It's not surprising they don't care because they literally have policy to do damage like this and their explicit goal has been this exact outcome.
Which is an intentional strategy to repeal social programs that they’d never get the votes to do so via legislation
Republicans are the only party that in the 21st century acts as though we can simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending and everything will be fine.
What does change(and is more important) is Debt/Revenue:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=TZfm
The ratio is looking like it is trending in the right direction. If GDP decreases while nominal tax receipts increase, GDP does not change the debt, while the debt/Revenue ratio looks good for paying bills, while not boding well for economic health.
What is this "real world" you are referring to? There has to be a balance between current and future expenditures and economic health to facilitate these. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Republicans may generally prefer creating money over destroying money, but that doesn't mean they aren't applying taxation. "Tax cuts" in normal speak just means a reduction in how much money is being destroyed. It does not refer to a reduction in your tax burden.
Exactly. Also known as a tax. You can make someone poorer by taking their money and destroying it, or you can make someone poorer by letting them keep their money and devalue it by creating more. Same coin no matter which side you want to look at it. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The taxes are always going to get paid in the end. The only choice is in exactly how you want to pay it. Each method has its own set of tradeoffs, so, like with everything, different groups understandably believe in different methods. In practice, both methods will be used. Nobody, apart from the previous commenter, is ever completely hardline "money must only be destroyed" or "money must only be created", but groups will still debate over what is the optimal ratio.
"Taxing billionaires" is the left's version of "cut Medicaid fraud." It's a message for low-information voters who have a gut feeling that free stuff will require more taxes, but get confused converting from billions to trillions: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/06/msnbc-sug...
That's why Democrats say "we're the only developed western country without universal healthcare," but never "we're the only developed western country without a 15%+ VAT."
In practice though tax cuts usually make rich richer without helping the economy to grow (because of lobbying/corruption).
This is being generous. It's much simpler.
The poor don't pay any federal taxes at all so you can't give them a tax cut because they don't pay any. You can give them a credit at best.
Edit:
Some data
> Another 60.3 million returns showed AGIs of less than $30,000. The average effective tax rate for those taxpayers was 1.5%, even before refundable tax credits were applied.
From: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-...
Even if we exclude poor there are many options how to split taxes between different income brackets, how to tax salaries vs capital gain, how to split taxes between individuals and businesses, how to avoid loopholes e. t. c. (e. g. in the UK I see small business struggling because of rising taxes while multinationals pay little taxes by moving profits offshore and reporting no profits in the UK).
And the other half thinks you can pay for a European-style welfare state without European-style middle class taxes. Americans are Disney adults.
Given that the US has a population of 342.7 million people [3], those two trillion dollars divides out to $5800 per resident per year.
The UK's universal healthcare system costs ~$4700 per person per year (~£3,500)[4].
If we could spend healthcare dollars as efficiently as the UK, the current government spending in the US is enough to support a single payer healthcare system covering every resident without raising taxes.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
[2] https://www.kff.org/medicaid/medicaid-financing-the-basics/#...
Except we couldn't. For the same reason our public schools can't get Finland's test scores while spending $3,000 less per student pear year than the U.S. For the same reason our public transit systems can't build subways for $100 million per km, like Spain.
Why that is is a bit complicated and doesn't have a single root cause. It's also a bit tricky because every major component blames the other components for the total cost.
Part of the problem (roughly 10% by one estimation I read) is drug prices. Drug prices in the US are >2x the price as compared to other developed countries [1].
No, my point is that we couldn't achieve UK costs by doing "single payer." Our publicly funded systems, like schools and transit, are also cost-inefficient (public schools somewhat less so, public transmit somewhat more so).
I already mentioned drug prices, another input in the cost of US healthcare is the cost of physician salaries. Physicians in the US are paid ~2x what physicians in the UK are paid [1].
One input to physician salaries is that we limited the number of new doctors by limiting the number of residency positions.
[1] https://www.physiciansweekly.com/post/how-do-us-physician-sa...
If I compare the prices of a PS5 in the US to a PS5 in the UK (excluding the 20% Tax), they are basically the same price [1].
If I buy a pair of 501 Levi's jeans in the UK [2] and a pair of 501 Levi's jeans from the US [3] I pay basically the same price (again excluding VAT).
If I buy a Ford compact crossover in the US and buy a Ford compact crossover in the UK, I pay basically the same price of ~$33k.
Please explain why it is a fact of life that a drug in the US costs considerably more than the same drug from the same manufacturer just purchased in Europe.
Why can we not compare the cost of drugs Canada, Japan, UK, Germany, ... to the price of drugs in the US?
And again, drugs cost considerably more in the US whether they were purchased publicly or privately.
[1] https://blog.playstation.com/2026/03/27/new-price-changes-fo...
[2] https://www.levi.com/GB/en_GB/clothing/men/jeans/straight/50...
[3] https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/clothing/men/jeans/straight/50...
Services aren't goods manufactured in a single place. Delivery of healthcare services in the U.S. versus U.K. reflect myriad factors that are rooted in differences between Americans and British people. Americans wouldn't tolerate the trade-offs in the British healthcare system--a system I think is very good, btw--for the same reason they wouldn't tolerate living in little British houses or driving little British cars.
> Please explain why it is a fact of life that a drug in the US costs considerably more than the same drug from the same manufacturer just purchased in Europe.
It's a policy determination to subsidize drug companies to make sure we get access to the latest drugs.
I do not believe this is true. Keep in mind that the UK has universal healthcare (NHS) but also has a private healthcare system.
The private healthcare system can be used to prioritize speed, comfort, elective procedures, ...
Around 12% of the UK population has private medical insurance [1].
> It's a policy determination to subsidize drug companies to make sure we get access to the latest drugs.
There are cases in which a drug is under extreme demand outstripping manufacturing capacity. In these cases, paying more can provide access to a limited resource.
However, to my eyes, this appears to be an unusual occurrence rather than the typical state of drug production worldwide. I don't see evidence that the amount the US pays for drugs results in dramatically higher access.
I believe the opposite is true. If a drug is available in a US pharmacy but it is unaffordable, does one have access to it? I would say no.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/30/almost-one-i...
In the UK, 61% of people report being satisfied with their healthcare, according to OECD. In the US, it’s 75%. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025...
The only thing intentional in politics is preserving your personal status and wealth. This is bipartisan.
It could be a very messy bubble if/when it collapses, and I think our way out at this point would have to be AI-driven productivity gains. Hopefully Altman's little wish-granting machine ends up being accurate.
> Basically, America has an economy that is buoyed by AI development and infrastructure spending right now but is poised to pop and the national debt has been ballooned by two to three generations of political leadership failing to properly address underlying issues and instead printing money.
Maybe we shouldn't have spent five decades giving the wealthy tax break after tax break while hollowing out the middle class and suppressing wages with union busting and globalization. Productivity is up ~90% over this time frame, and most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. But here we are. The bill has come due for strip mining the country economically, and taxes will go up to pay down this debt (because only the top ~40% of income earners have enough income to have a federal tax liability). We will fix this eventually through demographic compression (economic growth comes, broadly speaking, from population growth and the US has reached peak population; forward growth will be substantially lower than the past when the population was growing rapidly), politics, and the bond market forcing the US government to raise taxes (“bond vigilantes”).
it won't be the wealthy or cash-under-the-table classes paying these taxes, the increases will be in the income brackets. Which means paycheck receiving working stiffs ( middle and upper-middle class ) and retierees drawing from a 401k/IRA are the ones who will pay just like always.
Hell, between PPP and the OBBB tax cuts, rich people are getting $2T over from the YS Governemnt from 2020-2030. It’ll keep happening too, this country is an oligarchy now. Wish it wouldn’t but I don’t see a sea change coming, just further concentration of wealth and power.
The hypothesis is that lowering taxes rates will actually increase government revenues.
The Trump cuts don't feel like they're laffer optimal. Instead they feel like political capture by the wealthy class. A cumulative of left of laffer optimal tax strategies over the past years have resulted in a deficit growing at rates which now exceed what a laffer peak rate would now support.
- the rich got their tax breaks, and have contributed to deficits for decades. Now they complain that social security entitlements must be cut to keep within our means.
That's the Starve the Beast strategy.
If this were the case, revenue would have gone up after the tax cuts. They didn't. Receipts as share of GDP fell and the deficit tripled. The debt went from 25% of GDP to 40% of GDP during Reagan. We've never meaningfully been on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. It's basically just conservative propaganda at this point.
As the other post mentioned, the strategy is and was Starve the Beast. We know this because that's what Reagan actually campaigned on.
> "John Anderson tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."
That changes everything, doesn't matter that it didn't work at all.
Iran War Cost Tracker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47237080 - March 2026 (446 comments)
Pentagon Tells Congress First Week of Iran War Cost More Than $11.3 Billion - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war... | https://archive.today/Q4oDX - March 11th, 2026
Consumer energy excess cost burden is ~$76B as of this comment (indirect regressive consumer tax):
https://iranwarcost.watson.brown.edu/
> Meanwhile, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security each grew around $100 billion in the last year.
While we should be efficient with these programs, that's what government is for, and what I pay US federal taxes for: to take care of my fellow citizens. Not to bomb innocent people with overpriced military industrial complex hardware on the other side of the world for illegitimate reasons (F-35 program costs now exceed $2T, for example).
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
Pentagon Fails Eighth Audit, Eyes 2028 Turnaround - https://www.military.com/feature/2025/12/24/pentagon-fails-e... - December 24th, 2025
Annual net interest on debt is ~$900B/year, as of this comment; we could replace Medicare and Medicaid with Medicare for All for ~$2T/year, which would contribute to constraining healthcare spending increases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666290. It is an active choice to continue to operate the entire system inefficiently; we could make other, better choices. The inefficiency and debt growth is a result of operating the system for entrenched interests to profit off of the dysfunction.
For you to deny that social spending is problem (especially for what it does buy) totally denigrates you and your position.
I also thought that the military budget was too big... in 1998. But in 2026, Europe is raising defense spending targets to 3.5% of GDP, which is more than what the U.S. spends: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz4nq91wpo
It turns out that, if the U.S. isn't willing to guarantee your security, you have to spend 3-5% of GDP on defense (just like Europe used to do before 1990). As the U.S. loses hegemony and we move to a multi-polar world, everyone's military budgets will go up.
> If American foreign policy was rational, we wouldn’t have been involved in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and now Iran. Not to mention Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya, and countless minor skirmishes. We’ve been throwing kids into the meat grinder for 75 years, and lighting dollars on fire, for no good reason. There’s no reason for us to light money on fire having bases all over the world, when we have two huge oceans to protect us.