7 ms·

Steve Ballmer: facts on the US federal budget [video]

Danchristensen 2y ago
[dead]
ccvannorman 2y ago
This struck me from two angles: First, it's beautiful, well produced, clear, and concise representation of the federal budget including key areas like the deficit and spending breakdowns. However, it also struck me as "useless", in the sense of "I found it difficult to take away any useful, new, or actionable information". I'm not sure what Ballmer's intended audience or result was, but it must not've been me ... Personally I would have benefited from less "moving flashy graphs" / "Steve explaining each node in moderate detail", and more "Here's one clean boring way to look at the data", "here's what X means for us / here's what people are considering because of X." That said I respect what's being done and hope he continues to produce more informational content!
- SllX 2y ago
  It gives people a baseline for where to start in any discussions regarding the Federal budget, whether that’s immediately actionable, it is useful to have the vocabulary to discuss the budget if you’re going to talk about it at all. I’m occasionally having to correct people who believe and are insistent that our largest ticket spending item is the Military. It’s certainly the largest part of our discretionary budget, but if you’re going to talk about the Federal budget, it is unhelpful to disregard the non-discretionary budget that goes mostly into Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and giving people an education on discretionary vs non-discretionary spending drags out conversations; then it’s a coin toss if that person retains any of that the next time you talk politics, or if it got muddled up in their minds by poor news reporting in-between, the news they follow to “stay informed”.
- conductr 2y ago
  It’s because he presented what could have been a single chart and did so by basically just reading the data. There was no analysis other than the tidbits about debt to GDP being at a high point. That said, great production and I hope it reaches people less familiar with these budgetary line items. If you’re aware what they are, like I am, it landed pretty flat but if you’re not familiar with them I could see it being quite informative. It’s good to build a baseline of financial literacy that I think we also have a general deficit of too.
kube-system 2y ago
At first I was hopeful about the "just facts" content, but once he started making comparisons between government budgets and household budgets, I had to roll my eyes. This is a very misleading way to represent the US government's financial standing. The US government doesn't have to save for retirement, it doesn't doesn't have a lifespan, and it is in a unique position to manipulate economic markets (and ultimately even the use of force) regarding its own debt. The insinuation that government deficit spending is analogous to household deficit spending is misleading. A typical response it elicits is "well how are we ever going to pay that off?!" because people compare it to their own debt. But we're not talking about credit card debt or a car note here, we're talking about issuing treasury bonds.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  In addition, no households issue their own sovereign currency, let alone one used as a reserve currency by a majority of the world.
- wormius 2y ago
  Jesus Christ, he does that? One would think someone of his stature had a better intelligence about that sorta thing, but I guess he just wants to do more propaganda for tax cuts. The second I hear someone make that comparison, I tap out... Well I give em a few to explain why it's not accurate. Then I tap out if the explanation of why it's a bad comparison isn't forthcoming. Shame.
- rpdillon 2y ago
  Do you see the $35 trillion in debt as a problem? How do you think it's going to be resolved? When I see folks habitually complaining about how much the US spend on their military, and then I look at the actual budget and see that they are actually spending more to service their debt than they do on the military, I wonder what the end game is.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    > resolved My entire comment above was to argue that "resolving" the debt is nonsensical. The answer to when the debt needs to be paid off is: never. The government can issue more debt indefinitely. In fact, "paying off the debt" implies the government would stop selling treasuries, which is entirely more scary than the debt. > I wonder what the end game is. There is no end game, ideally, the US wants the US to continue to exist, and continue to fund the things that improve conditions for their citizens. Believe it or not, the single largest holder of US government debt is... the US government itself. And 77.1% of the entire debt is owed to domestic US entities. The US debt is mostly Americans voluntarily financing their own government. This situation isn't something to "resolve", it is entirely okay. Debt to GDP does need to be within some reasonable bounds, but as long as our economy can support the debt, there's no reason to get rid of it, and many reasons not to.
which 2y ago
Highly recommend anyone who cares about this to do the CRFB’s Debt Fixer: https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer In this simulation you have to make choices to bring debt to 100% of GDP by 2034. For the most part you learn that discretionary spending is largely irrelevant though has modest room for improvement in military/federal employee benefits, payroll tax rate needs to go up and probably apply to all income, most of the TCJA needs to expire, and Medicare needs to be more efficient. Which all hit politically important constituencies in different ways so nothing will get done. Obama should have done the deal with Boehner and there would have been fewer hard choices to make!
- unethical_ban 2y ago
  Hm, I'm wondering why "paid family leave" is listed as if anyone is suggesting the government pay for it. When I have heard discussion of paid leave, it's always been "mandate companies provide it", not "federal government pays a stipend". In "Build and support affordable housing", it lists a large increase in debt. Does that calculation take into account likely savings for local and state entities and hospitals? I get it's a federal calculator, but it feels somewhat myopic. I guess the same could be said by a military hawk, who may assert "Sure, cut spending by $450B in ten years, but World War 3 will cost $10T!"
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > Hm, I'm wondering why "paid family leave" is listed as if anyone is suggesting the government pay for it. This vaguely reminds me of that classic "Americans will eventually do the right thing after thoroughly exploring all the alternatives" quote. The issue, at the highest level, is that the political process has agreed how much redistribution needs to happen and how much taxation is reasonable. The two numbers don't match, the situation is impossible to sustain and needs to be renegotiated - either more taxation or less redistributing. It doesn't really matter if the redistributing is officially handled via the government or forced to happen as a direct payment from taxee to welfare recipient. That is still settling the negotiation by saying that the taxpayers need to pay more. It is a little less administratively efficient to officially route it through the government but frankly I think that is a better idea. The US political consensus seems to be heading towards "we'll settle this by raising taxes, but we'll do it through payroll, inflation and corporate tax to try and disguise who is paying". That is a lousy strategy that will result in people getting poorer, not understanding why and lashing out randomly because they can sense at some level that they are worse off.
zelifcam 2y ago
I thought Jon Stewart did a good job this week of kindly exposing how he’s (unintentionally?) pushing misleading conclusions hiding behind his “I’m just reporting the numbers” speak.
- redserk 2y ago
  Yeah, I don’t think it’s even possible to have an objectively unbiased reporting of this. The moment you have to simplify any information, you’re introducing bias. For example, I wasn’t a fan of how the income tax bracket levels were chosen —- $150k doesn’t go that far in a lot of HCOL/VHCOL areas. That said, I think these videos do a decent high level overview and have led me to search for more information, especially on immigration. I think this project is most effective when used as a starting point for further research.
shove 2y ago
It was a lot more objective than I anticipated, but if you know how to look at such things, the propaganda is definitely in there.
ks2048 2y ago
[flagged]
- seneca 2y ago
  Are you disputing something he's saying in this video? It's all just statements of facts, he's not sharing opinions beyond "there's a debt problem" and "we should support veterans".
  - Clubber 2y ago
    It's statements of selective facts. He ignores all the tax loopholes people like him get. He focuses just on federal income tax (what rich people pay) and ignores (mostly) payroll tax, sales tax, gas tax, etc, which regular people pay. He focuses on what the top 1% pay in regard of federal income taxes, and the listener is supposed to ignore that having such a concentration of wealth is crippling to most people (and tax income in general). Also, he seems to focus highly on SS and Medicaid, which means he's leading the listener in identifying those as what to cut. When he mentions military spending, he minimizes it and hand waves it off as necessary (MS gets a lot of money from military contracts). He neglects to mention that SS tax is hard capped at around $168K or so and he pays relatively nothing into that system. He doesn't mention tariffs, which would go a long way to fund government. The US government was completely funded by tariffs for quite a long time. Assigning a tariff on, say offshore labor, would fund a lot of government, but it would make Ballmer's portfolio not grow as fast, etc, because MS would have to pay more for offshore talent. It's largely a propaganda piece trying to lead the listener into agreeing to cut SS and Medicaid, which of course would be even more devastating to anyone not in the top 1 or 2%. It's pretty disgusting actually. Fuck that guy. DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! (a pun on DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!)
gizmo 2y ago
[flagged]
- missedthecue 2y ago
  "Microsoft's stock stagnated for more than a decade after Ballmer got appointed CEO." Unfair thing to measure him by in my opinion. Steve Ballmer inherited Microsoft when the stock traded at a P/E of 60. When he left it was 14, in line with many other tech stocks during that time. (Even Apple was lower) He took earnings per share went from $0.70 to $2.63 during his tenure. A CAGR of 10.5% across 13 years in one of the world's biggest companies. He couldn't control multiple compression following the dotcom bust. Also his huge bet on cloud revolutioned everything and turned Microsoft into a powerhouse. Also I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the video. He is basically stating indisputable math and government stats. The only thing to disagree with would be that you want a bigger deficit.
- amanzi 2y ago
  Agree - I get very sceptical when someone presents "just the facts". Facts can easily be presented in a way that distorts reality and paints a false narrative. Similar to the age-old issue of correlation vs causation, facts can be presented in a way that implies a narrative, without even needing to spell it out. (disclaimer - I haven't watched Ballmer's video, I'm just commenting in general about "facts")
dventimi 2y ago
I stopped watching at the 12:30 mark.
mihaic 2y ago
So the US borrows annually around $1.6T and pays in interest almost $0.7T. That means that it's burning $0.7T yearly to increase the debt by a trillion? And the entire amount of taxes collected from corporations is less than two thirds of the interest? I learned more than I was expecting from this.

[dead]

This struck me from two angles: First, it's beautiful, well produced, clear, and concise representation of the federal budget including key areas like the deficit and spending breakdowns. However, it also struck me as "useless", in the sense of "I found it difficult to take away any useful, new, or actionable information". I'm not sure what Ballmer's intended audience or result was, but it must not've been me ... Personally I would have benefited from less "moving flashy graphs" / "Steve explaining each node in moderate detail", and more "Here's one clean boring way to look at the data", "here's what X means for us / here's what people are considering because of X." That said I respect what's being done and hope he continues to produce more informational content!

SllX 2y ago
It gives people a baseline for where to start in any discussions regarding the Federal budget, whether that’s immediately actionable, it is useful to have the vocabulary to discuss the budget if you’re going to talk about it at all. I’m occasionally having to correct people who believe and are insistent that our largest ticket spending item is the Military. It’s certainly the largest part of our discretionary budget, but if you’re going to talk about the Federal budget, it is unhelpful to disregard the non-discretionary budget that goes mostly into Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and giving people an education on discretionary vs non-discretionary spending drags out conversations; then it’s a coin toss if that person retains any of that the next time you talk politics, or if it got muddled up in their minds by poor news reporting in-between, the news they follow to “stay informed”.
conductr 2y ago
It’s because he presented what could have been a single chart and did so by basically just reading the data. There was no analysis other than the tidbits about debt to GDP being at a high point. That said, great production and I hope it reaches people less familiar with these budgetary line items. If you’re aware what they are, like I am, it landed pretty flat but if you’re not familiar with them I could see it being quite informative. It’s good to build a baseline of financial literacy that I think we also have a general deficit of too.

kube-system 2y ago

At first I was hopeful about the "just facts" content, but once he started making comparisons between government budgets and household budgets, I had to roll my eyes. This is a very misleading way to represent the US government's financial standing. The US government doesn't have to save for retirement, it doesn't doesn't have a lifespan, and it is in a unique position to manipulate economic markets (and ultimately even the use of force) regarding its own debt. The insinuation that government deficit spending is analogous to household deficit spending is misleading. A typical response it elicits is "well how are we ever going to pay that off?!" because people compare it to their own debt. But we're not talking about credit card debt or a car note here, we're talking about issuing treasury bonds.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
In addition, no households issue their own sovereign currency, let alone one used as a reserve currency by a majority of the world.
wormius 2y ago
Jesus Christ, he does that? One would think someone of his stature had a better intelligence about that sorta thing, but I guess he just wants to do more propaganda for tax cuts. The second I hear someone make that comparison, I tap out... Well I give em a few to explain why it's not accurate. Then I tap out if the explanation of why it's a bad comparison isn't forthcoming. Shame.
rpdillon 2y ago
Do you see the $35 trillion in debt as a problem? How do you think it's going to be resolved? When I see folks habitually complaining about how much the US spend on their military, and then I look at the actual budget and see that they are actually spending more to service their debt than they do on the military, I wonder what the end game is.
- kube-system 2y ago
  > resolved My entire comment above was to argue that "resolving" the debt is nonsensical. The answer to when the debt needs to be paid off is: never. The government can issue more debt indefinitely. In fact, "paying off the debt" implies the government would stop selling treasuries, which is entirely more scary than the debt. > I wonder what the end game is. There is no end game, ideally, the US wants the US to continue to exist, and continue to fund the things that improve conditions for their citizens. Believe it or not, the single largest holder of US government debt is... the US government itself. And 77.1% of the entire debt is owed to domestic US entities. The US debt is mostly Americans voluntarily financing their own government. This situation isn't something to "resolve", it is entirely okay. Debt to GDP does need to be within some reasonable bounds, but as long as our economy can support the debt, there's no reason to get rid of it, and many reasons not to.

which 2y ago

Highly recommend anyone who cares about this to do the CRFB’s Debt Fixer: https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer In this simulation you have to make choices to bring debt to 100% of GDP by 2034. For the most part you learn that discretionary spending is largely irrelevant though has modest room for improvement in military/federal employee benefits, payroll tax rate needs to go up and probably apply to all income, most of the TCJA needs to expire, and Medicare needs to be more efficient. Which all hit politically important constituencies in different ways so nothing will get done. Obama should have done the deal with Boehner and there would have been fewer hard choices to make!

unethical_ban 2y ago
Hm, I'm wondering why "paid family leave" is listed as if anyone is suggesting the government pay for it. When I have heard discussion of paid leave, it's always been "mandate companies provide it", not "federal government pays a stipend". In "Build and support affordable housing", it lists a large increase in debt. Does that calculation take into account likely savings for local and state entities and hospitals? I get it's a federal calculator, but it feels somewhat myopic. I guess the same could be said by a military hawk, who may assert "Sure, cut spending by $450B in ten years, but World War 3 will cost $10T!"
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Hm, I'm wondering why "paid family leave" is listed as if anyone is suggesting the government pay for it. This vaguely reminds me of that classic "Americans will eventually do the right thing after thoroughly exploring all the alternatives" quote. The issue, at the highest level, is that the political process has agreed how much redistribution needs to happen and how much taxation is reasonable. The two numbers don't match, the situation is impossible to sustain and needs to be renegotiated - either more taxation or less redistributing. It doesn't really matter if the redistributing is officially handled via the government or forced to happen as a direct payment from taxee to welfare recipient. That is still settling the negotiation by saying that the taxpayers need to pay more. It is a little less administratively efficient to officially route it through the government but frankly I think that is a better idea. The US political consensus seems to be heading towards "we'll settle this by raising taxes, but we'll do it through payroll, inflation and corporate tax to try and disguise who is paying". That is a lousy strategy that will result in people getting poorer, not understanding why and lashing out randomly because they can sense at some level that they are worse off.

zelifcam 2y ago

I thought Jon Stewart did a good job this week of kindly exposing how he’s (unintentionally?) pushing misleading conclusions hiding behind his “I’m just reporting the numbers” speak.

redserk 2y ago
Yeah, I don’t think it’s even possible to have an objectively unbiased reporting of this. The moment you have to simplify any information, you’re introducing bias. For example, I wasn’t a fan of how the income tax bracket levels were chosen —- $150k doesn’t go that far in a lot of HCOL/VHCOL areas. That said, I think these videos do a decent high level overview and have led me to search for more information, especially on immigration. I think this project is most effective when used as a starting point for further research.

shove 2y ago

It was a lot more objective than I anticipated, but if you know how to look at such things, the propaganda is definitely in there.

ks2048 2y ago

[flagged]

seneca 2y ago
Are you disputing something he's saying in this video? It's all just statements of facts, he's not sharing opinions beyond "there's a debt problem" and "we should support veterans".
- Clubber 2y ago
  It's statements of selective facts. He ignores all the tax loopholes people like him get. He focuses just on federal income tax (what rich people pay) and ignores (mostly) payroll tax, sales tax, gas tax, etc, which regular people pay. He focuses on what the top 1% pay in regard of federal income taxes, and the listener is supposed to ignore that having such a concentration of wealth is crippling to most people (and tax income in general). Also, he seems to focus highly on SS and Medicaid, which means he's leading the listener in identifying those as what to cut. When he mentions military spending, he minimizes it and hand waves it off as necessary (MS gets a lot of money from military contracts). He neglects to mention that SS tax is hard capped at around $168K or so and he pays relatively nothing into that system. He doesn't mention tariffs, which would go a long way to fund government. The US government was completely funded by tariffs for quite a long time. Assigning a tariff on, say offshore labor, would fund a lot of government, but it would make Ballmer's portfolio not grow as fast, etc, because MS would have to pay more for offshore talent. It's largely a propaganda piece trying to lead the listener into agreeing to cut SS and Medicaid, which of course would be even more devastating to anyone not in the top 1 or 2%. It's pretty disgusting actually. Fuck that guy. DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! DEFICITS! (a pun on DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!)

gizmo 2y ago

[flagged]

missedthecue 2y ago
"Microsoft's stock stagnated for more than a decade after Ballmer got appointed CEO." Unfair thing to measure him by in my opinion. Steve Ballmer inherited Microsoft when the stock traded at a P/E of 60. When he left it was 14, in line with many other tech stocks during that time. (Even Apple was lower) He took earnings per share went from $0.70 to $2.63 during his tenure. A CAGR of 10.5% across 13 years in one of the world's biggest companies. He couldn't control multiple compression following the dotcom bust. Also his huge bet on cloud revolutioned everything and turned Microsoft into a powerhouse. Also I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the video. He is basically stating indisputable math and government stats. The only thing to disagree with would be that you want a bigger deficit.
amanzi 2y ago
Agree - I get very sceptical when someone presents "just the facts". Facts can easily be presented in a way that distorts reality and paints a false narrative. Similar to the age-old issue of correlation vs causation, facts can be presented in a way that implies a narrative, without even needing to spell it out. (disclaimer - I haven't watched Ballmer's video, I'm just commenting in general about "facts")

dventimi 2y ago

I stopped watching at the 12:30 mark.

mihaic 2y ago

So the US borrows annually around $1.6T and pays in interest almost $0.7T. That means that it's burning $0.7T yearly to increase the debt by a trillion? And the entire amount of taxes collected from corporations is less than two thirds of the interest? I learned more than I was expecting from this.