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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 defic

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.

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.