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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

From the envy of the world to the laughing stock

I hear it a lot from international folks I know. Cancelling vacations, turning down job offers, no longer sending their kids here for college, moving their data off US servers.

The US is still enviable from a UK perspective

Depends where you are socio-economically

I’d rather be poor in the UK I’d rather be chronically sick in the UK, that is if I’m not already wealthy and insured I’d rather be in the US and middle class - particularly with inherited wealth I choose to live in the UK as an high level (middle) manager with my similar status American wife

What does the "proper" way of reducing the $2T annual deficit look like?

Taxing the rich and corporations for their share instead of giving them unnecessary tax breaks that they will gladly accept while still unnecessarily firing large sums of workers. Not complicated.

Also it would help to actually pass budgets instead of continuing resolution brinkmanship. Previous efforts such as the Hoover Commissions resulted in bipartisan spending reductions without the mass chaos and deprivation of lifesaving medicine to tens of millions of people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission

At least one of: cuts to Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, or defense; or tax hikes; or some combination thereof. Anyone who claims to cut the deficit without making those difficult choices simply isn't solving the problem.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

https://budget.house.gov/press-release/governments-mandatory...

100% agree, though I think people would scream just as much (if not more) if DOGE were going after social security, medicaid, and/or defense vs. psuedorandom federal programs/orgs. I currently think we need "all of the above":

- Cuts to Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and defense

- Tax hikes

That way nobody feels like they are being targetted; everyone should feel at least some pain from austerity measures.

How about not continuing tax cuts, especially tax cuts primarily benefitting the top 90%?

CRFB estimates ~$1T/year, if the current tax cuts are extended. https://www.crfb.org/blogs/trump-tax-priorities-total-5-11-t...

Republicans feigning concern about deficit or debt is fucking rich.

The top GOP priority in Congress right now, outside of ceding their constitutional responsibility, is searching for anyway to pass $4 trillion in tax cuts that will largely accumulate to the top 0.1%.

Most of MAGA is too distracted by culture wars tland identity politics to see the real robbery.

Ding ding ding.

Spot on. The surface level arguments that gets passed down as deep knowledge is scary. They spit in their faces and they praise them for the rain.

Actually conduct a proper study and defund unnecessary programs.

If your family needed to do a budget, to suddenly stop paying your bills is not wise frugality.

Inflation.

Any spending cut on that scale, ~7% of your GDP, will unavoidably cause a recession so hard the impacts won't be limited to just the USA.

Any tax hike at that scale will do similar, because that just changes who is doing the spending not the amount available in the economy to be spent.

Inflation is — or at least is supposed to — encourage spending by anyone simply holding money instead of creating wealth with it; this is supposed to create investment opportunities that grow the economy, this is supposed to automatically provide a greater tax base that automatically reduces any deficit.

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