No, it is not
With level of debt and borrowing, cannot afford more spending
With level of debt and borrowing, cannot afford more spending
It’s a policy choice that these returns are not taxed at comparable rates to income. The trend of nation-wide capital returns vs income is telling.
Instead of looking at where the tax revenues can come from, which I don't necessarily disagree consider what proportion of the nations economic activity is government spending.
I consider govt spending/GDP a much better indicator of economic health. In fact, tertiary_sector/GDP is better still.
The US government has too much presence in the economy and can't even provide health care and free tuition.
Have you considered who the narrative of wasteful spending benefits? Even our narratives of tax increases never discuss tax increases on what is now the bulk of personal monetary gain.
> After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes
It's hard to say the federal government has been cost cutting for 50 years when the budgets have been growing at exponential rates.
Is the proposal to cut large contracts or replace them with civil service? How do you reclaim these expenditures? My anecdotal observation is that many of these contracts are fundamentally difficult to do correctly. For example, Aircraft Carrier manufacturing has both a monopoly, and a monopsomy. There is only one seller and one buyer. That seller is increasingly having execution challenges due to the overall decline in US ship building but the only real solution would be to either re-shore commercial ship building in the United States, nationalize the seller and see if the government can run it better, or stop buying aircraft carriers.
Unfortunately, a 100% cut to all government defense and discretionary expenditures would only save 1.8 Trillion or roughly ~23% of the Federal budget. Obviously, this would yield problems. The only means available to truly cut the Federal budget at the rate of trillions per year would be a change of entitlement benefits.
It would be expected that the government budget grows as our population ages with current benefit programs. The same programs that the beneficiaries "paid into" for decades.
Human nature, I guess
"It’s almost taken as a tautology that the government is wasteful. After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes," These cuts are not reflected in government spending vs GDP is mostly flat for the last 40 years
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Note that in the 1970s the US was paying for moonshots and Vietnam (both filthy expensive)
"I tend to find it fanciful that individuals paid 1/4 of their private sector compensation to work on core civil infrastructure, national research priorities, and policy are somehow a bad deal for the American taxpayer at large. "
Ya, that's not a thing. I worked in government, I still work on government projects and no one outside the NSA is getting paid a 1/4 of their private sector compensation. Maybe a 20% hit which they chose to accept since, in my experience, most start as contractors and move to become feds for the job sec + benefits.
Frankly, Id say half of the government employees I worked with are unemployable. And they most of them had at least a STEM masters.
"If anything, I’d imagine that the government could incentivize greater productivity by normalizing the pay scales. At a minimum, maintaining a public capability can often neutralize monopolistic pricing practices."
I don't necessarily disagree.
"Have you considered who the narrative of wasteful spending benefits? Even our narratives of tax increases never discuss tax increases on what is now the bulk of personal monetary gain."
Ive considered it a lot in fact. One of the main beneficiaries appears to be the DC area which was the only region of the country not to have a recession in 2008 and has been outpacing most of the country in growth for thirty years.
The main beneficiaries, thus, are the laptop-class (and their billionaire masters) which is a new way of saying mandarins.
with interests payment reaching 1.2trln? And 5trln more to the debt pile? No
* Not cut taxes on the very wealthy by $4,000,000,000,000 over ten years
* Not give $500,000,000,000 to military and police expansion in the immediate future
* Not have one person dictating global trade policy with the US that impacts our relationships and competitiveness for the next 30 years
The president only has the power (allegedly) to do the tariffs moves he is doing based on a 1970s emergency powers act.
Anyway, that was just one example of "ways to be fiscally responsible that don't involve cutting science research"
BBB was proposed by freshly elected president to a freshly elected Congress, and it was passed and signed. I don't like it much, but people (yes, millions of americans) had spoken
I'm not arguing anything about its popularity, I'm arguing its wisdom. My point is that there are other ways to pretend to be fiscally responsible than to cut NASA funding.
It doesn't matter how much debt you have if taking on the debt raises your revenue by more than serving the interest payments.
Imagine telling a corporation they can't borrow money at 3% to grow 15% because "debt is bad." Or telling someone who needs a car to get to work that they should go without a car (and thus not become employed) rather than taking on a car payment because "debt is bad."
And on this front, the US has been doing great (but is currently shooting itself in the foot under the new administration)
Pushing the cost burden on subsequent generations is a cowardly way to deal with our financial problems. When Reagan entered office, the debt was less than $1T (about $3.5T in today's dollars).
The #4 cost currently is paying off interest (not principle) on old debt.
I agree we are spending too much now, but the solution should not be to stop all spending.
The problem is deeper than just a deficit.
If the economy is in the shitter you are perfectly entitled to run a deficit.
Doing good? Pay down debts. Need a boost? Invest and incur debt. Where is the flaw?
Yeah, and the USSR would have won.
>When Reagan entered office, the debt was less than $1T (about $3.5T in today's dollars).
Well, guess who won the Cold War? Who pushed the USSR to bankrupt itself?
It would be like saying "no private company should ever raise capital".
If one wants to make a nuanced argument about NASA or fiscal responsibility despite the current political environment, it is perfectly possible to do so! But you need to work much harder to tease out the nuance and distance yourself from the fascists, lest your effort of espousing your lofty ideals just end up as fuel supporting them. Fascists don't respect ideals beyond power - the open hypocrisy is the point.
The one who lacks nuance is not the one who thinks NASA could stand to shave a couple billions but the one who's making everything a partisan fight.
And no, the comment I responded to had absolutely no specific criticism about what from NASA should be "shaved". Notice how I didn't respond to the one about SLS?
Did you call for Biden's impeachment when he coordinated with social media companies to violate American 1A rights?
Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza?
Unless you too add these boiler plates on your messages you are full of it.
Yes, unequivocally.
> Did you call for his impeachment then or now?
I didn't call for his impeachment because it didn't seem like a political possibility to effect change. I did not vote for him in the first place, and there did not appear to be a differing alternative in the cards.
> Did you call for Biden's impeachment when he coordinated with social media companies to violate American 1A rights?
My view is I do not see what is significant about "Biden" or the government here, apart from people trying to tenuously connect the palpable infringement upon their freedom to the 1st amendment as written. The larger topic, advocating for the right of free speech with the rise of corporate government is one of my pet issues. But yet again, there has been no political option on the table to actually change anything about this.
> Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza?
Honestly, it seemed like Biden was doing the best he could given the Israel lobby. But I'll admit to not really being invested in that situation any longer.
... but what I most certainly did not do is post on any of these topics cheerleading for power. Especially with paltry appeals to values that when scrutinized, are being hypocritically used by power as justifications. It's not a matter of "boilerplate", it's a matter of expressing enough nuance to make it so that your opinion isn't simply contributing to the chorus cheerleading for power. There's a time and a place to call for good-faith reform of American institutions, but it's decidedly not when fascists are at the helm.
>> Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza?
> Honestly, it seemed like Biden was doing the best he could given the Israel lobby. But I'll admit to not really being invested in that situation any longer.
I responded to your question in the context of being about Biden's policies, in line with the thrust of your other questions.
Regarding what was and is going on in Gaza (regardless which US politicians and policies may be enabling it) ? Yes, I certainly condemn that! It's fucking genocide.
As I said, I'm not super invested in the situation any more, growing older and not seeing any real angle to personally affect it. I had a few weeks after Oct 7 of writing off the situation as FAFO (but still realizing that this was unfair to the Palestinians who did not support that attack), but Israel burnt through that goodwill quick. I'm old enough to have become more conservative such that if Israel had occupied Gaza and implemented martial law with the (stated and apparent) goal of keeping the peace until a civil non-Hamas government could be sustained, I just might have accepted that. But they didn't. What they are actually doing is straight up take-no-responsibility genocide.
but instead we're giving a massive tax break to rich people and increasing the military budget by $150B
Their wealth grow unchecked depressing yours.