At some point I realized: there is no plan to fix it. Both of the parties are just hoping that the upcoming crisis happens while the other party is in power.
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> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Good times have made weak men. People unwilling to stand up for our values. Afraid to even declare what we stand for. Afraid to be proud of our traditions and what makes our way of life superior and worth defending and fighting for. These weak people will vote for candidates who demoralise us and weaken us and ensure our demise.
The lion doesn't concern itself with the opinion of sheep.
They enshrined a number of rights that are under attack by both ends of the political spectrum.
It's the failure to break the cycle which leads to dictatorship, and is unequivocally not the solution to problems of today.
I was struck yesterday by reading Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth" proposals from the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_Our_Wealth#Proposed_legi...
One characteristic of democracy is that it is ever-rewritten by those who strive to change it and vote. (Also, occasionally assassination, in Long's case)
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
It isn't 2024 any more and you cannot repeat that election campaign.
Under the Trump administration, nothing goes to the voters and everything goes to BigTech, the MIC and Trump's friends.
Sounds like total bullshit. I briefly googled it and apart from AI also telling me that it was total bullshit, the first list I found split the Roman empire in two so it would neatly match the hypothesis!
Someone just thought of that and then found data to fit their neat idea.
> Sounds like total bullshit.
You're right. It more like an avg of 118 years (median 73), not 200, depending on what you mean by "greatest" ofc. The Ancient Romans, US, and Dutch pulling that average up and 1/3 of historically modern continuing democracies having a short lifespan being founded around WW2, pulling it down.
The Roman Empire was not stable for an uninterrupted period of time. It's conceptually called a single state for simplicity, because such a large period of time and area of land naturally had instability (less than current Europe, granted). The Roman Empire democratic government lasted about 487 years before falling into autocratic rule.
Did that mean it was no longer a great civilization?
Also I would argue that a civilization that only lasts 100 years is not great almost by definition. Where's your data?
The question was about the average lifespan of a democracy (or any derivation, like a republic).
This is a variation of talking past the subject. eg https://www.instagram.com/p/DY2DRKDhqaa
Please show me that moment, is it in the room with us right now?
On the contrary, giving money to the public would actually help the economy, but people continuously vote for politicians who are (ostensibly) “careful” with the money.
These are just straight up numbers increasing or decreasing. It’s not complicated shit. Quit equivocating.
2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.
3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.
4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.
That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.
So you don’t understand the concept of sovereignty then.
I’m also not entirely sure how relevant that is due to states (and provinces) not printing their own currency though. Very different situations.
“No budget that runs at a deficit is acceptable”
Why not? Deficits can be healthy and safe when they’re managed. Literally most persons, businesses, and governments use debt. It helps manage purchases over time, and it’s an inflationary hedge.
The idea that “any deficit is bad” was literally pushed as propaganda to make you fatalistic about managing the deficit. As said, one party raises it, one party lowers it, and the party that raises it claims that lowering it to anything but zero is “just as bad” as their runaway debt growth. Propaganda.
> Why not?
The household analogy works for some people because it answers a moral question, not an economic one: Why should government be exempt from rules that individuals must follow?
The development of the household budget idea as a way of reasoning about the the federal government's is as old as economics itself. The Greek word for economics is oikonomia, consisting of - oikos = household - nomos = management
This analogy broke 90 years ago in the US, when, in the aftermath of the great depression, Keynes argued that governments should do things that households cannot: borrow during recessions, spend when private demand collapses, tolerate deficits until recovery. And that these have a beneficial effect on the economy and its participants because government spending becomes someone else's income, essentially injecting demand into the economy.
During the 1970s, US politicians realized that the household budget analogy was an effective rhetorical tool for arguing for fiscal conservatism. Its effectiveness bore no relation to its reflection of present reality. What it did reflect was a set of values: thrift, responsibility, independence, and skepticism of debt. But most of all, it speaks to a sense of justice - that the rules for me were also the rules for thee. The difference that the government plays by a different set of economic constraints than I do is the fundamental tension that the household analogy attempts to address. This is a moral intuition not an economic intuition. The sentiment still holds power today despite it being a bad intuition pump for economic reasoning.
It probably greatly depends on what debt is spent. If it's used for investment to spur further growth, it's entirely different if it's used for consumption. Is government using depth for future growth?
The president proposes the entire budget, and can veto the entire budget regardless of which party is in power. Of course Congress has immense influence and you also can't pass a budget they don't agree with. That doesn't change that not only does the president matter (the claim I'm refuting), they are the most important single person that matters, by design.
In my opinion the following graph should be mandatory viewing before any discussion on major tax policy changes in the US.
you are right in that neither can fix it entirely
only one party consistently raises the debt->deficit
and only one party consistently lowers it
hint: you cannot spend $21 TRILLION on militarizing the country and going to war without exploding the deficit, there's no profit in war, only massive expense
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
and that $21 Trillion was before the Iran War which is going to go on for years and cost another trillion to replace all the weapons and ships, remember all those bases and planes that were destroyed which this administration is covering up
* There's lots of profit for military contractors and other insiders, which is the entire point!
If you wanted to “fix” the budget deficit, you’d have to collect all the money that the US has printed. At least that’s how I understand MMT.
1. First off: the deficit article were commenting under right now. This is unusual and terrible and 100% due to GOP norm breaking.
2. The BBB raised the debt astronomically, so this will continue well past the end of the war.
3. We’re engaged in a war of choice with a huge country with no end in sight and no stated objective, and the pentagon is getting more money than ever.
4. The corruption and graft is so rank and blatant that it might actually make a dent here, which is absurd. God forbid they carry out their ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and then we pay for Trump City, there. Not to mention all the subordinate graft.
5. Only one party has divorced itself from reason entirely. Democrats are deeply flawed and I disagree with many of them on many things, but none of them dare try the ‘nuh uh shut up’ approach that is central to the GOP in the days of Trump. Imagine if they said anything as absurd as “Haitians are eating our cats and dogs” or “I’ll give everyone $5k” or “I didn’t lose the election that every single watchdog said I did” — they would be lambasted and forgotten within days.
6. Only one party is planning for the other party to ever be in power ever again. That is, assuming you don’t take Miller’s word for it that there are seven bajillion illegal aliens that the democrats ship in to win elections, which just hasn’t happened to work yet because the GOP is just too popular, and hasn’t been uncovered in any actual investigations because they’re just too darn tricky.
Sorry. Presumably this whole thread will be wiped anyway. But this is not a “both parties” thing! We’ve had a balanced budget and a positive treasury balance in my lifetime, and I’m a baby person!
(People said it was impossible then as well, FWIW.)
I’m convinced that a big part of our political woes come from the fact that major elections are at the end of the year. Obama election, 2008. Great financial crisis, 2008. So who oversaw the big bailouts and massively spiked the deficit dealing with the crisis? Obama, of course. Except it wasn’t, it was Bush.
Likewise, Biden 2020. Pandemic 2020. Who oversaw lockdowns and massive federal payroll loans and big government checks sent out? Biden! (No, Trump.)
There was also the dot-com boom, which of course wouldn't have happened without Al Gore inventing the Internet.
Then Republicans took Congress in 1994 with their "Contract With America". They passed a budget that was much closer to balanced, whether Clinton wanted it or not. Eventually, as you say, that led to a surplus in 2000. (That was the first surplus since Andrew Jackson, by the way.) But Clinton by himself wasn't going to do it. He was going to play pretend. It was the Republican Congress that forced him to.
Now, if you think I'm advocating for the Republicans here, I note that Republicans don't believe in anything like a balanced budget when the president is their guy. I'm just saying that, if you're going to point to Clinton, state the record accurately.
(One detail I don't remember: Why did Clinton's 1993 deficit plan get no Republican votes? Was it because they did not want to cut the deficit? Was it because they just wanted to deny Clinton a victory? Or was it because they wanted to actually do something about the deficit, and Clinton's plan was more pretend than real?)
Such dives tend to be fatal.
Until AI can produce a blast-management plan to ensure the hero's survival, the necessary courage shall remain elusive.
Remember to call it SI ("Super Intelligence"), not AI otherwise you make yourself enemy of the United States of America.