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At some point in my life I took a step back to look at my life and how I’m doing and how much I pay for that life. Maybe I’m just incredibly lucky. My conserv

At some point in my life I took a step back to look at my life and how I’m doing and how much I pay for that life. Maybe I’m just incredibly lucky. My conservative expectation is that we all have to start contributing a lot more over the next few decades if we want to maintain our standard of living, otherwise it will just gradually get worse. I hope I’m wrong.

treyd 2y ago
> otherwise it will just gradually get worse. The austerity policies of the neoliberal turn has already caused standards of living among the less fortunate to drop over the last few decades already. The 2008 crisis is when it started to impact the middle class and we're still feeling the impacts 16+ years later.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  Now factor in the effects of climate change on many communities over the next decades. Maintaining our infrastructure i.e. lifestyle is going to be much much more expensive.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Minor correction: maintaining the lifestyle of billionaire coastal developers and their clientele will be much much more expensive. The poors will continue to be encouraged to eat shit and die as per usual.
    - valval 2y ago
      Yes, typically poor people’s contribution to the economy isn’t as great individually. Groundbreaking stuff.
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        The cute thing there being they outnumber the big fish by something like 400,000 to 1 in the US and without them there is literally no economy and no billionaire class.
        valval 2y ago
        Your take is as profound as claiming there’s no life without oxygen, but it serves very little actual utility in observing the world.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  There has been no austerity: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
  - dlp211 2y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong, but that graph doesn't show anything with regards to whether or not middle-class folks have been hit with austerity. Federal outlays are not granular enough and increasing Federal outlays is pretty meaningless.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Austerity in the context of government means spending cuts. "We diverted the tax money to cronies instead of anything that benefits you and spending actually went up" is not austerity, it's corruption.
  - User23 2y ago
    Austerity for thee, but not for me.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Do you really think the explosion in government spending is the result of austerity?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hollerith 2y ago
What would the government spend the additional tax revenue on, in your conservative expection?
- dymk 2y ago
  Healthcare, school lunches, diversion programs, research grants
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    (conts) infrastructure upkeep, managing various natural resources, emergency management, weather reporting/forecasting/research, economic reporting/research... There are so many valuable services provided by the US federal government. People just take it all for granted.
    - zb1plus 2y ago
      I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of putting undocumented immigrants who could be productive members of society in concentration camps or bombing brown people. Furthermore, I am happy to fund particular defense initiatives like supporting Ukraine, but I want a line item veto on unproductive or morally repugnant things the government does.
      - valval 2y ago
        [flagged]
        Propelloni 2y ago
        > Supporting the war in Ukraine is just another example of “bombing brown people”, yet you appear completely oblivious. How? Russia invades the Ukraine. Ukraine defends itself. Ukraine's allies, incl. the USA, send weapons. None of the allies, incl. the USA, fight in Ukraine or Russia. I'm afraid your independent thinking has formed a prejudiced opinion. George Carlin would not be proud.
intended 2y ago
Please note - this is a more modern belief. Something that solidified in the zeitgeist post 2008. If you go to early Reddit, you will see it a staunchly pro market, anti tax stronghold - as was HN. For eons, “competition” was the mantra along with “greed is good”. Many people who own wealth reached there with that ethos. No one has to “contribute more”. That’s the opportunity for whichever bright eye person decides to take advantage of the gap in the market. If you want a counter to this dogma - 1) Yes. Market inefficiencies should be open as opportunities to the industrious 2) No. Not all market inefficiencies are the same. for example, Public goods (police, military) are not better off with multiple companies. Insurance is similar. 3) Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate. 4) “more regulation means higher compliance costs” was a new one I saw. Guess what - if your firm uses contracts, that’s a compliance cost. Why not just do it by a hand shake? Save your lawyer fees. Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. You can trade on your competitive advantage, not on the tertiary strengths, such as a firms ability to pay for a better legal team. Edit: Soap box - This is about Personal Responsibility. The place where most people agree today, is the desire for a fair fight. How can I reasonably defend the idea of personal responsibility, in something like the sale of NINJA loans. If firms field trained, resourced, networked sales people to sell loans to people who have a negligible chance of even understanding what they are getting into, then how do I reasonably bring up personal responsibility ? Can people reasonably be expected to read all the contracts they have signed? ( Netflix, Uber, gmail, phone, etc.) Algorithmic ads are fine tuned to grab your attention and keep you online. There is more money spent on UI UX research than the GDP of some global south countries. Forget America for a second - imagine how regulators in smaller economies handle these things. Heck, that’s if they even have time to worry about these things.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate. One of the big problems here, and the lobbyists do this on purpose, is that they promote the false notion that the issue is the quantity of regulations and not their substance. Quantity can be an issue when the number of regulations becomes excessive and their sheer number thwarts competition by creating high barriers to entry, but "incumbents want fewer regulations" is not only misleading but typically the opposite of what really happens. Incumbents want to get rid of regulations that protect competition and add regulations that inhibit it. What we need, of course, is the opposite. Which isn't as simple as "make number of regulations go up/down", it matters very much which ones and what they do. > Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. This is completely the opposite. Compliance costs are generally fixed costs, i.e. every entity has to hire a lawyer and pay them $250,000. For a megacorp this is negligible and they don't even notice, for a small business they're now out of the market because that amount of expense would bankrupt them. The more rules you have, the higher that number gets. This is the sense in which the absolute number of rules matters. But it still depends what they are. Even if you only have a couple of rules, the incumbents will want rules that only they can comply with. Conversely, you can hypothetically have a lot of rules and still have them easy to comply with, though this is certainly easier said than done. What you really want is to have a small number of rules, but the right rules -- the ones the incumbents don't want and their smaller competitors do.

treyd 2y ago

> otherwise it will just gradually get worse. The austerity policies of the neoliberal turn has already caused standards of living among the less fortunate to drop over the last few decades already. The 2008 crisis is when it started to impact the middle class and we're still feeling the impacts 16+ years later.

barbazoo 2y ago
Now factor in the effects of climate change on many communities over the next decades. Maintaining our infrastructure i.e. lifestyle is going to be much much more expensive.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Minor correction: maintaining the lifestyle of billionaire coastal developers and their clientele will be much much more expensive. The poors will continue to be encouraged to eat shit and die as per usual.
  - valval 2y ago
    Yes, typically poor people’s contribution to the economy isn’t as great individually. Groundbreaking stuff.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      The cute thing there being they outnumber the big fish by something like 400,000 to 1 in the US and without them there is literally no economy and no billionaire class.
      - valval 2y ago
        Your take is as profound as claiming there’s no life without oxygen, but it serves very little actual utility in observing the world.
fallingknife 2y ago
There has been no austerity: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
- dlp211 2y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but that graph doesn't show anything with regards to whether or not middle-class folks have been hit with austerity. Federal outlays are not granular enough and increasing Federal outlays is pretty meaningless.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Austerity in the context of government means spending cuts. "We diverted the tax money to cronies instead of anything that benefits you and spending actually went up" is not austerity, it's corruption.
- User23 2y ago
  Austerity for thee, but not for me.
WalterBright 2y ago
Do you really think the explosion in government spending is the result of austerity?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hollerith 2y ago

What would the government spend the additional tax revenue on, in your conservative expection?

dymk 2y ago
Healthcare, school lunches, diversion programs, research grants
- nerdponx 2y ago
  (conts) infrastructure upkeep, managing various natural resources, emergency management, weather reporting/forecasting/research, economic reporting/research... There are so many valuable services provided by the US federal government. People just take it all for granted.
  - zb1plus 2y ago
    I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of putting undocumented immigrants who could be productive members of society in concentration camps or bombing brown people. Furthermore, I am happy to fund particular defense initiatives like supporting Ukraine, but I want a line item veto on unproductive or morally repugnant things the government does.
    - valval 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - Propelloni 2y ago
        > Supporting the war in Ukraine is just another example of “bombing brown people”, yet you appear completely oblivious. How? Russia invades the Ukraine. Ukraine defends itself. Ukraine's allies, incl. the USA, send weapons. None of the allies, incl. the USA, fight in Ukraine or Russia. I'm afraid your independent thinking has formed a prejudiced opinion. George Carlin would not be proud.

intended 2y ago

Please note - this is a more modern belief. Something that solidified in the zeitgeist post 2008. If you go to early Reddit, you will see it a staunchly pro market, anti tax stronghold - as was HN. For eons, “competition” was the mantra along with “greed is good”. Many people who own wealth reached there with that ethos. No one has to “contribute more”. That’s the opportunity for whichever bright eye person decides to take advantage of the gap in the market. If you want a counter to this dogma - 1) Yes. Market inefficiencies should be open as opportunities to the industrious 2) No. Not all market inefficiencies are the same. for example, Public goods (police, military) are not better off with multiple companies. Insurance is similar. 3) Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate. 4) “more regulation means higher compliance costs” was a new one I saw. Guess what - if your firm uses contracts, that’s a compliance cost. Why not just do it by a hand shake? Save your lawyer fees. Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. You can trade on your competitive advantage, not on the tertiary strengths, such as a firms ability to pay for a better legal team. Edit: Soap box - This is about Personal Responsibility. The place where most people agree today, is the desire for a fair fight. How can I reasonably defend the idea of personal responsibility, in something like the sale of NINJA loans. If firms field trained, resourced, networked sales people to sell loans to people who have a negligible chance of even understanding what they are getting into, then how do I reasonably bring up personal responsibility ? Can people reasonably be expected to read all the contracts they have signed? ( Netflix, Uber, gmail, phone, etc.) Algorithmic ads are fine tuned to grab your attention and keep you online. There is more money spent on UI UX research than the GDP of some global south countries. Forget America for a second - imagine how regulators in smaller economies handle these things. Heck, that’s if they even have time to worry about these things.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate. One of the big problems here, and the lobbyists do this on purpose, is that they promote the false notion that the issue is the quantity of regulations and not their substance. Quantity can be an issue when the number of regulations becomes excessive and their sheer number thwarts competition by creating high barriers to entry, but "incumbents want fewer regulations" is not only misleading but typically the opposite of what really happens. Incumbents want to get rid of regulations that protect competition and add regulations that inhibit it. What we need, of course, is the opposite. Which isn't as simple as "make number of regulations go up/down", it matters very much which ones and what they do. > Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. This is completely the opposite. Compliance costs are generally fixed costs, i.e. every entity has to hire a lawyer and pay them $250,000. For a megacorp this is negligible and they don't even notice, for a small business they're now out of the market because that amount of expense would bankrupt them. The more rules you have, the higher that number gets. This is the sense in which the absolute number of rules matters. But it still depends what they are. Even if you only have a couple of rules, the incumbents will want rules that only they can comply with. Conversely, you can hypothetically have a lot of rules and still have them easy to comply with, though this is certainly easier said than done. What you really want is to have a small number of rules, but the right rules -- the ones the incumbents don't want and their smaller competitors do.