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Comment by HDThoreaun | Hacker News Reader

Putting fiscal policy in technocrats hands seems like a bad idea to me. Most technocrats are completely divorced from the experience of average people. Since their incentives dont align they would end up implementing bad policy thinking it was good. Tax policy could certainly work though. Most tax law is written by technocrats today, they just need a politician to champion it after its written for it to become a law.

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Imho, the way to do it is to allow the unelected technocrat body to set the general parameters (e.g. max available spending for current tax policy) while leaving the specific params (e.g. budget items) to Congress.

Technocrat bodies seem to do okay with setting scientifically-supported, non-specific directions, that can then be decomposed into specific directions by people better connected to constituents.

This couldn't ever work. In a crisis like 2007 the US rapidly going into deficit spending is the only thing that kept the financial system running. Have a hard cap during the next crisis and the Great Depression will start having numbers beside it. Economics is a soft science and politics isn't a science at all.

Any economist on such a body would have seen that the post-Bear Stearns reaction in 2008 merited exceptions to fiscal policy.

Such a body presumably would also realize that deficit spending on an average non-crisis Tuesday should be much more tightly reigned in.

I chose the Fed as an example because, whether they're correct or not, they absolutely pivot around exceptions.

This is precisely my point. Who decides what is and is not a crisis. Germany tried a version of what you're advocating for and recently realized it was unsustainable, and declared a crisis so they could up defense spending.

Trump has declared crisis events no less than 20 times to justify his insane policy decisions.

We're just playing pretend games now.

The entire point of the Fed et al. is to remove the ability to decide what is and isn't exceptional from those who have political stakes in declaring everything exceptional.

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