Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

Why do people say 'we don't have the money' for stuff like infrastructure? We never have a problem finding the 'trillions of dollars for wars'. It seems there is only ever a problem coming up with funds these days when it is to invest in things that help our own citizens (outside of just throwing money at them).

View on HN

You're right. It's not about how much money is available. It's always about the choices of where they spend it and those choices rarely benefit the citizens, somewhat ironically.

It’s not even just about choices, it’s about consensus and we’ve forgotten how to see a win from a partial loss. We no longer know compromise at a federal level

As you say, we have forgotten consensus building.

And we have forgotten the rational can-do optimistic spirit of problem solving via hard work, (the ideal of) objective thinking, and the hunger for adopting ideas from anywhere.

A lot of this is the result of power centralization in our social and political sphere's. Winner take all dynamics are so immediately and decisively rewarding, that long term, collaborative and independent thinking have become self-defeating (for the political and socially powerful).

Technology can solve many problems. Unfortunately, that can include shifting the price of growing problems into the future and onto the powerless. Enshittification of the whole planet and human condition.

It isn't technology's fault, and if/when society gets shocked into organizing better, we are going to need every technological edge we have accumulated to turn things around.

Not just federal. Federal is where things are most obviously broken, but the same is going on all the way down to the bottom, just slower. I live in a town of ~8k and local politics (over local issues!) is insanely partisan in a way it wasn't even 10 years ago.

I don't think it is so much about win/partial loss but considering large views or long term thinking/strategizing. Especially true in politics because we've developed a system where a representative is only concerned about the timeframe of an election cycle, rather than concerned with what they can do for the people. And we hold them accountable by that metric. So any project that is longer than an election cycle can end up being a game of hot potato where the last one holding it loses. In reality there are several members to blame. It's like how people judge a president based on the economy yet often policies they make don't actually have large effects until years later (definitely some are shorter term, but also remember that effects compound and set a stage). World is too complicated and we're too dumb. We can be not as dumb, but that's not quite easy because complexity is de facto hard.

They do have money. But off by a few orders of magnitude. Proposed Texas high-speed Houston-Dallas rail lands $500K in federal funds: https://energycapitalhtx.com/high-speed-houston-dallas-rail-...

That 500K should be enough to build 1/4 of a bathroom: https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...

It's easier to steal pentagon contract money than money issued for highways or train tracks therefore military contracting has a higher profit margin therefore that's what the lobbyists advocate for.

Why even mention wars? We have the money for Hyperloops, Solar Freaking Roadways, Boring Company, and so much more... you know... terrible ideas that clearly won't work, don't even pass a sniff test, but we throw millions or sometimes billions at. I'm totally okay with pushing the bounds of what we can do as humans, and even encourage it. But running on hype is not a sustainable system and arguably fraudulent (I believe it is). The Bloomberg article sure makes Hyperloop look like it is...

I different version of hype applies in a different way. With the systems destroying themselves through compounding "compromises" to get political allies. It's a Vox video, so high level but not a bad intro[0]. Tldr: easy to derail (pun intended) any political project, and the bigger the project the easier it is to derail.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0dSm_ClcSw

Because the debt is now due?

"U.S. Debt: Visualizing the $31.4 Trillion Owed in 2023" - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-debt-31-4-trillion-ow...

> Because the debt is now due?

The so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) credibly posits that because the U.S. borrows in its own currency (dollars), it can simply "print money" as needed — as long as the U.S. economy has sufficient unused productive capacity to absorb the resulting increase in demand. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/business/economy/modern-m...

MMT is basically modern day heliocentrism - objectively correct, but threatening to established wealth and power structures and therefore Wrong.

A few years ago we had an opportunity to borrow at a negative interest rate. Should have leaned into that opportunity.

Also we’re under-taxing bajillionaires and politically-active but tax-exempt megachurches.

It was a choice not an opportunity. They decided to do that to boost asset values.

If the government sent out a hit team to forcefully rob every single last penny of net worth every US billionaire has, what impact would that income have on the national debt? I'm pretty sure it'd be extremely negligible.

'Tax the billionaires' is a red herring. Nobody should use that or engage with it. The issue is that they exist in the first place.

nah, bro. like pigs, you fatten them up and then eat them. do it in 3 or 4 cycles and then there will be no more billionaires.

? American debt is only due, if they abandon the world, which pays for this debt by valuing american security and insurances of free trade high, by using the dollar to trade and as reserve currency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com