, only slightly more than Japan, which owns 4.8% of it. Most US debt is owned by government programmes such as Social Security.
So okay. Great. Now let's do it in a way that doesn't turn the entire nation into a series of hyper-reactionary tribes fighting over leftovers.
How is this stuff getting upvoted?
But if we start seeing articles about, say, midterm elections, that would suck. :)
I think that this approach could be taken too far so that we would end up with a reddit clone, but a step in this direction seems to be in order now.
However, the fact of the matter is that people are free to upvote things they find interesting. If you don’t find something interesting, you don’t have to read it or comment on it.
I dunno... prob because it's popular and people want to read it.
I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later.
I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons. I certainly don't post things to promote any kind of political agenda per se.
I also didn't notice the things you are specifically commenting on. I recall different details from the front page. So there's possibly a certain amount of "You just happened to see X for some reason." which isn't conclusive proof of objective fact.
What I meant is:
Three years ago, HackerNews seemed (to me) to be a forum for intellectuals to discuss things business/tech-y. Opinions were mostly well thought out. When they weren't, they were challenged (thanks for calling me out [= ).
Now it just seems like the break-room banter. A lot of sensationalist articles seem to make the front page. A lot of purely comedic comments (which I do appreciate). A lot more unfounded anecdotes. A lot of promotional posts, etc.
Also -- and I'm admittedly putting on my tin hat here -- I've seen a lot of discussions that seem like they're just troll accounts trying to further polarize the community.
Maybe I'm part of the problem ]=
Reddit is a very cosmopolitan environment. It's like a big city, where you can participate in different social groups and there can be overlap in members, but it isn't guaranteed. Your behavior on one sub forum can impact your reputation on another, but it isn't the same as a situation where you deal with the same moderators and same group of people all the time for everything.
I don't hang on "the front page" of Reddit. I have a few niche interests I dabble in a bit over there.
I occasionally consider writing a blog post to talk about some of the differences between forums of various formats that I've experienced. It's more than I care to try to catalog in a comment here.
But when you say "HN is like Reddit," that doesn't even parse for me. Because it's like "So, exactly what part of Reddit are you comparing it to?" It strikes me as a six blind men and the elephant scenario.
Had you read the site guidelines then (or now!) you'd know that the very first thing they say is that HN is about more than this.
As politics has become more contentious in recent years, both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs", which promotes people seeing information that is for or against (or even just about, and confirmation bias does the rest) one of these areas as being political.
There's likely also an increased number of political articles as well, which contributes it's own little bit.
I hope it doesn't impact the content or discussion too much.
Presumably it's a mirage, since "turning into Slashdot/Digg/Reddit" would hardly have been a steady state.
Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.
I'm very slightly Cherokee. I've begun following more Native American twitter accounts and I started a new blog to explore my Native heritage a bit. I've posted a number of items about Native issues because that's something I happen to be reading here lately.
There's no political agenda there, though I keep waiting to be accused of such. I post things I happen to trip across. HN can upvote or flag (or just ignore) as it sees fit.
I've largely given up on predicting what works here. I have essentially zero ability to do that.
That's part of what makes it fun, at least when it's general randomness that pulls really interesting people into the discussion :)
> Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.
I think that would have been an interesting discussion, if it could have avoided devolving into political tribalism. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether it could have. I will say it's interesting to be early in a submission that slightly contentious and to help or see some early comments steered or redirected usefully, and see an article that spent a few minutes flagged come back to life.
As someone who identifies as a relatively apolitical moderate, this has gotten ridiculous in recent years. I mean, whoever thought that "social justice", "science", "reality-based", "clean air", or "international relations" would be identified as partisan liberal issues, or "freedom of speech", "strong economy", or "life" could be partisan conservative issues?
Even more strangely, both sides have claimed "rule of law", and yet it seems to mean completely opposite things depending on who says it.
Posting factual and informative articles is promoting a certain kind of political agenda, truth-based.
Five hundred star-bellies Sneetches and five hundred plain-bellied Sneetches died in combat yesterday; reading just the obituaries of the heroic star-bellied Sneetches and how they gave their lives for peace is truth-based, but it's a very different agenda from the equally-truth-based approach of reading the obituaries of the martyred plain-bellied Sneetches and how they sacrificed everything for their people's freedom.
Saying that truth doesn't matter because "everybody has their own truth" is a political agenda whose purpose is to make people believe any "truth" is as good as any other and therefore we should not even try to look for evidence.
As for why things are upvoted, they are upvoted because registered users click the button. You can promote your own preferred stories by upvoting them.
It's as if startups have slown down and programming novelties have died off, and it's being padded with politically driven articles.
Complaints like this go back about as far as HN does. I wrote a thing about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
A lot of the users seem to be more business oriented though, and they will want to hack the economy... So good luck.