So much of the way the United States works is having a nearly limitless source of borrowing at low rates in the form of selling treasury bonds.
The further we get away from that being true, the more precarious things become.
The further we get away from that being true, the more precarious things become.
All the people complaining about "US Debt" and $26T of "net investment" or whatever don't realize that this is/was the benefit of the US being stable, strong, and friendly.
When the US is unstable, weak, and a bully, as it is now, all that goes away. The bill comes due, and the US will pay dearly. The rest of the world will pay nothing.
Just because the US changes political direction, that doesn't equate to instability. Its aims are changing, like it or not, good or bad. The US deciding it wants Greenland is not a proof of instability, it's a change in the strategic goals held by the people controlling the superpower.
And the US is at a high level of strength, not weakness. Its large corporations hold sway over the globe in a manner the likes of which has never been seen before in modern history. Its military has force projection to nearly every point on the globe, with hundreds of global military bases. Its national wealth is at an all-time high. Its stock markets are at all-time highs. Its median income is at an all-time high. Its median disposable income is at an all-time high. Its housing wealth is at an all-time high.
Then why is everyone so damned unhappy all the time?
That has changed dramatically in the past few decades and with it, places where Americans can find common ground.
Other western countries are going down the exact same path, just a bit behind us.
No, homogeneity doesn't cause happiness.[1] And the US was always less homogenous than other "western" countries.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Japan#Suicide_proble...
Funny though how all those European countries everyone on HN and Reddit point to as "how things should be" are all pretty ethnically and culturally homogenous, though that's changing rapidly. Interestingly, cracks are starting to appear.
> And the US was always less homogenous than other "western" countries.
The US was 85-90% white in 1965. That's pretty homogenous.
And that evolution itself tells the story of the US itself. The people in non-homogenous neighborhoods are happy and harmonious, but outsiders scared of cultural differences cause racial strife and discontent.
Those who let themselves get worked up about racism are the problem, not the non-homogenous races.
Instead of stopping there you're regurgitating, and it's unfortunate I'm confirming Poe's law, Mein Kampf.
> The US was 85-90% white in 1965. That's pretty homogenous.
I think you know nothing about culture, ethnicity, or the history of bigotry, xenophobia, and racism in the US if you can confidently make that statement. You're reducing all the diverse peoples that made up the nation into a single group based on their skin color.
There’s multiple components to what “happiness” entails. One might argue that a society filled with numerous cultures and ethnicities all vying for their own interests can make for quite a bit of unhappiness. E.g., if everyone was white, there’d be no hand-wringing over white supremacy. If everyone was straight, there’d be no hand-wringing over LGBT representation, and so on. That’s not saying that other social ills can’t exist in homogenous societies, but they do have fewer due to having more shared identity and values. Don’t be dense just to make a point.
> You're reducing all the diverse peoples that made up the nation into a single group based on their skin color.
Like people do today when lumping everyone of various ethnicities into the “white” bucket and decrying “whiteness”? If it’s a valid classification today why can’t we use the same term retrospectively?
You think people didn't find other ways to dislike each other when they were all "white"? Like I already said you don't know history very well or you're the one being "dense to make a point".
> If it’s a valid classification today why can’t we use the same term retrospectively?
I can't speak for today or say if it's valid. But that's not how things were back then because the people themselves didn't believe that. You've never heard the slurs people used for different ethnic and religious groups that all hailed from Europe and had light skin? The amount of "hand-wringing" about JFK being the first non-Protestant president? There was no feeling of "homogeneity" back then either based solely on skin color.
Those with housing have locked others out of housing, causing lots of "wealth" that those with housing don't even consider to be wealth. They think it's just "normal" and don't realize the massive advantage it gives them over everybody stuck renting.
But that's symptomatic of all the other inequality. Housing is the biggest expense, and most obvious form of rent extraction that the wealthy use to exploit those without wealth, but it's not the only one.
this is satire right?
the UK's system is close to 1000 years old
I doubt the current US system will last another decade
> with hundreds of global military bases
all of which will evaporate the moment it does anything to Greenland
no, it's evolved continuously from 1066
by the time of the US rebellion, the king was already neutered
> their first PM was in the 18th century.
the title of "Prime Minister" is a modern invention (and not a formal position)
there has been a Lord High Treasurer since the 1100s
a constitutionally limited monarchy is older than the US
meanwhile the modern US seems to be a absolute monarchy that isn't constitutionally limited
Eh?
If the US political system was stable and fit for purpose, the US would have got rid of the wannabe dictator by now; or at least held his power in check.
EDIT: Amusingly, I'm being downvoted by a class of American who refuses to believe their way might not be the best after all. Even when the facts are staring them in the face.
But I don't think that the people downvoting you are necessarily other US citizens. It feels like HN is very good at eliminating bots, but in these sorts of discussions lots of sleeper agent bots come out to try to shift discussion. Every bit of our social media is full of it and I think that the downvotes your comment probably come from that.
Interesting point. I (very likely) stand corrected.
This is in part because other countries allow American countries to come in and take over markets.
> Its military has force projection to nearly every point on the globe, with hundreds of global military bases
How are the hosts to all those bases going to react when suddenly the guest acts belligerent? When the ally drops down to an occupier, that force projection suddenly starts looking like occupation, which becomes a lot more expensive to maintain.
And the expense has worked until now because everyone else has wanted our currency so what's a bit more currency printing, but when we kick our own global reserve currency status because we fucked all of our allies, well now that "force projections becomes a lot more expensive" actually becomes expensive^squared.
This is absolutely idiotic for anyone who indulges in the privileges of empire.
How many European powers have had their incumbent head of state violently attempt to hold onto power after losing an election after January 6th, 2021?
Instead, in the US, we have our supposed captains of industry wielding chain saws on stage to publicly support the wannabe tyrant, and donating billions behind the scenes to privately support the wannabe tyrant.
I'm not confusing anything, right now Trump's mouth IS the political system in the US. Republicans control every aspect of the government completely, all the way through to the checks of the US Supreme Court.
No Republican has enough backbone to stand up to Trump, and if they do gain a backbone to stand up to Trump at all, like MTG, they exit politics quickly. Thomas Massie is the closest to somebody who is standing up to Trump. If Republicans in the Senate were willing to stay in office yet defect from the party, that would be enough to stand up to Trump, but even that's not happening.
Right now, the US is in a position not unlike Imperial Japan, right before they launched an attack on the US, forcing the US into WW2. High Command wants somebody to stand up and stop the obviously bad action, but nobody is willing to make the short-term sacrifice for the long-term good.
Can you name 26 countries with the same level of unity and cooperation with the US as what exists between the 27 members of the EU (and larger economic zone)?
The US is but one country. If you zoom into states, you’d see a lot more bickering and division - y’all just sent your military against your own people just now…
Besides Trump, I doubt there's another official in the WH who wants this. They are all just humoring the demented old man.
I am not advocating that the status quo should go on, I am just saying that the repercussions will be vast and long lasting, likely resulting in a world war, and whatever follows after that(if anything).
If its going to be like this the rest of the world might as well cut its losses
I agree that at some point, governments and people will need to step up and fight back, but the idea that the US will somehow fall in a vacuum and everyone else will live happily ever after is laughable.
the US will somehow fall in a vacuum and everyone else will live happily ever after is laughable.
Not everything is a movie with a final battle. Alternatives are found and adopted all the time without violent strife.
Empires rise and fall, pax Americana was not the world's first hegemony. The end of the British Empire is within living memory - while they sowed seeds of instability in a handful of former colonies that still flare up today, the rest of the world is fine. Britain, on the other hand, has had to enter a "managed decline", and is a much smaller player in world politics than it was a century ago.
The US doesn't have the cards to play, because the current US Government doesn't even understand where the wealth has come from. That US Government has risen to power by tricking the public into thinking that the very things that make the US wealthy and powerful are actually a scam making them poorer.
The current US Government has already broken the trust that makes the US strong. The repercussions will take years to become fully visible, and without immediate course correction those future repercussions will get far far worse.
Literally a bang.
Or many bangs. The largest military in human history going YOLO won’t be a pretty sight. (The only way it sucks more in America than it does abroad is if we go civil war. But even then, it’s almost certain to go global.)
It won't.
This may be recency bias. The current age just has more immediate, global communications. "The sun never sets on the British empire" had a literal meaning based on how globalized it was then. They even laid intercontinental undersea cables.
And which is harder? Bringing back production to satiate domestic demand or increasing domestic demand? Historically, demand deficiency is much harder to restore.
There's an implication here that the country *wants* to become a consumer economy, and not remain an export economy.
Furthermore, it relies on the leadership wanting to wind down that production, and not use that subsidy to further bolster their industrial capacity & crush global prices, in an attempt to wash out the others & only have their country be the sole remaining place capable of meeting demand at that subsidized point.
Why grind away relentlessly in industries with tiny profit margins, when there are high-margin innovation-driven industries that your economy can advance to?
Why stick with producing clothing, when you can move on to cars? Why stick with cars, when you can move on to chips? Why stay with chips, when you can move on to the next new technology that the entire world wants, but which only your economy can produce because it grew the industry from scratch and everybody is playing catch up?
Dictators love autarky because it gives them complete control of the population. Populations should not love autarky, because it makes them poor and robs them of wealth and opportunity.
1) A consumer economy is not required to extract wealth from other countries.
2) A consumer economy is metastable by design:
(2a) It inherently requires the buy-in of other nations to want to export to you in the first place, which is not guaranteed.
(2b) The wealth of the consumer economy is primarily derived from salesmanship and not the product itself, which is also metastable.
3) Knowledge work is not barred to an export economy, and can similarly be performed there without having to become a consumer economy.
> Why grind away relentlessly in industries with tiny profit margins, when there are high-margin innovation-driven industries that your economy can advance to?
(Previous point (3) similarly applies here)
> Why stick with producing clothing, when you can move on to cars? Why stick with cars, when you can move on to chips? Why stay with chips, when you can move on to the next new technology that the entire world wants, but which only your economy can produce because it grew the industry from scratch and everybody is playing catch up?
1) None of these decisions are mutually exclusive. Why throw away the $10 you picked up just because you saw $100?
2) Establishment of a new industry is not assured. Failure can still occur, even when billions are thrown. (see Abu Dhabi & GlobalFoundries semiconductor fab venture)
2b) Not very new industrial move needs to be made. Tech leapfrogging can occur at a later date.
3) The demand for those """lower end""" products do not evaporate. Unless a sensible smartphone-like revolution comes for clothing / cars (i.e. The unification of multiple former products under a new product), the industry's products & demand will rarely change. The tastes will shift, but the fundamentals of the product & the industry will remain.
4-IMPORTANT) Margins are not obligated to trend towards zero, and can in fact increase as more people make the same mental conclusions as described and abandon their own industries, eventually leading to an oligopoly / monopoly scenario that is harder to retake back.
> Dictators love autarky because it gives them complete control of the population. Populations should not love autarky, because it makes them poor and robs them of wealth and opportunity.
Wealth does not inherently manifest from (the ether / nothing), and neither does opportunity. Even in the EU, wealth is derived from the decisions of the State to create / retain wealth.
Dedollarization means that the US market is far poorer and can't import as much as before, yet the new reserve currency(ies) make holders that much richer, enabling greater demand for either imports or self-consumption.
It will be an adjustment, but there will be many winners, none of which are the US. There may be some losers who do not negotiate trade deals or can't find new markets, but it's unlikely. The supposed US trade war on China has resulted in their GDP growing by a massive 5% last year. Canada, losing its exports to the US, negotiates deals with other countries.
The pain for other countries is more organizational than anything economic. The US will face massive economic disaster in the form of devalued dollars and the need to close the government deficit after decades of being addicted to massive reserve-currency-enabled deficit spending. The US will be plummeted into massive recession by those sudden changes, while the rest of the world merely trades with whoever are the winners.
If, for example, China decides that it finally wants a consumer economy, and the Renminbi becomes a partial reserve currency, the consumer demand will be absolutely massive. Europe may have a harder time signaling to Europeans that they are far wealthier, but make imports cheaper for Europeans, and people who find that they suddenly have a lot more left in their bank account at the end of the month usually find ways to spend at least part of it.
I'd take those numbers with a grain of salt. China is known to play with the numbers to hit goals when they feel that they need to.
>The US will be plummeted into massive recession by those sudden changes, while the rest of the world merely trades with whoever are the winners.
The massive devaluation in the dollar would mean that the country would become incredibly attractive for manufacturing exports, which would prevent a massive recession.
>If, for example, China decides that it finally wants a consumer economy, and the Renminbi becomes a partial reserve currency, the consumer demand will be absolutely massive.
If you think that China is going to shut down the majority of its factories, move them to other countries, and let their currency float freely (well, freer than it is today), you're delusional.
First, the US will not be attractive in any way for investment because it is run by a madman that has ridiculous tariff policies that make starting manufacturing supply chains nearly impossible.
Second, even if the US could transition its economy back to manufacturing, that's a massive slide down the value chain to far less profitable industries than our current tech, biotech, and service driven economies. The idea as presented is a serious downgrade in quality of life compared to today.
> If you think that China is going to shut down the majority of its factories, move them to other countries, and let their currency float freely (well, freer than it is today), you're delusional.
China wants to transition its economy up the value chain to the high tech industry that the US currently has. It has the educational system and the brain power, and the biggest impediment, brain drain to the US, has now been shut off.
If climbing the value chain, out of manufacturing, requires China to shut down factories or open up currency somehow, they are far more likely to do that than to abandon their ambition of economic growth.
This is a fantasy that the CCP leadership will not entertain, because it would mean losing their control as the (export/industrial) king. Their national security descends from having that crown firmly in their hands & making everyone else reliant on their industries, and will do as much as they can to make sure it stays that way.
A strong currency runs counter to what the CCP leadership wants, having seen how it has hollowed out the US' industrial capacity (as a result of strong currency demand leading to comparatively higher labor costs).
The manufacturing stage is just a stepping stone to getting to where the US already is.
The end goal of the CCP is not to be a middling power, with middling wealth. It's to be the greatest power. That some in the US want to go down the value chain and take China's manufacturing spot just as China zooms ahead of the US, is, well... It would be comical if it weren't so sad.
None of that requires a strong currency, only a strong industry.
That's what the CCP has done with their own currency, by deliberately weakening it & funneling the strength into drowning the global market with their industry's products. A strong currency runs counter to that by making their products more expensive as a result.
Had the RMB continued its original trajectory (2003-2015), it would've wound up at approximately 1EUR ~= 5RMB. Instead, the CCP made the decision to weaken the RMB to maintain industrial capability, and further expand into technological ventures without abandoning the other industries they've captured before.
> That some in the US want to go down the value chain and take China's manufacturing spot just as China zooms ahead of the US, is, well... It would be comical if it weren't so sad.
1) China is able to "zoom ahead" because they have a strong industry within their own borders, buffered from the political decisions of other countries.
2) The value of the lower parts of the chain is not obligated to be lower than the upper parts of the chain.
https://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/news/its-okay-to-move-down...
in 2022 China, Russia exported around 630 billion USD, US imported around 950 billion USD. maybe the world will not end if these three just go and play in a separate sandbox;)
> it's going to be a painful adjustment.
even if demand falls a bit it's not the end of the world if it becomes more sustainable afterwards (less overproduction, consumer waste, gassing the environment)
Most other contemporary and historical parallels of authoritarians show far higher popularity of the authoritarian. Trump is nowhere close.
The biggest risk to the US is that the media is completely compromised, as are leadership at many institutions. Even in Silicon Valley, the loudest and most vocal leaders are self-destructively supporting this madness that will destroy the US's wealth, and their future wealth gains too.
You could almost make this case in 2016, but anyone who fell for Trump in 2024 will just fall for the next con man to come along. At some point we have to take responsibility for our own choices and stop blaming the media.
The truth about Trump was out there, and it was not hard to find.
Added here due to rate-limiting:
2024 was right after voters had seen Biden at that debate, while all the "responsible" people insisted he was sharp and smart. It really was more unique than its given credit for.
Both candidates were a disgrace to the parties who propped them up. However, nothing Biden said was any worse than what Trump said about immigrants eating peoples' pet dogs and cats.
At the Biden/Trump debate, the choice was between malevolent, incoherent senility and plain old garden-variety senility, and the voters choose poorly. At the actual election, there were even fewer excuses for voting for Trump, as Biden was no longer in play.
Most people who were tricked were people who don't pay much attention, and might only get a few articles of news, if anything. When the media doesn't tell people that there are plans for mass deportations at numbers that require legal immigrants to be deported, then the media is lying to its consumers. When the media is not willing to report that Project 2025 is Trump's plan, and instead places Trump's lie about ignorance on the same footing as the reality of people saying it is his plan, then the media lies to people.
Media consumers expect that journalists will react normally to extreme news. But instead the media is normalizing extremely unpopular and ridiculous policies that everybody would hate if they knew what the media knew.
I know large families of Mexican descent who have lived in the US for generations, that had many Trump voters in the recent election, from people that don't follow much news, and believed ridiculous things like Trump being a "Peace President." As you might imagine, there's a bit of intense discussion these days about how they were tricked into voting for secret police that will imprison family members and detain them for days without cause. If somebody reads a single article, they shouldn't have to read 5 more in order to get the real story merely because the media was more concerned about normalizing Trump's views than it was about reacting like a normal person would to the insanity of Trump.
Do people have personal responsibility to be better informed? Sure! But when they go to CBS they should get a real news article, not glazing of the most radical opinions out there on the political spectrum.
Put another way, if someone asked you to estimate what the split between the one third of the population that didn't vote was, what would you use as a reference point? Social media posts? Vibes? Or maybe polls leading up to the vote that showed the same roughly 50-50 split found in the actual results?
So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all. So we really don't know whether it holds for the rest of the population at all.
But the parent was — the implication being that if the other third had voted, surely they would have voted in greater proportion for Democrats than Republicans. That’s based on nothing but vibes and assumptions. I argue that the 64% share of people that actually did vote give you a lot more confidence in how the remaining third probably would have voted than whatever the parent suggested. It’s at least a starting point for extrapolation.
Unfortunately, my understanding based on reported surveys [1] is that if the non-voters had voted, Trump's margin of victory would have been even greater. If that's the case, then those who say that my 1/3 figure is too low are correct.
1: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/26/2024-election-turno...
Nazis did it in Germany. They lost parliamentary seats in the November 1932 election, but remained the largest party with 33% of seats. The next year the country was already a dictatorship.
Communists did it in Czhechoslovakia in 1948. They led a coalition government but had just lost the previous election.
I'm worried that United States 2027 will be added to this list. If MAGA sees their grip on power starting to fade after November elections, they may try increasingly extreme measures.
Maybe indeed the relatively best solution is in the middle: proportional representation with well-chosen thresholds.
Most of the US borrowing is domestic, very little of it is now foreign. No foreign entity can afford to absorb $2 trillion of new paper every year. That's equal to the total holdings of China + Japan. Going forward you might as well regard all US Govt borrowing as domestic, as that will essentially be the case given the scale. The UK holds $885b of treasuries, what are they going to buy annually that will make a difference at this point?
Every nation has a limitless ability to borrow internally via currency debasement, with obvious consequences. That USD debasement is why gold has gone up 10x in 20 years when priced in dollars. It's why healthcare and housing is so expensive - when priced in dollars. Cash pushed into gold in 2005, $100k, would now buy you a million dollar house. It's the dollar of course that has been hammered (among other currencies, the Euro has not done well against gold either).
The US won't stop being able to debase its currency and buy its own debt. What the US is doing is eating its hand. If it continues to get worse, it moves on to eating its arm, and so on (the US is de facto consuming its national wealth through stealth confiscation via currency destruction, rather than paying the bills with taxation directly).
Mechanically, "they" being sovereign banks serve as price-insensitive marginal buyers that close treasury auctions regardless of price because they buy treasury for storage/liquidity. VS domestic buyers (hedgefund insurance), who are price sensitive = raise rates to attract discriminate buyers who buy for yield/valuation = worse debt servicing = faster debasing. Foreign sovereign buyers still play governor role in making sure domestic buyers get a shit none-market deal, i.e. US gov gets a good deal which moderates velocity of debasing. Of course past certain level of debt brrrting, the ability for sovereign buyers to absorb is compromised, in which case it makes sense for US to fuck foreign buyers over and inflate away as much debt as possible while still reserve currency - US can inflate/soft default faster than world can unwind. And TBH US will probably be "fine" as long as US can still gunboat diplomacy. If can't be banker anymore, be the mob boss.