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2003? My God, how will we ever live with only the funding from such a... Wait, 2003? We spend THAT much more money than we did in 2003? That's absolutely ri

2003? My God, how will we ever live with only the funding from such a... Wait, 2003? We spend THAT much more money than we did in 2003? That's absolutely ridiculous. It's time this country learned to live within its means. That goes for the government and the people in it, too.

scarmig 15y ago
Whenever you see numbers like this, always ask two questions. Is it adjusted for inflation, and is it adjusted for economic growth? If you're feeling really wonky, you'd also adjust for sector-specific inflation. For instance, disproportionate increase in the cost of health care. Which I hear the government spends a couple dollars here and there on...
- Locke1689 15y ago
  What many people (including the writers of this article) don't seem to understand is that major nations don't pay off their debt -- they inflate it away.
dialtone 15y ago
More than the size of the increase since 2003 would be interesting to know what are the components of this increase.
wheels 15y ago
That's somewhat naive, as is this article, though I assume the author is being intentionally so. Counterintuively, during a recession, the government is usually the only entity that's able to pump enough money into the economy to fuel growth and ultimately end the recession – i.e. the time that its spending is most critical is when its income is at a low. The Great Recession lasted so long precisely because the government tried to "live within its means" rather than getting out the jumper cables. This is also central to the current debate about the best course of action for EU countries, most notably Greece, at present. The danger of simply cutting costs is that it may plunge the country into prolonged recession and ironically impair the country's ability to manage manage its debt effectively. Punditry aside, it's typically been the Democrats in recent decades that have put more effort into reducing the national debt (as Obama is proposing now through increased taxation). At least in theory, if not always in practice, the entire American political spectrum agrees that US debt must be minded and that the current level relative to the GDP is sub-optimal. But the ability to repay debt is linked to the health of the economy, and the goal is to avoid being penny wise and pound foolish.
- jerf 15y ago
  "Counterintuively, during a recession, the government is usually the only entity that's able to pump enough money into the economy to fuel growth and ultimately end the recession" Yes, that's the theory. But look around you. Is it working? No. We're doing way worse than those recessions where we instead responded by cutting taxes and actually living within our means. This theory is wrong. It's 2011. If this were going to work, it would have worked by now. It's not three months after the crisis anymore and it's past time to stop talking like it is. This approach is now a concrete failure, and I really don't buy the whole "it just wasn't big enough"; it's already far larger than it ever has been before, and what we've got is a far larger failure than ever before. (And I mean, policy failure, not just financial crisis size.) It's time for people to stop running around and talking as if the bastardized Keynesian economics the government is babbling about has any sort of connection to reality. They've have repeatedly utterly failed to correctly predict the effects of their policies, and that's the standard that matters in the end, more than anything else. We've tried spending like drunken sailors. It's time to try... not.
  - palish 15y ago
    We're not in a recession. Or if we are, we're not in a bad one.
    - jerf 15y ago
      We are not in a recession, according to one particular definition of recession. Bandy about definitions all you like but it won't employ one more person. There is no way in which the economy is currently good, and most importantly, no way in which the predictions made about what impact our actions will have from several years ago are going to be correct retroactively. I think perhaps I should have hammered on that point a bit more. Predictions were made based on a certain model; predictions failed. Anyone with a scientific viewpoint of the world ought to be able to see what that means: Model wrong. And the model being wrong has implications, not least of which is that your confidence level in all the people confidently lecturing us about the folly of actions like cutting government spending based on this model, this model already proved wrong, should be significantly lowered. After the performance of this economic model, after the endless month after month of "unexpected" economic news, we're really supposed to just keep pissing trillions more dollars away because by golly, hopefully, someday this model will start working if we just try hard enough? I recognize that pattern; it's a failure scenario, not an immanent-triumph scenario.

scarmig 15y ago

Whenever you see numbers like this, always ask two questions. Is it adjusted for inflation, and is it adjusted for economic growth? If you're feeling really wonky, you'd also adjust for sector-specific inflation. For instance, disproportionate increase in the cost of health care. Which I hear the government spends a couple dollars here and there on...

Locke1689 15y ago
What many people (including the writers of this article) don't seem to understand is that major nations don't pay off their debt -- they inflate it away.

dialtone 15y ago

More than the size of the increase since 2003 would be interesting to know what are the components of this increase.

wheels 15y ago

That's somewhat naive, as is this article, though I assume the author is being intentionally so. Counterintuively, during a recession, the government is usually the only entity that's able to pump enough money into the economy to fuel growth and ultimately end the recession – i.e. the time that its spending is most critical is when its income is at a low. The Great Recession lasted so long precisely because the government tried to "live within its means" rather than getting out the jumper cables. This is also central to the current debate about the best course of action for EU countries, most notably Greece, at present. The danger of simply cutting costs is that it may plunge the country into prolonged recession and ironically impair the country's ability to manage manage its debt effectively. Punditry aside, it's typically been the Democrats in recent decades that have put more effort into reducing the national debt (as Obama is proposing now through increased taxation). At least in theory, if not always in practice, the entire American political spectrum agrees that US debt must be minded and that the current level relative to the GDP is sub-optimal. But the ability to repay debt is linked to the health of the economy, and the goal is to avoid being penny wise and pound foolish.

jerf 15y ago
"Counterintuively, during a recession, the government is usually the only entity that's able to pump enough money into the economy to fuel growth and ultimately end the recession" Yes, that's the theory. But look around you. Is it working? No. We're doing way worse than those recessions where we instead responded by cutting taxes and actually living within our means. This theory is wrong. It's 2011. If this were going to work, it would have worked by now. It's not three months after the crisis anymore and it's past time to stop talking like it is. This approach is now a concrete failure, and I really don't buy the whole "it just wasn't big enough"; it's already far larger than it ever has been before, and what we've got is a far larger failure than ever before. (And I mean, policy failure, not just financial crisis size.) It's time for people to stop running around and talking as if the bastardized Keynesian economics the government is babbling about has any sort of connection to reality. They've have repeatedly utterly failed to correctly predict the effects of their policies, and that's the standard that matters in the end, more than anything else. We've tried spending like drunken sailors. It's time to try... not.
- palish 15y ago
  We're not in a recession. Or if we are, we're not in a bad one.
  - jerf 15y ago
    We are not in a recession, according to one particular definition of recession. Bandy about definitions all you like but it won't employ one more person. There is no way in which the economy is currently good, and most importantly, no way in which the predictions made about what impact our actions will have from several years ago are going to be correct retroactively. I think perhaps I should have hammered on that point a bit more. Predictions were made based on a certain model; predictions failed. Anyone with a scientific viewpoint of the world ought to be able to see what that means: Model wrong. And the model being wrong has implications, not least of which is that your confidence level in all the people confidently lecturing us about the folly of actions like cutting government spending based on this model, this model already proved wrong, should be significantly lowered. After the performance of this economic model, after the endless month after month of "unexpected" economic news, we're really supposed to just keep pissing trillions more dollars away because by golly, hopefully, someday this model will start working if we just try hard enough? I recognize that pattern; it's a failure scenario, not an immanent-triumph scenario.