4 ms·

For a starting premise, we might define "enough" as a balanced budget.

hackyhacky 1y ago
If a balanced budget is your goal, only two steps are required: reduce military spending, increase taxes. No need to cut research. In practice the current budget bill is wildly unbalanced and will vastly extend our debt, despite extensive cuts to important programs.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  We could zero out the military budget and that still doesn't get us anywhere close to balanced. Even cutting 100% of discretionary spending barely does the job. We either need massive cuts in mandatory spending (fundamental changes to social contract) or increased revenue (politically not viable). There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.
  - tokai 1y ago
    >increased revenue (politically not viable) Is that really true? Seems like its just an issue of how you frame it.
    - alistairSH 1y ago
      The party that controls all three branches of the federal government is pushing a budget that cuts taxes and increase the deficit. There has been zero talk from them about balancing the budget. And there likely won't be, because if they do, they won't be able to use it as a cudgel to beat the Democrats when party control eventually swings the other way.
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      This [1] is a graph of government receipts (basically all income for the government) over time. It has not only increased exponentially, but basically never decreased except during major economic crises. Yet somehow in that graph, we ended up more than $36 trillion dollars in debt. It makes it clear that the fundamental issue is not government revenue, but government spending. Every single time you give the government $1 they find a reason to spend $1.05. Why would you expect this to change if you give them $1.05, instead of them now just finding a reason to spend $1.10? I think that democracies are probably just fundamentally incapable of caring about long-term problems like debt when acting irresponsibly has substantial short-term benefits. It's almost like some spin on a tragedy of the commons. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGRECPT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGRECPT
  - hackyhacky 1y ago
    > There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy. The alternative is to pay an ever increasing amount of interest on our ever increasing debt. The other alternative is to default on our debt obligations. Neither option is good.
    - whatshisface 1y ago
      If you borrow at 3% to invest in an asset that yields 10%, you can increase your position forever and will be rewarded.
      - hackyhacky 1y ago
        Sure, but that is not what is happening. In reality, debt is increasing faster than GDP and interest represents a larger part of the budget. Do you think that's sustainable?
        whatshisface 1y ago
        It'll be even less sustainable if we cut investment spending in science in favor of uncapitalized spending.
  - borvo 1y ago
    There's some tipping point where it's too much. For example, when the interest on the debt >> defense spending. Agree it doesn't need to be fully balanced, debt is a useful tool.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    > There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy. I don't think this is really supportable. Obviously one can appeal to the practically endless examples of countries that destroyed their own economies with debt. Of course the obvious argument to this is that this hasn't happened to the US. But there were extremely unique, and liminal, circumstances that explain this, that a search on "exporting inflation" [1] can largely explain. And those days are mostly behind us. We can see this playing out in practice. Current interest payments on the debt are now $1.1 trillion per year. They've grown exponentially, far faster than the debt has. [2] The reason for this is that we can't just handwave away inflation so easily anymore, so we're now experiencing more like what would happen to other countries that let their money printers get a bit too excited. The Fed is keeping rates high in hopes of bringing inflation down, but it's just not really working. What this means is that when the government sells treasuries (which is how they 'print money') they need to offer ever higher interest rates. Notably even 20 year treasuries right now are offering yields of about 5%, so it seems most are not enthusiastic about things getting much better. I think we're well on our way to becoming another of history's cautionary tales that the next great power will also certainly think doesn't apply to them, because if something hasn't exploded in 50 years, that must mean it'll never explode. --- [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA
    - alistairSH 1y ago
      That's fair. I should have been more precise... There's little evidence we need to have a totally balanced budget every year. Current spending levels are likely unsustainable. Either way, we still can't balance the budget by only cutting discretionary spending - any serious discussion of a balanced budget MUST include the revenue side, plus possible changes to the social contract (IE, all the programs that just about everybody wants to keep).
  - nathan_compton 1y ago
    > politically not viable These three words are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting.
- bumby 1y ago
  >reduce military spending…No need to cut research You do know the military spend on research dwarfs any other federal agency, right? The DoD research budget is about 5X that of NASA. This gets to the point early where it’s easy to be in favor of cuts in the abstract but much harder in practice once you see that it touches something you favor.
  - qualeed 1y ago
    >You do know the military spend on research The charitable reading of parent's comment is "reduce the spending on the parts of the military that aren't research (or research solely dedicated to killing people)". I'm sure they were thinking more along the lines of bombing various countries (or $40MM birthday parades) rather than the next onion routing protocol coming out of the Naval Research Laboratory. You can still disagree with that, of course, but responding to the steelman version of someone's argument is much better than a snarky "You do know XYZ, right?".
    - bumby 1y ago
      That’s fair. My intent was not snark but to maybe spark some curiosity about what that military spend goes towards. But I think the OP could have framed it a little better to indicate they understood that nuance. Just like the budget cuts for NASA leave a considerable amount of research in place, it’s about priorities. The problem in many of these discussions is a lack of nuance: eg, not understanding the scope of what the DoD does, for example. The DoD spends as much as 15X as NASA on medical research, but the OP doesn’t acknowledge any of that with a overly generalized recommendation to simply cut defense spending. The difference is I’m not as confident as you to claim I know what they were thinking without further information. That’s why I framed it as a question.
- Whoppertime 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_U... Defense spending is 12% of the budget. Even if we cut every dime from defense we would still have 88% of the problem and be no closer to a balanced budget
nemomarx 1y ago
Raise taxes then.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Sorry I thought tariffs would result in our immediate destruction.
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    There are other kinds of taxes, you know. Or maybe you don't.
alistairSH 1y ago
We could cut 100% of discretionary spending and might just balance the budget. If you really want a balanced budget, you need to figure out how to slow the growth of mandatory spending and increase revenue. Neither of which Trump or the GOP seem interested in doing.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  Apparently somebody takes issue with my comment, so here's the CBO's own analysis for 2024[1]. Total Revenue: 4.9 trillion Mandatory Spending: 4.1 trillion Net Interest: 0.9 trillion Discretionary Spending: 1.8 trillion Yes, we could zero out discretionary spending and just barely eke out a balanced budget. We either need more revenue OR a complete reset on the social contract for a long-term balanced budget. 1 - https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185
jasonjayr 1y ago
That also assumes that a "balanced budget" is the best macro-economic policy for a country of our size.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  Another consideration would be the "Economic Calculation Problem", or our inability measure (price) the utility of state allocations of capital. The deficit is only one implication of the spending program. There are also the unseen factors when these funds are removed from the private sector, not just via taxation but also by comparative valuation of scarce resources. I.e. if there are 100 cement trucks in the economy and 95 are allocated for state projects, the private sector needs to produce additional cement trucks under the increased burden of taxation. In the near term, cement construction costs have been increased. From this point, perhaps another bureau will enter by nationalizing the cement truck industry, "To secure our vital national interests and remain competitive" Without decentralized market price signals, we are unable to value the end goals of the state's construction project. More troubling still, we wouldn't know of how the market may have allocated those trucks or if those trucks would have been used in a more productive way. However, we can observe empirical historical examples of lowered productivity which correlates with central planning.
e2le 1y ago
NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy. Hastily making cuts into programmes that generate significant economic and scientific value for your nation is a losers strategy. I'm sure it'll also have other deleterious effects on the economy such as brain drain which would be difficult to reverse. https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report
- timr 1y ago
  > NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy. Citation absolutely required. Amongst other things, NASA has set huge piles of money on fire (literally!) building a rocket program that should probably be shut down entirely. Now, whether or not these particular scientific programs are a net positive investment is a more subtle point that is certainly up for debate, but "NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy" is pure assertion. Speaking as someone who is generally pro-science -- to the point where I actually went out and got a PhD, in science -- we can't just assume that "science" is net beneficial to society. From direct experience, most science is just useless crap, and a lot of scientific funding is pure political patronage, dressed up in a white lab coat. I do think it's a situation where the line item is fairly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but in a world where the government is quickly going broke, hard choices must be made, and cutting this kind of stuff will also not be the end of science.
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    Here's a citation that says the ROI for NASA is 3x. https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report
    - timr 1y ago
      That’s not a study, that’s a report issued by NASA. You have to be painfully credulous to believe that that NASA would find anything to the contrary.
      - 1y ago

If a balanced budget is your goal, only two steps are required: reduce military spending, increase taxes. No need to cut research. In practice the current budget bill is wildly unbalanced and will vastly extend our debt, despite extensive cuts to important programs.

alistairSH 1y ago
We could zero out the military budget and that still doesn't get us anywhere close to balanced. Even cutting 100% of discretionary spending barely does the job. We either need massive cuts in mandatory spending (fundamental changes to social contract) or increased revenue (politically not viable). There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.
- tokai 1y ago
  >increased revenue (politically not viable) Is that really true? Seems like its just an issue of how you frame it.
  - alistairSH 1y ago
    The party that controls all three branches of the federal government is pushing a budget that cuts taxes and increase the deficit. There has been zero talk from them about balancing the budget. And there likely won't be, because if they do, they won't be able to use it as a cudgel to beat the Democrats when party control eventually swings the other way.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    This [1] is a graph of government receipts (basically all income for the government) over time. It has not only increased exponentially, but basically never decreased except during major economic crises. Yet somehow in that graph, we ended up more than $36 trillion dollars in debt. It makes it clear that the fundamental issue is not government revenue, but government spending. Every single time you give the government $1 they find a reason to spend $1.05. Why would you expect this to change if you give them $1.05, instead of them now just finding a reason to spend $1.10? I think that democracies are probably just fundamentally incapable of caring about long-term problems like debt when acting irresponsibly has substantial short-term benefits. It's almost like some spin on a tragedy of the commons. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGRECPT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGRECPT
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy. The alternative is to pay an ever increasing amount of interest on our ever increasing debt. The other alternative is to default on our debt obligations. Neither option is good.
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    If you borrow at 3% to invest in an asset that yields 10%, you can increase your position forever and will be rewarded.
    - hackyhacky 1y ago
      Sure, but that is not what is happening. In reality, debt is increasing faster than GDP and interest represents a larger part of the budget. Do you think that's sustainable?
      - whatshisface 1y ago
        It'll be even less sustainable if we cut investment spending in science in favor of uncapitalized spending.
- borvo 1y ago
  There's some tipping point where it's too much. For example, when the interest on the debt >> defense spending. Agree it doesn't need to be fully balanced, debt is a useful tool.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  > There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy. I don't think this is really supportable. Obviously one can appeal to the practically endless examples of countries that destroyed their own economies with debt. Of course the obvious argument to this is that this hasn't happened to the US. But there were extremely unique, and liminal, circumstances that explain this, that a search on "exporting inflation" [1] can largely explain. And those days are mostly behind us. We can see this playing out in practice. Current interest payments on the debt are now $1.1 trillion per year. They've grown exponentially, far faster than the debt has. [2] The reason for this is that we can't just handwave away inflation so easily anymore, so we're now experiencing more like what would happen to other countries that let their money printers get a bit too excited. The Fed is keeping rates high in hopes of bringing inflation down, but it's just not really working. What this means is that when the government sells treasuries (which is how they 'print money') they need to offer ever higher interest rates. Notably even 20 year treasuries right now are offering yields of about 5%, so it seems most are not enthusiastic about things getting much better. I think we're well on our way to becoming another of history's cautionary tales that the next great power will also certainly think doesn't apply to them, because if something hasn't exploded in 50 years, that must mean it'll never explode. --- [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA
  - alistairSH 1y ago
    That's fair. I should have been more precise... There's little evidence we need to have a totally balanced budget every year. Current spending levels are likely unsustainable. Either way, we still can't balance the budget by only cutting discretionary spending - any serious discussion of a balanced budget MUST include the revenue side, plus possible changes to the social contract (IE, all the programs that just about everybody wants to keep).
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  > politically not viable These three words are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting.
bumby 1y ago
>reduce military spending…No need to cut research You do know the military spend on research dwarfs any other federal agency, right? The DoD research budget is about 5X that of NASA. This gets to the point early where it’s easy to be in favor of cuts in the abstract but much harder in practice once you see that it touches something you favor.
- qualeed 1y ago
  >You do know the military spend on research The charitable reading of parent's comment is "reduce the spending on the parts of the military that aren't research (or research solely dedicated to killing people)". I'm sure they were thinking more along the lines of bombing various countries (or $40MM birthday parades) rather than the next onion routing protocol coming out of the Naval Research Laboratory. You can still disagree with that, of course, but responding to the steelman version of someone's argument is much better than a snarky "You do know XYZ, right?".
  - bumby 1y ago
    That’s fair. My intent was not snark but to maybe spark some curiosity about what that military spend goes towards. But I think the OP could have framed it a little better to indicate they understood that nuance. Just like the budget cuts for NASA leave a considerable amount of research in place, it’s about priorities. The problem in many of these discussions is a lack of nuance: eg, not understanding the scope of what the DoD does, for example. The DoD spends as much as 15X as NASA on medical research, but the OP doesn’t acknowledge any of that with a overly generalized recommendation to simply cut defense spending. The difference is I’m not as confident as you to claim I know what they were thinking without further information. That’s why I framed it as a question.
Whoppertime 1y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_U... Defense spending is 12% of the budget. Even if we cut every dime from defense we would still have 88% of the problem and be no closer to a balanced budget

nemomarx 1y ago

Raise taxes then.

msgodel 1y ago
Sorry I thought tariffs would result in our immediate destruction.
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  There are other kinds of taxes, you know. Or maybe you don't.

alistairSH 1y ago

We could cut 100% of discretionary spending and might just balance the budget. If you really want a balanced budget, you need to figure out how to slow the growth of mandatory spending and increase revenue. Neither of which Trump or the GOP seem interested in doing.

alistairSH 1y ago
Apparently somebody takes issue with my comment, so here's the CBO's own analysis for 2024[1]. Total Revenue: 4.9 trillion Mandatory Spending: 4.1 trillion Net Interest: 0.9 trillion Discretionary Spending: 1.8 trillion Yes, we could zero out discretionary spending and just barely eke out a balanced budget. We either need more revenue OR a complete reset on the social contract for a long-term balanced budget. 1 - https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185

jasonjayr 1y ago

That also assumes that a "balanced budget" is the best macro-economic policy for a country of our size.

palmfacehn 1y ago
Another consideration would be the "Economic Calculation Problem", or our inability measure (price) the utility of state allocations of capital. The deficit is only one implication of the spending program. There are also the unseen factors when these funds are removed from the private sector, not just via taxation but also by comparative valuation of scarce resources. I.e. if there are 100 cement trucks in the economy and 95 are allocated for state projects, the private sector needs to produce additional cement trucks under the increased burden of taxation. In the near term, cement construction costs have been increased. From this point, perhaps another bureau will enter by nationalizing the cement truck industry, "To secure our vital national interests and remain competitive" Without decentralized market price signals, we are unable to value the end goals of the state's construction project. More troubling still, we wouldn't know of how the market may have allocated those trucks or if those trucks would have been used in a more productive way. However, we can observe empirical historical examples of lowered productivity which correlates with central planning.

e2le 1y ago

NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy. Hastily making cuts into programmes that generate significant economic and scientific value for your nation is a losers strategy. I'm sure it'll also have other deleterious effects on the economy such as brain drain which would be difficult to reverse. https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report

timr 1y ago
> NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy. Citation absolutely required. Amongst other things, NASA has set huge piles of money on fire (literally!) building a rocket program that should probably be shut down entirely. Now, whether or not these particular scientific programs are a net positive investment is a more subtle point that is certainly up for debate, but "NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy" is pure assertion. Speaking as someone who is generally pro-science -- to the point where I actually went out and got a PhD, in science -- we can't just assume that "science" is net beneficial to society. From direct experience, most science is just useless crap, and a lot of scientific funding is pure political patronage, dressed up in a white lab coat. I do think it's a situation where the line item is fairly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but in a world where the government is quickly going broke, hard choices must be made, and cutting this kind of stuff will also not be the end of science.
- whatshisface 1y ago
  Here's a citation that says the ROI for NASA is 3x. https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report
  - timr 1y ago
    That’s not a study, that’s a report issued by NASA. You have to be painfully credulous to believe that that NASA would find anything to the contrary.
    - 1y ago