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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

Of course, what will the FED do when the fake conservative government didn't really cut spending but only put on a show for fox news?

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Conservative governments in the US have increased spending going back 50 years. Their base still believes them for some reason that they will lower spending.

> Their base still believes them for some reason that they will lower spending

Their base doesn't care. I doubt it has ever cared. It, like everyone else, wants the money spent on what it wants.

Show me the incentives (being able to charge interest on money printed out of thin air) and I'll show you the outcome.

Conservatives vote based on conservative reasons, not on economic reasons. Their knowledge of economics is pretty limited, anyway.

Congress never does its real job, which is to look out for the American people. They're always compromised.

Austerity is probably not the answer. We need to redefine the economy and quick.

> Austerity is probably not the answer. We need to redefine the economy and quick.

It isn't. But the dog and pony show going on is also not the right answer. Look at the president and the party - be honest - do you really think this group actually cares to fix anything in the country, with dignity and respect for humans?

No, but I also don't think that dignity and respect for humans is what moves the market.

> No, but I also don't think that dignity and respect for humans is what moves the market.

No but without dignity and respect for humans you get revolts - which moves the market.

Asking myself: are the cuts practical and soundly made, done intelligently? The answer is overwhelmingly: no, absolutely not, absolutely never. Cutting small little beautiful things that make the world better down won't have any net impact, yet picking fights with NOAA and CFPB and other good forces is the main course time after time.

I want you to enumerate the dignity and respect issues as you see them. I think a general washing isn't going to be very good conversation.

> I want you to enumerate the dignity and respect issues as you see them. I think a general washing isn't going to be very good conversation.

Which one do you want to talk about?

- Cutting healthcare for masses while giving the super wealthy a tax cut?

- Pedophilia and protection of pedophilia while blaming the "others"?

- Abrupt kidnappings of people based on race when 40% of the country is not white?

- Reducing trust in institutions built by Americans over the decades like CDC while gaslighting parents to not vaccinate their kids?

DOGE was the hint of austerity and everyone shit themselves and freaked out about all the government layoffs and cost cutting. The same thing is happening in Argentina--the Peronists are on the rise again because nobody has the patience for any shred of a libertarian style of governance to work. Oh, and corruption, but we'll see about that. It would actually piss me off royally if Milei goes down because he couldn't resist having his own hand in the till. A lot is at stake, just the entire future of the human race and all that.

If DOGE were at all intelligent or backed by a law or anything other than Musk's weird drug addled personal preferences, I might agree. But it isn't. DOGE did things irrationally, and did things that potentially impact every citizens' personal security.

Between Musk and nothing getting done, I'll take Musk. We're in a far worse place than you think, this isn't fun and games.

Musk was using the government as a playground and a platform to build his personal brand. Nothing he did was “serious”. If they wanted to reduce the deficit, they’d close the carried interest loophole for hedge funds instead of running around on stage with chainsaws. That’d save around 1.3B per year which is far more than all the DOGE cuts combined. And, it wouldn’t cost a bunch of jobs.

I'll take getting nothing done, if that means the tax records and social security records stay secret. I'll also take nothing getting done over an un-elected, previously-illegal effort like DOGE. You have no idea what I think of the place we're in, but as far as government policy goes, nothing changing is a great default. Make a case for the change, including a cost/benefit breakdown, then we can talk.

The bond market forces austerity in the end either way.

Or you can try inflation, which again leads to the bond market telling you that it didn’t help.

This is what I find so useless. There is not just a single number that can define this situation. Defining it in such a way seems to be a solid way to avoid having a real conversation.

> We need to redefine the economy

Our legal system is a social construct. Money, a social construct. The economy? The economy is a description of a real system. You can't define away energy scarcity or the cost of distributing food.

Fair, maybe redefine is not the right word? Rework the incentive structure. From my point of view there is a lot of effort being expended for negative return for the average citizen. Its going to be interesting to see what happens now that China is out as long as these tariffs hold (stay in law and are actually abided). I hope the end result isn't running back and begging for mercy.

> China is out as long as these tariffs hold

Are we actually tariffing China? I thought Trump chickened out on that.

Goddamnit are you serious? You probably know better than I. I swear I heard some stupid high number on NPR yesterday.

The answer is, it depends on the good. It's not a single number, de minimis is gone though.

> Goddamnit are you serious?

Yup [1]! It’s higher than it was before. But well below other countries’.

[1] https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/us-china-tariff-pause-e...

It's 30 percent higher than last year, plus additional tariffs on certain things. We've (temporarily? tune in two months!) backed away from the 150% or whatever number but that increase is still hanging over everything. And doing tariff rate and schedule policy by whim is a terrible idea independent of whether you agree with tariffs as a policy. I'm mixed on them honestly, which doesn't sell myself to any group it seems. But I think they exist as a semiuseful tool that can be hard to gauge and should be used carefully.

The stacking 50% tariffs on aluminum and steel(deal with this one less, it might be lower?), plus adding new harmonized codes to the tariffed list is a pain in the dick. Visiting friends this weekend we were talking about how they could undercut my sales by being in Canada and having substantially lower cost of goods..

It seems like it's less about the actual percentages at this point and more about ongoing uncertainty paralyzing businesses. You can't do any long term planning in this climate, and that puts everything on pause across a wide spectrum of industries, which is objectively bad for the economy.

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