Why the young should welcome austerity | Hacker News Reader

Why the young should welcome austerity

bbc.co.uk

15 pointssoren_dahl27 comments

The most obvious symptom of the malaise is the huge debts we have managed to accumulate in recent decades, which - unlike in the past - cannot largely be blamed on wars.

U.S. Defense spending is around $900 B/yr (including veterans health, etc). That is the post-Iraq War cost. Social Security is net $0 (what comes in, goes out, either today or tomorrow, and with relatively minor adjustments and the elimination of gov't "borrowing" from SS funds, it can stay that way forever). Medicare is perhaps 1/4 the cost of defense spending.

I fail to see how debt can be attributed to social services simply because you might decide to stop calling things "war".

"Young" people might consider austerity if, firstly, defense budgets were cut down by orders of magnitude. Let's see how much debt is accumulated when we're not throwing away (bombing away) nearly 50% of revenue.

The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.

No. The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows relatively few to massively and outrageously profit via post-9/11 escalation of defense spending.

If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.

Even excluding the complete failure to acknowledge out of control defense spending as the #1 cause of economic issues, there are many, many aspects of the Tea Party that simply have nothing to do with economics, and are in themselves completely out of sync with large swathes of people (perhaps most particularly young people). And now, with consideration that defense spending is the #1 issue, the attraction of youth to Occupy makes a lot of sense.

If older American's knew what was good for their children, they'd run as fast as they could from the Tea Party, and perhaps Occupy would be less viewed (inaccurately) as naive.

And all that's leaving aside the fact that a significant portion of the economic downturn was due to the machinations of the financial market leaders. Yet these leaders are the least affected by austerity measures. Perhaps some minor tangible steps should be taken to address those leaders before asking the rest of the world to pick up the slack.

I'd say this is spot on, but the question is that of whether paying off the vast majority of the debt is even possible. In the USA especially, I've long since concluded it simply cannot happen.

Look at how much bickering the Republicans and Democrats have over even relatively minor issues. $10^9 is one 15-thousandth of the national debt and there's fights about such amounts.

Well it's entirely possible for a sufficiently reckless administration to pay off the debt tomorrow if they felt like it. The mint is allowed to make arbitrary denomination currency, they could mint a X-trillion dollar coin and pay off the debt with it if they felt like it.

But they'd probably get shot for doing it.

That said no, the article is not spot on. In any state where the government is a significant part of the employment/economy the government cutting spending is just going to keep money and jobs out of the economy.

Maybe you are too young to remember, but once upon a time, there was this thing called economic growth...

An extended counter-argument emerges from these blog posts:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/think-of-the-chi...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/doing-their-best...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/insane-in-spain/

Given Krugman's little rant on Sweden http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/sweden-sweden-as... which spawned responses like http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/sweden-no-longer-the-free-marke... and his attitude towards Estonia and the US stimuli, I think there is some doubt as to his work.

Whose work, especially in economics, isn't in "some doubt"? A one paragraph blog post hardly discredits Krugman in general.

I am of no fixed opinion when it comes to economic theory, but Krugman's and Dean Baker's writings on the economy of the last ten years (i.e. housing bubble onwards) are some of the few things I've found that are intended for a general audience, are (at least partly) based on data rather than ideology alone, and seem coherent to me. That doesn't mean they're right, of course. If there's a critique of their view that meets the same criteria – generally accessible, based on evidence, not entirely ideological, and coherent – I'd like to see it. Most of what I've run across in that department is either incomprehensible to me, obviously ideological, or both.

The people who seem lacking in credibility right now are the ones recommending plunging ahead with full-bore austerity when there are both obvious reasons to think it will make matters worse (because it will reduce demand and slow growth) and obvious evidence that it is doing so right now, e.g. in the UK, which has been running this experiment for the last few years. Perhaps this is just my ignorance speaking, but what I noticed is: (1) those austerity measures were greeted by loud cheers by the same people who still think that way today; (2) the Krugman and Baker types predicted that it would make things worse; (3) the UK has gone back into recession.

Interesting, I find Krugman to be more ideological than reasoned, but I that could be from working on government stuff in the 90s. I would recommend reading about spending changes in 1946, it is quite an interesting era to compare to 1920, 1929, and today.

Do you have the same opinion about Baker? I find him to be less political than Krugman (which doesn't necessarily mean less ideological). His posts are almost always based on data and seem to make a pretty strong case. Plus he called the housing bubble really early (2002 or so), again just by looking at data.

Probably the most interesting point that Baker makes (makes ad nauseum, in fact) is that the US's fiscal dilemma is almost entirely a matter of health care costs.

I've only read a little bit of Baker from his stuff on housing, and I tend to agree with him. He does a decent job of actually backing up his point without the slight-of-hand graphs Krugman uses. I am not fond of his headline writings to attract attention. His criticism of the regulators is detailed and backed up well.

I really, really wish we had gone another way on health care. Moving health care away from company to individual purchases, health savings accounts, government health disaster insurance (everything over a certain $ amount), massive changes to IHS. Phasing in items and protecting from day one our most vulnerable populations (fix the leaks instead of buying a new boat).

I'm curious: do you have any examples where Krugman is flat-out wrong? There are many cases where the people whom he criticizes are. His predictions have been more right than wrong, imho.

Well, that link I posted sure is him being wrong.

Actually, I'll have to disagree with you on that.

Well, if using deceptive graphs aren't very convincing (see all of the results of his article). Perhaps his criticism of Germany, Estonia, and his writings on the stimulus actions by the USA which turned out to be wrong would do it.

Is it just me, or does he not actually make a case for austerity here? He makes a case for the government balancing its books, but there are other ways (such as higher taxes and defaults) which are hardly touched on here.

I've seen Niall Ferguson's TV series (the ascent of money etc.) which are quite good, but this article seems dangerously ideological to me.

Why should anyone welcome a system - be it austerity or extend and pretend where they or their children pay to line the pockets of the 1%?

I understand that the BBC is the voice of the state, but OP, how could you consider anything other than the Iceland solution to be the correct course?

I don't really know enough about the subject to agree or disagree, I just thought the points the author made were interesting.

However, to try and answer your question, I don't think that it can be as simple as taking one country's solution and applying it to another, it seems to be that economics at this scale is maybe close to the complexity of weather systems, and therefore each situation is unique.

> I understand that the BBC is the voice of the state

You understand incorrectly. The BBC is funded by a compulsory license fee, but it's certainly not a communist era Pravda-like entity.

Each of the UK's political parties generally thinks that the BBC is biased against them. and the BBC is often regarded as being biased against the left wing and the right wing simultaneously.

If a company/startup/government could loan money at a very low rate to invest in profitable and/or useful projects for which there is known demand and they refused, what would you say?

Austerity is a great tool to starve the beast [1].

I think the three biggest issues are some spending, taxes and regulation that's spiralling out of control. However, RARELY do authoritative spending is cut, leading to broken fallacy issues [2].

Secondly, taxes kept being cut so money has to be found somewhere. What better way to take advantage of those without much of a political voice? Youth, disabled, unemployment, etc. Those services are being cut. While some taxes are randomly raised on others, leading to schizophrenic implementations (A tax on corn because it causes fat, but wait, it has a subsidy? I heard).

Thirdly, the parties have socially authoritative and fiscally libertarian attitudes. This means cracking down on general freedom in life (conservative/traditional) while giving more freedom to those with money.

It's almost as if the parties in power are forming a feudal-style police state. Literally.

What I found that's very sad is that most of the politicians in Western countries benefited from cheap or FREE university education and are now demanding the youth to accept those cuts. Fucking hypocrites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Austerity doesn't seem to be solving the problem. Stimulus sort of helped, but was applied at the top. Trickle-down is known to not work very well...

Major governments will either find something that works, or we are likely to see repeats of the French Revolution translated to modern times and idioms.

I wouldn't call the stimulus a top-down approach, and I thin it's greatest "failing" was that there wasn't enough of it, first because no one really appreciated how bad things were, and then because one party decided to put party before country...

For perspective: the author of this piece is a right-wing ideologue who has called for eliminating Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and all income taxes on the rich.

Not sure what this piece has to do with Hacker News either.

Hi, from the HN Guidelines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Also, your comment doesn't engage with any of the issues of the article.

>>If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.

Hahaha.

It's possible both to be against the government debts & deficit spending, and to be against an austerity agenda. For example, one way to reduce the deficit and debt with minimal pain and austerity is to reduce discretionary military spending (which, for the US, is arguably what most of it is, in the form of overseas adventures and bases, and astronomically expensive weapon systems), and to increase taxes and/or otherwise close loopholes & exemptions for the rich and large corporations. Niall has argued for gutting and privatizing social safety net programs, and for abolishing income tax, inheritance taxes and gift taxes, and replacing them with a national sales tax. Any objective economist will tell you that over time that will lead to a society where there is an even larger plutocratic aristocracy -- which, coupled with "one dollar, one vote" mechanisms (like the Citizens United decision) that have been getting stronger in the US recently -- would further distort democracy away from the best interests of the young or poor working class and the 99%, and toward the best interests of the wealthiest 1%.

> reduce discretionary military spending

Make sure to think about what happens next after you do that. The money spent on military spending is huge part of the economy. Stop that and you'll have massive layoffs.

If this stuff was so simple it would be solved already.

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