As a consequence, the Fed will be forced to lower interest rates as low as possible again so the government can escape crushing interest payments and let inflation inflate away government debt.
Expect long term inflation, asset prices, and commodity prices that keeps rising as a consequence.
We definitely don’t know the future trajectory of productivity growth. There might be inflection points that more than compensate for slowing worker growth. This is in fact the basis for investor excitement about clean energy, robotics, artificial intelligence, new health care technologies, etc.
We, the population, vote for the persons with specific political wills. We choose what to enact.
When something is permitted, it becomes mandatory to somebody, and oil is used widely. Personally choosing to avoid products that used oil in their manufacturing would basically relegate you to having to farm your own food by hand. That is not feasible in a society with competition.
Hundreds of millions will die due to climate change if we don't act.
The problem I think, is that oil would still be mandatory because of competition between countries. Especially if there were wars.
We literally have no choice but to make small insignificant changes that does not harm the bottom line of those responsible too much.
Universally in this world people live most ecologically in parts of the world where they are too poor to act otherwise, not where they are most climate or environment conscious. Voluntary personal responsibility gets you nowhere when it comes to solving large-scale problems.
That sounds great and all until your granny can’t afford heat in the winter or there’s no food in the stores, etc. Then people will vote out the politicians making the policies or revolt.
That’s what I’m talking about personal responsibility. Not regarding individual actions per se, but accepting that most of us in the developed world are as complicit as the big oil companies.
That said, technology is improving to where the cheapest option is the ecological one for power. A fair bit of that has been due to individual actions of many folks wanting and paying for solar power and electric vehicles, etc.
Ironically to me, the individual preferences of the Green Party members also put lots of political pressure to shutdown nuclear power in Germany. That caused Germany to fallback to coal and natural gas.
Good luck clawing back the 10% of SNAP benefits spent on soda.
Yes everyone should be ethical in their consumption. If I gave you an arbitrary product and asked you to tell me if its ethically sourced, there's a high chance you can't. Even if I give you the internet and a week to research.
So, that's one problem. Another problem is that even if you could tell what is/isn't ethical you can't necessarily switch away.
Sometimes the more ethical choices aren't available, or are too expensive, or are outlandish. I'm sure everyone in the US would love to eat grass fed pasture raised beef. Meredith, who works two shifts at the town Dairy Queen, who's trying to give her son some protein, so his tiny muscles don't atrophy, doesn't have the funds for that.
Cars and oil are perhaps the most clear-cut example of this. People don't drive because they want to, they do it because they have to. It's literally life or death. A car in the US isn't just a box on wheels, it's a lifeline.
Sort of. I think it's more accurate to say that there are just enough fiscally irresponsible politicians in office to prevent a government that pays as it goes via taxes. The vast majority of those politicians are Republican, taught by Ronald Reagan that they could have massive spending AND tax cuts without political penalty (indeed, Reagan was rewarded with adulation for nearly tripling the national debt). Democrats have been fairly consistent in reducing the deficit, and if they'd had their political druthers, would've reduced it even further with additional taxes. The reality is that maintaining a modern superpower of over 300 million people requires much more in annual taxes than voters realize, at least in part because they've been misled by Republican leadership to believe that taxes (particularly progressive taxes) are unnecessary.
There's no direct election, and despite "every kind" of politician existing, the representatives of two parties with very similar polices overall, differing only in pointless stuff, keep taking turns in the presidency since forever. The choices are quite constrained.
your argument stopped having any semblance of merit at least decade ago. Now it is laughably unbelievable.
Now, ought there be more direct representation? Of course!
Should we have more than two major parties? Of course!
Guess what, a lot of people on this forum I am sure make plenty of money to be able to afford going to a few fundraising events for local politicians that they favor.
Y'all have influence here if you want to use it.
This is prohibitively expensive for anyone, even the largest corporations.
You can help get people elected into local positions that align with your interests. AND some of those people will continue to build their career in politics and may become Senator or Governor someday.
That's influence. That's buying into the system to make it how you think things will be better.
Such is life in Palo Alto.
It appears that Palo Alto has elections for city council every 4 years.
Here's an election guide:
https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/Departments/City-Clerk/Munici...
https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/Departments/City-Clerk/Munici...
Except that this is far from the reality.
We elect people with specific views but they seem to vote regardless of their constituent interests, let alone their supporters’. Instances of this fact are very easily searchable online.
https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
You want me to believe that the majority of constituents represented by these 193 republican representatives are against an insulin price cap?
https://images.dailykos.com/images/1054844/story_image/FPNbI...
My newest advocacy addresses this problem.
I call it “extend the powers of justice by jury”.
The idea that these representatives can just vote without accountability is absurd, and clearly a weakness money has uncovered in the US political system. (I refuse the claim status quotitians make that “elections are accountability“)
My suggestion is elected representatives act as litigators to their side of the argument and they need to make their claim to a jury overseen by a judge. That jury determines if a bill passes.
Who you elect as your representatives still matters, but now their ability to litigate persuasively is the number one quality of consideration when choosing those representatives.
This should remove the power that money has in bills being passed, as well as completely remove the “rider compromises” where officials compromise by including unrelated clauses to encourage the passing of a bill.
I want a representative government and I think expanding the powers of justice by jury will help in further enshrining that goal in our political systems.
A huge amount of debt is to Americans, American institutions and the states.
The US would piss off other countries who lent us money, who'd come knocking with a country-scale baseball bat demanding their money. But two thirds of that $35T is owed to Americans. There'd be a good chance of either a civil war or global war. We'd likely lose our status as the world's reserve currency, devaluing the dollar and leading to inflation.
Nobody would trust the government enough to lend them money, so they'd have no choice but to print money to pay expenses at this point. So, we'd have inflation either way.
Defaulting would impact the value of Treasurys far more than inflation, a bond’s price is merely the sum of its future cash flows, pricing in a default would push yields waaay higher than they would from inflation alone. There would also be massive liquidity problems since banks and companies hold a ton of Treasurys along with pensions and retirees.
There’s far more negative impacts from a debt default that sibling comments already elaborated on.
There are very few black swan scenarios that would cause me to liquidate the assets in my retirement accounts for cash, but a US sovereign default would be one of them.
Because one ultimately still keeps the debt obligation in place, whilst the latter causes debt confidence collapses & the destruction of faith in repayments from the government.
Would you rather take a 2% value loss via inflation, or a 90-100% value loss as the government declares default? Most people would take the former rather than the latter, as the impact of one is much softer than the other.
They wouldn't get voted in. You said it yourself. What kind of platform is "let me cut your benefits/raise your taxes for temporary pain now so that hopefully in 10 years some good thing (that you might not even notice) will happen if everything goes according to plan"?
Did we read the same article?
Disagree on multiple counts.
First - you don't need both - if you cut Social Security and Medicaid altogether, and use the surplus to start paying down debt, that solves 100% of the deficit and starts chipping away at the debt, while this would actually reduce taxes rather than raising them. I'm not asserting that the political will exists to do this (it doesn't), but the idea that you can't balance the budget without raising taxes is obviously false - taxes are nonzero, but you could reduce spending to zero.
Second - you don't actually need either - if you hyperinflate the currency, the value of the existing debt becomes negligible. To wit, I fundamentally agree with the message of the remainder of your post.
How is making me and almost everyone over 60 homeless going to result in a surplus? There would be all the dead lawmakers to bury, and so much security to try to protect the rest.
That's a "let them eat cake" level of breaking the social contract you're considering
I'm sympathetic to your struggles if OASI is the difference between you being homeless and not 60+ years into your life. Just know that your benefits are slated to be reduced by a minimum of 21%, automatically starting in 2033 when the trust fund is depleted, per laws already on the books.
Social Security and Medicare are, fundamentally, classic pyramid schemes. They rely on an infinitely increasing number of people to remain fiscally viable. We're at the end of that road now though, U.S. TFR is down ~1.6. These programs are going to crack soon, and anyone under the age of 40 today will never see a penny from either of these programs despite paying in for their entire lives.
I understand that ripping away benefits you already paid for is unfair to your generation, but being forced to fund benefits we'll never receive is also unfair to my generation, to say nothing of all the generations after mine.
Considering your argument is based on your belief 21% equals 100%, I should hope so!