3 ms·

We live beyond our means, have unsustainable quality of life. Gonna catch up one day.

adventured 9y ago
Fortunately we don't have an unsustainable quality of life. It's pretty simple mathematically. Not so simple politically. You slash $250 billion off the US military. You slash $100 billion in local+state+federal spending off of all the activities related to the war on drugs. You very lightly cut entitlements. You raise taxes on the top 10% by quite a bit. You raise taxes on the next quarter by a modest amount. Your budget is now close to break-even. You haven't impacted the standard of living of ~95% of Americans at all. Quite the opposite, you just dramatically boosted the long-term prospects of the quality of life for the average American. Hundreds of billions in wasted revenue can now flow into highly productive use over time, whether healthcare or transportation/infrastructure (or just not running up debt interest by exceeding the budget). Just by not running up that debt interest, you'll save trillions of dollars over time. If you really wanted to dramatically boost the US standard of living, you'd squeeze the healthcare cost monster to death. The monetary benefit of that system overwhelmingly flows to the top quarter of Americans, who are already doing extraordinarily well. We have a ton of room to work with in that area, that could improve our situation by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It's not even necessary to get creative, all we have to do is begin copying any number of several highly function systems from around the world. Cutting the military etc. will harm the economy you might say? Except that's obviously wrong. It'll further unleash the economy, releasing that money to far superior productive, compounding use. Most US military spending is for soldiers, who are contributing very little to the US economy as is versus their peers, their labor is low productivity and low innovation. They make nothing, they're nearly strictly consumption engines. No other prosperous developed economies have the need to spend on such things at such a high rate, neither does the US. It merely requires that the US accept that it's not the world police and doesn't need to be.
- d--b 9y ago
  Definitely agree with all that. Yet this is all quite unpopular. I can't help thinking that all economic woes are self inflicted because of bad culture.

Fortunately we don't have an unsustainable quality of life. It's pretty simple mathematically. Not so simple politically. You slash $250 billion off the US military. You slash $100 billion in local+state+federal spending off of all the activities related to the war on drugs. You very lightly cut entitlements. You raise taxes on the top 10% by quite a bit. You raise taxes on the next quarter by a modest amount. Your budget is now close to break-even. You haven't impacted the standard of living of ~95% of Americans at all. Quite the opposite, you just dramatically boosted the long-term prospects of the quality of life for the average American. Hundreds of billions in wasted revenue can now flow into highly productive use over time, whether healthcare or transportation/infrastructure (or just not running up debt interest by exceeding the budget). Just by not running up that debt interest, you'll save trillions of dollars over time. If you really wanted to dramatically boost the US standard of living, you'd squeeze the healthcare cost monster to death. The monetary benefit of that system overwhelmingly flows to the top quarter of Americans, who are already doing extraordinarily well. We have a ton of room to work with in that area, that could improve our situation by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It's not even necessary to get creative, all we have to do is begin copying any number of several highly function systems from around the world. Cutting the military etc. will harm the economy you might say? Except that's obviously wrong. It'll further unleash the economy, releasing that money to far superior productive, compounding use. Most US military spending is for soldiers, who are contributing very little to the US economy as is versus their peers, their labor is low productivity and low innovation. They make nothing, they're nearly strictly consumption engines. No other prosperous developed economies have the need to spend on such things at such a high rate, neither does the US. It merely requires that the US accept that it's not the world police and doesn't need to be.

d--b 9y ago
Definitely agree with all that. Yet this is all quite unpopular. I can't help thinking that all economic woes are self inflicted because of bad culture.