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Comment by dietr1ch | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the biggest difference being about freedom, but what to maximise, individual or society as a group.

Individuals excel when there's absolutely no rule stopping them, but enough to not make others a threat, and groups excel when there's rules to prevent individuals from taking an advantage over the rest, be it not paying their fair share on maintaining society, ignoring costs that society pays as a whole.

Here the idea is that natural gas is a greenwashed technology and that society would be better off moving away from it, so through this ban you'll start the migration away from natural gas. The individual standpoint is that natural gas is probably cheaper, so fuck the planet if that gets you a better price.

Are there other things to change if you care about the planet? Sure, but that's not the point and doing only one of them isn't going to make a dent on the upcoming climate catastrophes.

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Not sure why the GP got down voted, you two are saying effectively the same thing.

Liberalism used to be about the individual and individual rights/freedoms. The term has been redefined (at least in the US) to focus on social and collective issues. When you focus on collective issues you inevitably ban things deemed worse for the collective and enforce those bans on anyone who doesn't conform.

> Are there other things to change if you care about the planet? Sure, but that's not the point and doing only one of them isn't going to make a dent on the upcoming climate catastrophes.

It's really interesting to me that this argument comes up often in environmental issues but is treated like the plague in other areas.

There was a thread a few days ago about the potential defunding of federal weather reporting services. I raised this same basic point, that we must do something about our deficit and even small cuts will help relative to doing nothing.

That landed like a lead balloon, the pain caused by any spending cuts just aren't acceptable to most people, unlike the pains caused by any regulations intended to help the environment.

Being able to use natural gas isn't a valuable public good.

I used to live in an area with regular tornadoes, having public weather data is life saving. People shouldn't have to die from tornadoes because they're poor.

I currently live in an area with regular tornadoes. There's a huge gap between a federally subsidized weather prediction program and making sure people in your community can be alerted.

Most even small towns in my area, the kind with one stop light at best, have community storm shelters. Granted those ultimately are partly subsidized by the federal government, but that is still different than a federal agency program.

To that end, if the concern is tornado safety why doesn't the government give communities or individuals storm shelters for free rather than partially subsidizing them for those who are at least well enough off to throw a few thousand at a small unit?

Can you provide any evidence or reasoning that cutting the weather services would help move the needle on our deficit? Are you sure that not having them won't cause an increase instead, for example if the lack of data causes destruction or worse crop yields? Are the groups advocating for doing this taking steps to reduce the deficit elsewhere, or are they increasing it instead? Do we actually need to address the deficit?

Cutting spending to any existing program will decrease the deficit relative to where it would be without cutting that spending. I'm not sure what evidence you'd really need there, say the budget is currently $150m and you reduce it to $0 - the deficit decreases by $150m. Given that the government doesn't use a zero-based budget, for better or worse, that decrease extends into all future years as the default otherwise is for that same $150m to be spent every year.

We absolutely do need to address the deficit as well as our debt. Expenses just to service the debt are a large chunk of our annual budget now. Do you know of any example of a country that ran up a debt to GDP (or similar) ratio this high and didn't have meaningful economic issues? Similarly, do you know of any country that debased its own currency through aggressive money printing and didn't end up collapsing, hyper-inflating, or both?

> say the budget is currently $150m and you reduce it to $0 - the deficit decreases by $150m.

Interest accrued on debt must be added to the deficit as well, unless you are including that in the budget? I'm not sure how defaulting on debt payments would play out though.

The Republicans went nuts when Bill Clinton started reducing debt with a surplus. They thought debt reduction was a really really bad thing. American is actually pretty average in debt/gdp ratio for developed countries, however. Nowhere near as crazy as Japan.

> Interest accrued on debt must be added to the deficit as well, unless you are including that in the budget?

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. I'm talking only about reducing the deficit, any debt already owed would still be there and interest on it would still be owed. Cutting spending to reduce deficit would just slow down how quickly the debt grows.

> American is actually pretty average in debt/gdp ratio for developed countries, however. Nowhere near as crazy as Japan.

Oh sure, though in my opinion that's a sign of how many countries are in similar debt trouble rather than it being okay.

The US debt to GDP is currently around 124%. Until very recently it was broadly agreed in economics that over 100% was a huge risk and over 120% was effectively a point of no return before you follow in Japan's footsteps.

Those warning sign levels only got moved once the US passed them. Maybe they're right and it isn't actually a problem, but I can say those original levels came with specific historical examples of countries that failed after those levels and today's understanding of what ratios are okay seem to come with vague explanations and hand waving.

When the cuts are paired with other things that explode the deficit, it seems pretty meaningless.

With that we totally agree. I take huge issue with any increase in federal spending, and didn't vote for this administration in case that matters here. I wouldn't throw out funding cuts just because we are still spending elsewhere though, that seems like a move that just gets us closer to the edge faster.

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