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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched.

Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song)

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serv...

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This has a significant consequence - the military is an almost foolproof path out of the lower and well into the middle class. You can basically do nothing but be mediocre or even marginal and still be financially secure and earn a solid retirement.

All that is lost if you can’t even join up.

I wonder if the lack of concern is because of the future of autonomous warfare. There's drones of course, but also tech that enables things like aircraft carriers to run with much fewer crew.

I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.

The covid relief plan would prove a definitive counter to your hypothetical concern over tax money.

The public clamor for “$2k” checks, which comprise less than 1/4 of the $1.9 trillion dollar package that’s now entering reconciliation proves pretty strongly that the public is not sensitive to the cost of their government “benefits”.

The Democratic Party has never been particularly concerned about taxes and debt. The Republican Party is periodically concerned about it, but mostly when they don’t control the government.

I used to think Democrats would tax and spend, and republicans would borrow and spend. It looks like both will now print money (expand the money supply) and spend.

The next few years will be an interesting test of “Modern Monetary Theory”.

Clinton and Obama were the only presidents to lower the deficit in the last 50 years.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/31/fac...

Who controls spending? Especially on transfer programs, which represent the bulk of the deficit? (It’s not the president)

http://goliards.us/adelphi/deficits/index.html is more useful. It shows party control of the presidency, house, and senate and deficits each year, not just at end of term.

Looks like the ideal for deficit control is to have a democratic president and republican control of both houses of Congress. Unified government by either party leads to less constraint on spending.

If Democrats make up half the team that you claim is most effective at limiting deficits, it would seem to me to be difficult to sustain the argument that Democrats don't care about them.

Look at the data on deficits linked above.

This seems to be the pattern:

Republican president: spend on this!

  Republican congress: OK

  Democratic congress: OK, as long as we spend on this, too.

Democratic president: spend on this!

  Democratic congress: OK

  Republican congress: No, deficits are important.

Yeah, but that happened with the other party controlling the purse strings, in both cases, who were voted in as a reaction to those administrations with financial mandates.

Both Clinton and Obama inherited a recession from their Republican predecessors, and were punished for the unforgivable sin of responding appropriately.

By that logic did Bush inherit the dot-com crash from Clinton? I think you'd like to make the world fit neatly into ideological views. The boom-bust cycle of the US economy is pretty nuts when you step back and take it all in. Often the federal policies and bank regulations, to the extent they drive 'irrational exuberance', seldom reach their zenith and nadir all within one administration. The subprime mortgage crisis being a good example.

If you don't think it's possible to make the world fit neatly into ideological views, then I don't understand your former comment where you appear to give credit for the deficit reduction under Clinton and Obama to the Republicans.

Of course you don’t.

> I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.

Don't see this in Canada, where tax dollars pay for it. Stigma only works if there is a majority against a minority. Most people are fat.

My understanding is that a lot of people who join the military now come from military families, so they're kind of already prepared for it. (This is different from AOC's claim which is the military preys on poor students and gamers.)

If you're going in just as a drone pilot, the fitness standards wouldn't be needed for anything, so presumably they expect people to still be doing something up close and physical though?

Running ships with much fewer crew is fine until something breaks and needs to be repaired. The Navy tried that for a while with the LCS and it didn't work.

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