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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 budg

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

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