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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

All previous R governments have talked the same and increased the debt.

I expect this one to do the same, and expand the deficit to make big tax cuts. The Liz Truss budget.

And all previous D governments, no?

The point is that Congress is the one responsible for indebting the US, and it's both parties that are responsible. The Executive can only do so much to correct this, and even if Musk's claim of saving $2T turns out to be true, that still isn't even nearly enough to stem the tide of spending that has bankrupted the US.

This whole framing is nonsense. The US is the reserve currency of the world, and its influence in both economic and soft power has had massive ROI for the entire economy for decades. There is no other government that plays this role in the global economy, and it's a ridiculously advantageous one. The fact that a balance sheet shows the sum of the investments to achieve and maintain that as a deficit is not a reason to freak out, this is a drastic misunderstanding of how nation-scale economics work that comes from people who are only familiar with household and business budgets

But if we were concerned about the budget, contractors are drastically more expensive than federal agencies and are much more dubious in their value proposition for the state or the public. It's just that the people involved made their fortunes on cushy government contracts and corporate welfare, so they won't go after it. The whole "fiscal conservatism" concept has always been a massive grift and this is the most blatant and obvious it's ever been

And you're absolutely right in saying that the Democrats are on the same grift, as their strategy has shifted to triangulation in the last 40 years, though the economic shocks they tend to produce over this insanity are generally smaller. The fact is, neoliberal economics has failed to produce widespread domestic prosperity, was likely an attempt to loot modern economies for an oligarch class from the beginning, and people keep accepting doubling down on these policies because they've been systematically misinformed about economic cause and effect through trite little analogies

What measures do you suggest to take things in a different direction?

Here are some easy ones off the cuff: Kill a massive amount of wasteful private contracts. Remove the entire means-testing bureaucracy from every social program. Put more funding into stuff that actually gets ROI, like the IRS, the FTC, and the CFPB. Don't shoot ourselves in the foot by killing massively beneficial soft-power investments like USAID. That one in particular is essentially handing the mantle of cultural and economic hegemony to China on a silver platter. Maybe you don't believe America should be a hegemonic empire from a moral perspective, but it's hard to argue that it's not a beneficial position

The agenda here is just very clearly not efficiency, but cronyism, enabling autocratic control, and culture war vendettas. It really takes willful ignorance to think this is going to be good for the country overall. It will mostly be good for Elon Musk and his buddies, and maybe only in the short term

More broadly, I'd like to see the US return to a state of regulating finance and enforcing anti-trust in a sane manner. The boom-bust cycle and total crackdown on labor and consumer protection has turned the domestic economy into a casino that impoverishes the vast majority of its citizens, and the effect of bailing out this corrupt financier class every time they crash massive sectors of the economy has been the destruction of the real economy, an enduring public distrust of the government, and a class of insulated plutocrats who have been shielded from the consequences of their mistakes, believe themselves untouchable, and have now orchestrated a total takeover of the political process. We had economic stability before, and it was looted by the greed of our financial and industrial sectors.

Of course this all seems like a pipe dream. Those guys won. They have assumed control and they don't have to give a fuck what people on some forum say about them

Hardly bankrupt, but: none of this is going to make a difference without cutting into the big pie of military spending which is pork-barreled to individual constituencies. Or the large amount spent on retirees because they're an important class of voters who have no employment income. Or putting up taxes.

There's no excuse for repeating this. It takes seconds to see where the money actually goes:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

That agrees with me: "Top 10 Spending by Category and Agency" top 3 are social security, defence, medicare. Then there's an explanation that social security is in the "mandatory" category.

Under Clinton the US was running a surplus. When Bush came in he passed huge tax cuts and turned it into a deficit instead.

The dotcom boom was popping just as Clinton was leaving office. Clinton also lifted the legal restrictions (he signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act of 1933) that would have prevented the banking / mortgage crisis of 2008.

Yea TBH you're not gonna sell me on a president past Kennedy looking out for the US taxpayer or the economy in aggregate. Neoliberalism is one of the worst kinds of parasitic meme

Congress found $2.7 trillion (with a T) in improper payments from Medicaid and Medicare over the last 20 years. This was Congress, not even DOGE, at work (finally), and the yelling and screaming is still over "you can't look at that data!"

They can, they should, and there needs to be an actual clean up, not a "we're totally doing it, honest, Scout's honor!" like we've seen from the last 30 years worth of administrations (and yes, I know who's included in that span :) ).

Trump added $8.4T to the national deficit as a president during (mostly) good times. Biden added $4.3T to the national deficit as a president during challenging times.

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