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I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. Except political pork like price supports for large indus

I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. Except political pork like price supports for large industrial farmers in the Midwest. ;-)

tomrod 1y ago
For certain industries, there are reasonable arguments to be made to keep domestic and support via price controls. Food at a high level, yes. Pork specifically, no. (I know you didn't mean literal pork, but thinking through the spectrum here).
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  Would something like mandating a significant amount of ethanol (from corn) in gasoline be an effective way to so this?
  - tomrod 1y ago
    No. Subsidizing production of next gen/green energy production and grid operations, yes.
    - DamonHD 1y ago
      By about 30x to 100x per acre (PV vs ethanol)... https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2501605122 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
      - tomrod 1y ago
        Hear hear.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
pstuart 1y ago
It can be, when it's invested in butter rather than guns. Yes, military investments have paid off in new technologies (e.g., Arpanet) but as a whole only reward the owners of the Military Industrial Complex.
- laverya 1y ago
  Yeah except for arpanet, GPS, satellites in general, jet engines, composites, computers, and everything that came from there... What has military r&d ever done for us?
  - convolvatron 1y ago
    this is not at all simple. part of that causality is that fundamental research money was channeled through the military, because that was politically acceptable. is there a particularly good reason why DOE and DOD funding of university research is higher than NSF? and its pretty easily to cleave off defense spending for basic research performed by universities from the more applied R&D that defense contractors do, much of that from the black budget. this is a place where every visitor leaves shaking their heads at the overt corruption and waste. but its necessary to have such programs in general to support our common goal of self-autonomy as a nation. so if we're going to serious as a democratic political body about trying to get the most value from our tax money, we can't really can't fixate on reductionist statements that assert that defense or social support money is an unalloyed bad or good. we really need better transparency and to actually dig into the details.
- toss1 1y ago
  Of course, nevermind that we may need to defend ourselves and/or our allies against exoansionist autocratic aggressors like Russia (see Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Baltics and explicit threats against Poland, Germany, England, & US), China (what happens to the tech industry every Taiwan goes up in smoke?), Iran, etc. Fukyima (sp?) was right about the end of history sort of happening when all countries of the world embrace liberal democracy, but he was very wrong that we are anywhere near that point. Until then, only strength will deter or oppose the aggressors.
xpe 1y ago
> I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. "Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated. This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean. Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.
- kenjackson 1y ago
  This is good. Although I’d make it a 4-tuple to make “target” clear. There are two aspects to target: “where is the impact on the return” and “where is the cost of the investment”.
ModernMech 1y ago
It depends what your investment strategy is. If your goal is to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, then government spending is a good idea. But some people would rather all boats not be lifted. They'd just like to lift some boats, but sink others. Still, other people would prefer to sink as many boats as possible while being in control of the remaining boats that float. For people who fit into those later categories, government spending is not a good ROI. As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs. Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".

I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. Except political pork like price supports for large industrial farmers in the Midwest. ;-)

tomrod 1y ago

For certain industries, there are reasonable arguments to be made to keep domestic and support via price controls. Food at a high level, yes. Pork specifically, no. (I know you didn't mean literal pork, but thinking through the spectrum here).

tbrownaw 1y ago
Would something like mandating a significant amount of ethanol (from corn) in gasoline be an effective way to so this?
- tomrod 1y ago
  No. Subsidizing production of next gen/green energy production and grid operations, yes.
  - DamonHD 1y ago
    By about 30x to 100x per acre (PV vs ethanol)... https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2501605122 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
    - tomrod 1y ago
      Hear hear.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

pstuart 1y ago

It can be, when it's invested in butter rather than guns. Yes, military investments have paid off in new technologies (e.g., Arpanet) but as a whole only reward the owners of the Military Industrial Complex.

laverya 1y ago
Yeah except for arpanet, GPS, satellites in general, jet engines, composites, computers, and everything that came from there... What has military r&d ever done for us?
- convolvatron 1y ago
  this is not at all simple. part of that causality is that fundamental research money was channeled through the military, because that was politically acceptable. is there a particularly good reason why DOE and DOD funding of university research is higher than NSF? and its pretty easily to cleave off defense spending for basic research performed by universities from the more applied R&D that defense contractors do, much of that from the black budget. this is a place where every visitor leaves shaking their heads at the overt corruption and waste. but its necessary to have such programs in general to support our common goal of self-autonomy as a nation. so if we're going to serious as a democratic political body about trying to get the most value from our tax money, we can't really can't fixate on reductionist statements that assert that defense or social support money is an unalloyed bad or good. we really need better transparency and to actually dig into the details.
toss1 1y ago
Of course, nevermind that we may need to defend ourselves and/or our allies against exoansionist autocratic aggressors like Russia (see Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Baltics and explicit threats against Poland, Germany, England, & US), China (what happens to the tech industry every Taiwan goes up in smoke?), Iran, etc. Fukyima (sp?) was right about the end of history sort of happening when all countries of the world embrace liberal democracy, but he was very wrong that we are anywhere near that point. Until then, only strength will deter or oppose the aggressors.

xpe 1y ago

> I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. "Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated. This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean. Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.

kenjackson 1y ago
This is good. Although I’d make it a 4-tuple to make “target” clear. There are two aspects to target: “where is the impact on the return” and “where is the cost of the investment”.

ModernMech 1y ago

It depends what your investment strategy is. If your goal is to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, then government spending is a good idea. But some people would rather all boats not be lifted. They'd just like to lift some boats, but sink others. Still, other people would prefer to sink as many boats as possible while being in control of the remaining boats that float. For people who fit into those later categories, government spending is not a good ROI. As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs. Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".