Spending is only one part. The part that almost nobody wants to touch is raising taxes to support the spending.
So what you really need is an impartial Fed-budgetary-counterpart arbiter that declares when balanced budget rules are and aren't in effect.
And probably toss in what target percent of debt needs to be paid down too.
Perhaps the best left/right cooperative government of our lifetime.
Skeptical? Review the famous Contract with America.
Does Clinton deserve a. Ok the credit, for signing off on it? No, of course not. He deserves some of the credit. The rest goes to the Republican congress, which did the budgeting.
Credit where credit is due.
But stories are much more fun than data, and we put everything on the credit card, and here we are.
We probably want to fix that quirk, if we want politicians more reliably doing the fiscally sound thing.
So whether an executive makes campaign promises, takes credit for signing the bills into law, or championing the bills and advocating that Congress pass them, it is ultimately Congress--the House with the Senate--that has done these things with taxes and the budget.
Taxes went up and relative spending went down during the period when Bush Sr was president and Democrats controlled the House & Senate.
Taxes went up and relative spending went down during the period when Clinton was president and Republicans controlled the House & Senate.
This was not true when they had a trifecta. There are reasons many Americans prefer the parties split power.
NYC passed their pied a terre tax. Even federally, at least some in congress are trying to push for new taxes. Taxing the wealthy is the most popular way to lower the debt.
https://jayapal.house.gov/2026/03/26/jayapal-warren-boyle-45...
https://thehill.com/business/economy/5554777-gallup-poll-nat...
Let me clarify: Few in the mainstream of current politics and media want to discuss higher taxes on the uber wealthy (1B and up) - much less the very wealthy (100M and up).
It's only happening in a few places at the state and local level, but that's challenging because of the ability of the wealthy to move residence between states (something the pied a terre tax cleverly works around).
It also seems to have a lot more purchase these days in forums like this. My comment above about raising taxes would likely have received much more opposition 10 years ago. It seems like the consciousness here has shifted, probably because many here have a front row seat to the emergence of the tech oligarchy.
I think HN specifically, and the country more generally, has become disgusted with the magnitude of wealth concentration.
Very few here probably believe Ellison, Gates, Bezos, Page/Brin, Elon, or Zuckerberg don't deserve to be very rich.
But that reasonable "very" is 2-3 orders of magnitude less than their current net worth.
That's what many people feel is the broken part of end stage capitalism.
I'd like to believe this, but the proof is in the pudding, the pudding being how they vote. Apart from a few well known politicians, most of them aren't running on a platform of countering oligarchs.
A HNer might ask themselves: do I vote for the future where preserve low taxes in case I become massively wealthy, or do I vote for the future where I work for my income?
One step past there, of course, there is no more unity. Can we just run a deficit forever with no consequences? I have a profound distrust of free lunches, but I can't prove that MMT is false. I'm almost certain that it is, but I can't prove it to the satisfaction of anyone who believes it.
But even if you don't believe MMT, then what? Can we keep going a while longer without too much damage? Should we?
And if not, then we have to cut some things or raise some taxes or both, and that's where the political trench warfare starts.
I'd prefer to use that money for "progressive" things like schools and libraries and parks (voted in 2024 to increase my own taxes on those things specifically, but my neighbors voted against them), but I'd even settle for spending it on the military if it came out of the pockets of the oligarchs to reduce inequality.
The second and greater difficulty is that realizing that a solution that is politically untenable is not a solution, it's a campaign slogan. I don't know how we get people to move past this difficulty.
When the structural violence that permeates our society finally manifests in the only violence the lower class can execute - this non-viability might change.
It will be a harrowing time- and I hope we avoid this.
The billionaires will cease to exist one way or another.
Money has always been a social construct. There is no fundamental particle of currency.
The government said pay taxes in USD or go to jail. They pay their contractors and employees USD (some of which can essentially be "eased" out of thin air). After those people get it, they can say "jump bitch" and you or someone you want to trade with will do what they say, because without those USD you won't be able to settle your tax debts.
In countries where people don't want to hold the local currency, they exchange whatever for local currency when they need it.
You can always be assured there is some American who desperately wants to stay out of jail, and someone will want to buy their stuff.
The drivers are consumption and investment. Not taxation.
If you want to sell to the richest consumers in the world, you get dollars. If you want to finance something from the deepest financial market in the world, you accept (and repay with) dollars. (Both of which drive demand for, and thus deepen liquidity around, dollar-denominated financial assets.)
Demand for currencies and the level of taxation are barely correlated.
USA provides more goods and services in nominal value than any other country. The people providing those goods and services have the threat of jail for not paying taxes. Even if you pay them in something like gold they have to account for the USD value and then pay taxes plus taxes on any appreciation vs USD, so there's too much friction for them whether taxation is 10% or 30% not to just accept dollars. Many would probably like to be paid in gold or something but they still have to get USD to settle the debt so you end up with "other thing" + "USD" no matter what, forcing USD as a lingua franca when all those "investments" and "financial markets" settle.
Taxation is the underlying "backing of violence" that helps makes USD so attractive. It's not the level of non-zero taxation but the level of mass potential violence against a large body of relatively productive people for not paying taxes. The IRS will raid someone just as easily no matter the tax rate, so I wouldn't expect raising taxes to do much to raise global demand for USD because the level of violence backing it doesn't change much.
It really isn’t. If the U.S. shifted to a system of tariff-only taxes, the dollar would still be in demand. If the U.S. let income taxes be paid in the currency of the payer’s choice, most Americans would pay in dollars and irrespectively the dollar would be globally demanded.
There simply isn’t much empirical proof for the taxation hypothesis of the value of money.
Gold came into the "money" game quite late. The earliest forms of money we have are with credit, on tablets dating back to Ur III (>3000 BC); gold came later (Lydians in 700 BC).
Credit has been part of many societies, even that had gold/silver floating around (because for most of the folks who were near the bottom, they didn't have enough to lay claim to any precious metal):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years
Even the much-vaunted Gold Standard was only really a thing for ~50 years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
And it's not like it provided price stability:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
In some circumstances the use of gold as the base of currencies caused problems:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1857
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression#Causes_of_the_...
>but we decided it's 2.5"x6" paper with ink on it.
It was clearly referring to USD, not whatever the David Graeber of the IWW was saying happened 5000 years ago while talking about "everyday communism."
Since ~1792 up until, depending on when you want to argue, some time in the 20th century USD was backed by or defined by gold or silver.
Price stability has gone down the toilet since the 70s when the government defaulted on its gold backing. Prices were remarkably more stable under the gold standard. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/50060e33c4aa3d...
As for gold standard an 50 years or some such (IDK about those numbers, but lets take in on face for a moment), sure but it was a direct drop in for silver standard which lasted "from the Sumerians c. 3000 BC until 1873." [0] The idea there was a precious metals backing, not that the PM has to necessarily be gold.