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Comment by deevolution | Hacker News Reader

A welfare state isn't necessary if people save aggressively like in Singapore. People are actually required to save something like 35% of their income and their employers have to contribute an additional 15%. Some welfare exists but only for special circumstances like for the needy or disabled. Simply telling people to save more wouldn't cut it in America. If we end welfare like the Republicans want, I think we would need a government mandated savings rate or employment matching program similar to Singapore. We also need to go back to a gold standard and end inflationary fiat money - this is exactly why people dont have a rainy day fund / have no incentives to save in the first place. Its left the individual and the family vulnerable, fragile, and it has lowered our time horizons and corrupted our institutions and increased our dependence on the government.

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I don't think anyone's in favor of rampant money supply expansion like we've seen over the past decade or so, but I think you have to ignore or disagree with some pretty basic conclusions to be in favor of returning to the gold standard. Despite the potential negative effects, printing money seems to be effective in staving off the most severe effects of economic downturns. Evidence from 2008 and the coronavirus stimulus seems clear - you can fairly effectively prop up employment and demand without driving up inflation too badly.

And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan).

In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

You're basically replacing an insurance program that everyone pays into with safety guarantees with a savings account that each individual pays into with zero guarantees and each individual now has to know how to save enough for themselves, oh and the government will take some of your money if you don't save enough of it. I can't imagine anything more regressive.

The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.

We can't even suggest people wear masks without them saying we're taking their freedom away. Not way we're forcing people to save money.

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