Do I agree with everything Elon Musk is doing with DOGE? Absolutely not. Is something like what he is doing necessary at this point? Yes.
Our various federal entitlement programs are the largest single line items of the U.S. federal budget. Over a decade ago when I first became aware of the problem in college, the net present value of the unfunded liabilities of our federal entitlement programs was estimated to be about $100 trillion, which may or may not have been a conservative (as in understated) estimate. This problem has not gotten any better. For clarification: Net present value or NPV means what we would have to invest right now to take care of an issue. $100 trillion is several times the annual GDP of the United States. Are you starting to see the problem?
Whenever someone talks about cutting federal spending, they’re usually not serious. They merely manage the decline by cutting the increase in spending, not meaningfully actually cutting spending itself. Oh, a 4% increase in the budget instead of 6%; I’m so thrifty and frugal!! Like when Pelosi claimed during sequestration that $11 million was about all the spending cuts she could muster, saying she had cut the federal government to the bone. Liar. The other canard that gets bandied about, including by Donald Trump right now, is that all spending cuts will target “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Without anyone ever defining what any of those words even mean and rarely actually meaningfully going after fraud.
Obama, who dragged this line out a lot, oversaw a massive expansion in the Social Security disability numbers. His administration, at the near start of the recession kicked off by the housing bust and financial collapse of fall 2008 (that all but guaranteed he would win the White House a couple months later,) decided to approve virtually every disability claim that came in. Leading to some truly ridiculous people claiming lifelong disability, in that they could not hold down a job even with reasonable accommodations. Like the man who dressed up as a baby at home but as an adult outside of it. When an investigative reporter spotlighted him and led to his disability income being shut off to the embarrassment of everyone, he threatened to kill himself.
Which brings us to what I call the Puppy Stomping Fallacy. Whenever spending is cut, whether it be USAID or the Department of Education, the people who have a vested interest in the money spigot never getting shut off (like NGOs) find something, however small, that is a good thing that will no longer be receiving federal funding and claim the cutters lack basic humanity and empathy. As if every good thing must be paid for by the US taxpayer forever and ever and always. The scope and size of the federal government has ballooned so much over the last century in a way that is getting more and more unsustainable. And we have to start somewhere to get these deficits and debt under control. Throwing everything, absolutely everything, onto the cutting room floor is what private businesses do on the verge of or after declaring bankruptcy. While the federal government does not have a profit motive, it does have a finite amount of resources. Money isn’t infinite. Because printing money, for instance, causes bad things when left on autopilot. Just like jacking up taxes ridiculously would have negative consequences. We have already seen some of these consequences in the form of inflation, stagnation, and stagflation.
To bring up an example from the last paragraph, the U.S. Department of Education was created under the Carter Administration and recognized a problem: Education outcomes in America had fallen over the past few decades preceding its creation. What it didn’t do is meaningfully solve the problem. Education standards fell, education outcomes continued to fall, and education just got ridiculously more expensive while continuing to get worse. The pandemic exacerbated all of these issues. The problems with pre-collegiate education in America are legion. The biggest one is that the largest lobbying organizations for it don’t give two big dumpies about the students and whether they are actually learning anything meaningful for their eventual adult lives. The teachers’ unions, who care about union dues and teachers’ salaries and benefits. But mostly the union dues. Which allow them to spend so much money buying off the politicians that negotiate their massive union contracts. Big conflict of interest there, of course. And there exist very few solutions to unfornicate this equine. But kneecapping the influence of the teachers’ unions would be a start. How you do that without causing Hell screams from the people who currently benefit from the arrangement, I don’t know. Somebody is going to have to lose here. And I’d rather it be the corrupt union bosses and the politicians who feed them in a vicious cycle of graft and bovine feces and not the students and parents.
Thirteen percent of the annual U.S. federal budget is merely interest on our debt. As we continue to deficit spend like it’s going out of style, stacking up more and more debt every single year. That gravy train will end eventually. Just like Social Security and Medicare will implode eventually, leaving us few options to deal with the problem when that happens. We do virtually zero actual debt service. What happens when the various awful regimes the world over, at least one of which buys a whole lot of our debt on an annual basis, decide that it isn’t worth it anymore? When China decides that its currency should become the new reserve currency for the world? Nothing good.
What are the solutions as of now? Raising taxes and cutting spending. I am philosophically against tax increases as a general principle. Milton Friedman once described tax cuts as cutting the government’s allowance. The government has no real money of its own. It either prints money, which devalues the world’s reserve currency, or takes money from its (hopefully productive) citizens. But some tax increases are likely necessary at this juncture. We pretty much have to raise payroll taxes to deal with Social Security and Medicare at some point. Those are the taxes that are supposed to pay for them, but every surplus in them in the last forty odd years has been raided by the federal government to pay for something else, leaving the fund with a bajillion IOUs that have never been repaid. The money has to come from somewhere as more and more Baby Boomers retire and the worker to retiree ratio gets closer and closer to one. If we raise payroll taxes too much, the workers getting it up the rear will revolt and start a likely very bad intergenerational civil war that the Baby Boomers probably won’t win what with their relative frailty. Although they do have most of the wealth…
Having a lot more babies would help, but not before either program implodes, too little too late. Importing a lot of immigrants might help, but illegal immigrants aren’t going to be solving our payroll tax deficit issue. If they even pay income taxes, they are breaking the law by earning a paycheck in America at all (in most cases.) Legal immigrants can help, but the industries we badly need, like doctors and nurses, have lobbying organizations that prevent us from just importing doctors or other such professionals from other countries through profligate licensing restrictions. We could have set both Medicare and Social Security to taper the age of benefit eligibility to life expectancy, but also too late on that one for the current problem. And no one is truly talking about going after Social Security and Medicare anyway, especially benefits for current and soon-to-be retirees. And then there’s the H1B visa abuse where tech companies, for instance, import foreign workers in order to pay them less than American workers in industries that are not starved at all for workers.
So many problems that no cares to truly fix. I’ll just continue to be Cassandra, fiddling while Rome burns.
Eat at Arby’s.
So want it all burned down. You offer no real solutions to the problems you identify. And you remain convinced that federal civil servants – doing what congress told them to do – need to suffer as a consequence. Got it.
In other words nothing new. Move on people.Report
I offered plenty.Report
Imagine that the government is like a forest.
Sometimes you need significant pruning and removal of the dead wood.
“So you just want it all burned down.”
“No, that’s actually what I’m trying to *PREVENT*.”
California’s wilderness husbandry in recent years demonstrates what can happen when there is a catastrophic failure.
If you want to prevent that sort of thing, you have to actively cut some stuff away and remove stuff.
If you’d like to complain that that won’t be as pleasant as pretending that there isn’t going to be a fire someday, you’re right. Pretending that there isn’t going to be a fire someday is much more pleasant than removing dead wood.Report
Precisely.Report
The three biggest sources of deadwood are tax breaks for corporations and the 1% – they have never trickled down nor have there ever driven growth as promised; defense spending and tax incentives for business (like ethanol subsidies). Canning off the 1% that is foreign aid is never going to help. Ditto firing half the federal workforce. What has been proposed so far is burning it all down so that rich tech bros don’t have their greed impinged on. Nothing more nothing less.Report
Making arguments I have never made.
So, let’s address it: No matter the set tax rate, the effective tax rate for all tax revenue has historically been 18-22% of GDP.
Effective tax rate is all that actually matters, although the rate affects people in the bottom of each rate quintile more than those at the top of the ladder, for obvious reasons associated with economies of scale.Report
Worth adding is that state/local tax revenue is, in practice, 9-12% of state/local GDP. Rich states run at the top end of that, poor states at the low end. Treating that as a constraint, what we see at the state level is state funding for K-12 education and Medicaid are steadily displacing spending in other major areas. (Baumol’s Cost Disease is relevant.) This trend has been clear in state general fund budgets since the mid-1990s. Speaking broadly, higher education has taken the biggest hit, followed by transportation.Report
Does anyone recall what happened the last time the U.S. government ran a budget surplus?Report
The World Trade Center got attacked?Report
Twice.Report
You guys are ice cold. Let me refresh your memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Growth_and_Tax_Relief_Reconciliation_Act_of_2001Report
Zero debt service was done?
The post-Cold War peace dividend was largely a farce fueled by the dot com bubble and Clinton willfully ignoring the rise of Islamofascist terrorism.
Try again.Report
This is down right hysterical, given we spent at least $5 trillion dollars for the Pentagon to fight ‘islamofascist’ terrorism abroad when at the end of the day all we needed was reinforced cockpit doors and maybe a narrowly defined special forces operation in Afghanistan.Report
The only way to fight Islamic terrorism is to ignore its causes while spending trillions on wars of choice that destabilize an entire region, radicalizing many thousands of young people in the process (and battle-hardening them), and in the end, at least in some cases, result in us leaving with our tail between our legs.
Meanwhile, cancer research is an area ripe for fraud, and we should halt it completely.Report
The suggestion that we should spend money on good things and not spend it on bad things is risible.
We need to maintain the status quo at all costs.
This is what “progressive” means.Report
Who gets to decide what’s good and what’s not good? Elon Musk and his coding epigones? I promise you, risible is not how this strikes me.Report
Is it even possible to distinguish between things?Report
This is probably your weakest attempt at avoiding a question.Report
It seems like we’re in a place between:
1. Status Quo
2. Changing Things
I can understand the argument that the status quo is preferable to letting Trump be President and letting Elon audit the government. I can!
But the argument that the government should only change if Good People are in charge of it is one that makes a lot of assumptions that, among other things, fail to take into account the reality on the ground (the reality, of course, includes the whole “50%+1 of people seem to have voted for exactly this” thing).Report
I went back and reread Chris’ comment and he made no mention of bad or good people. In fact, the 2 things he mentioned were war and cancer research. Let’s stay on point.Report
The question was “Who gets to decide what’s good and what’s not good?”
I jumped to something like “morality experts, presumably good ones” but I would be willing to hear who we think should be in charge of deciding what’s good.
Philosophy majors? We’ve been trained…Report
Missed that one. Good or bad people can be in charge of government, and both can make either good or bad decisions regarding change. Whichever way the decisions go, they must be lawful.Report
It’s true that in literally all aspects of life we have two choices at the most abstract level, change or not change, but I can’t think of a single domain in which merely asking, “Should we change or not change?” is particularly useful, nor can I think of many, if any, in which “Change for change’s sake” is useful.
Since you are fond of analogies (e.g., the forest one above), I’ll offer one: imagine if a person is in an abusive marriage. They have two choices: stay in the marriage or leave. If we only ask this question at this level, pretty much everyone will say, “Leaving, obviously.” But what if “leaving” means being homeless? What if it means getting into a relationship with an even more abusive person? What if it means jumping out of an airplane without a parachute? Without specifying what leaving entails, we haven’t really addressed the question of whether leaving is better.
Do I think halting all cancer research is better than doing research as we’ve always done it? No. Do I think it would make sense to evaluate the way we do cancer research funding to make sure we’re not wasting money where that money could be better spent on curing friggin’ cancer? Sure, that makes sense.Report
One of the big things that I’ve grown wary of is the whole “High Speed Rail” gambit when it comes to funding.
I think that High Speed Rail would be good.
I think that Cancer Research would be good.
I think that there are a lot of things that would be good.
If, at the end of the day, we end up with a bunch of non-replicable experiments and not a single passenger has ridden the rails, it seems to me that the topic should not be whether Cancer Research is important and whether I support it.
I do support Cancer Research.
I support High Speed Rail, for that matter.
“Well, then… you should give me money and leave me to my own devices.”Report
I’m saying that I think this cure is worse than the disease. Generally, curing the person by killing them is considered bad medicine. And I think killing the patient is the ultimate goal here. Hell, Musk has basically said so in the past.
I will say that the tiny accelerationist voice in the back of my head keeps saying, “Yeeeeees,” though.Report
While this cure could easily be worse than the disease… we’re not even done diagnosing it yet.
The last thing we need is a cancer cure if we, instead, have explosive cell death.Report
“But what if “leaving” means being homeless? What if it means getting into a relationship with an even more abusive person?”
This is just fear of the unknown. The right choice is STILL leaving. Then you deal with what come from that choice.Report
One can’t merely “leave.” “Leave” is an abstract verb that can refer to many possible actions. Leaving takes a form, and some forms are better than others. For another, simpler example, leaving a 5th story apartment by going out the apartment door, down the stairs or elevator, and then out the main door, is one way of doing it, and diving out the window is another. Before we evaluate whether leaving is good, we should make sure we’re doing it by the door, and not the window.Report
Elon is not Auditing anything.Report
I am against domestic boondoggles. But all domestic boondoggles at least put money in the pockets of Americans, and even the worst of the worst are to some degree defensible on those terms.
The boondoggles Russel is defending caused untold damage (Chris understates it only because it takes books to describe how bad both wars and related activities were). The money would have been better spent by flying around in a helicopter dumping it out over American cities.Report
I absolutely agree with that. And as someone who supported Afghanistan and argued that Iraq was important because the government wouldn’t lie to us about WMDs, I now look back at those beliefs and do a mixture of cringing and kicking myself.
So now I am willing to look at the spending and, at the very least!, bring sunlight to what is being done.
There’s a simple heuristic that strikes me as reasonable:
If this particular spending came to light, would I rather be defending it?
So to grab an example that is easy: Social Security payments to a 68 year old plumber who retired last year.
Yes. I would easily prefer to defend that.
A government payment to an NGO that has 78% overhead costs?
No. I would easily prefer to have someone else defend it while I attacked it.
Between those two absurd extremes there is a grey area someplace and I would love to find it, so long as we agree that the stuff on the bad side of the gray area can be cut.
And if that is *NOT* something that is acceptable to the opposition, I will then shrug and sit back down.Report
No real disagreement on the principle. This is where I interject that there was a ‘smarter government’ component to the Obama administration. That inclination seems to have been lost in the Biden admin and the unusual circumstances of slow growth and essentially 0% interest on government borrowing that preceded it. I am all for bringing those concepts back.Report
Maybe we should ask the Republicans to go back to Mitt Romney and Democrats will support him this time and there won’t be *ANY* Hitler comparisons.
“Can we go back to the deal we rejected a decade ago?”Report
I am not one to defend the constant calling up of the famous Austrian in American politics but that’s just changing the subject.
What killed Romney was the proposal for wholesale restructuring (read massively cutting) of entitlements. Some changes there may well need to be on the table at some point but I know that you know that isn’t the same as auditing fraud waste and abuse in discretionary spending or ferreting out millions spent on teaching the women of Kandahar about Gloria Steinem or whatever.Report
Huh. I thought that the Romney thing would be preferable to Literally Voldemort.
If we’re in a place where Trump is doing something that we agree should be done (though we kinda wish that someone else were doing it), we’re in a strange new territory.Report
I feel that way about a handful of things Trump is doing and I am probably to the left of 75-80% of the country. I doubt I’m alone.
However if you ask me if those things are worth the price of other things going on or likely to go on under this administration I’d still say no.Report
We could have “wholesale restructuring” without “massive cutting”.
Force all HealthCare providers to set a price and publish it for every service. This would outlaw these price fixing “networks” and bring the market to bear.
Far as I can tell, no one is claiming that our HC is efficient even compared to other countries.
That’s over and above whether or not the various reports I’ve been hearing are correct. I.e. whether 10-20% of spending is outright fraud and whether we have various boondoggles and such.Report
It’s always bemusing when you return to this well and I just have to ask what your assertion is?
Like, was Romneybot treated unfairly when he ran in 2012? Any objective review at how Presidential candidates in the recent past were treated, especially on the left, would have to answer that question “no, not particularily”. LIkewise are you suggesting it’d have been better for liberals if Romney had won in 2012? As in trading a term for Obama for 1-2 theoretical terms of Romney and the obvious rejoinder is “LOL of course not”. So that, then, begs the question as to what your core assertion vis a vis Romney is?Report
LIkewise are you suggesting it’d have been better for liberals if Romney had won in 2012?
What does that timeline look like?
2012 – Romney
What happens in 2016? Hillary? Might Hillary have beaten Romney in 2016 as the strongest Democratic nominee the Democratic machine had yet been able to put together?
What happens in 2019? Does that same bowl of bat soup get eaten in the wet market?
Does George Floyd try to pass a counterfeit $20 only to get choked out by his nightclub co-worker?
Does 2021-2024 go nuts just like last time?
There are a *LOT* of little linchpins on that wheel.
But I’m mostly struck by the whole “is there *ANYTHING* that you’d have been willing to trade in the last decade?” question always getting the answer of “why are Democrats the only ones who have to give things up?”Report
Counterfactuals are extremely hard to run, to put it mildly, would Pres Romneybot have had a Dem Senate in ’12? Would the GOP have taken full control of Congress in ’14?
I think the only thing we can say with any confidence is SSM would have been pushed back a few years and the Iran deal would have never occurred. Since I, and most liberals, consider both of those good policies obviously Romney would have been a terrible trade without even assuming his normal Republitarian tax cut nonsense would have been an awful trade for the gridlock that Obama had. There’s also a non-zero chance that Romneybot sends boots in when Syria uses chemical weapons which would have been a W style clusterfish. Does Pres. Romneybot butterfly away Trump? Maybe in 16. Do I think Hillary would have beat him? If he beat Obama how on God(ess?)’s green earth would he have lost to Hillary??! Anything post 2016 is, frankly, nonsensical to even speculate on.
Like I said, the counterfactuals break down fast. Romney didn’t narrowly lose to Obama, remember, he got pretty firmly walloped.
Which brings me back to the core question: were liberals incorrectly or unfairly unsupportive of Romney? Hahaha God(ess?) no! Would a world of a Romney presidency be a brighter one from a liberal point of view? No, not even if we assume only one term.
And would Romney have prevented Trump? I’d say absolutely not. Trump took over the GOP because of the gaping chasm between the GOP’s ruling elite and their voters on tax policy, gov spending and immigration along with the shriveling of the social conservative movement that papered over it. Romney wouldn’t have addressed any of those problems and, if anything, would have likely exacerbated them.Report
I’m pretty sure that Obergefell would have happened no matter what… but if we are in the best of all possible worlds, we sure seem to be kicking and screaming a lot.
And whether Trump would have been prevented, I have no idea. Let’s give Clinton two terms.
It’s 2024. Does Trump get elected?
Maybe. He’s just, you know, unprepared. No Project 2025 (not that he ran on it), no DOGE, no nothin’. Maybe some light immigration reform.
Maybe what happened to Liberals over the last couple of decades is the best that Liberals could have hoped for.
And it brought us Trump anyway.Report
I agree the supreme court would eventually have given way on SSM. When gays got equal rights to serve in the military under Obama’s first term the gig was up and the social conservative route was starting*. I think a Romney victory would, possibly, have made the courts hesitate a bit longer on Obergefell than they did under an Obama victory.
And we agree Trump was going to happen. The dysfunction on the right was eventually going to summon Trump or someone like him and i don’t think that Liberals were going to snap around on Immigration absolutism or on Free trade absent Trump happening.
But it seems like your point was strictly counterfactuals which is entirely fine; I appreciate you clarifying.
*It is interesting that, for all his stomping on Trans matters, neither Trump nor his social con eunuchs have made even gestures at going after SSM. It may be too soon to be sure, but I do suspect that it signifies the final waving of the white flag on SSM. Note, Jay vis a vis our previous discussion on the matter, that the right never did any “We were wrong about SSM” self examinations; they never overtly reversed their positions or pulled out their policy planks or did any of the repentance self flagellating self-examination stuff you think the left needs to do about DEI. They just… stopped emphasizing it and stopped talking about it.Report
Well, the main thing that I run into over and over again is the question of whether there was a particular victory that maybe could have been avoided.
Like, what W would you trade for an L in the last decade or two that might have kept us from getting here.
I think that there’s a very *OBVIOUS* one that is under everybody’s nose (and tied to a prominent assassination mere weeks ago).
the right never did any “We were wrong about SSM” self examinations; they never overtly reversed their positions or pulled out their policy planks or did any of the repentance self flagellating self-examination stuff you think the left needs to do about DEI
That’s true. They never did.
And two weird things happened. One was Trump holding up one of the White Supremacist rainbow flags with “LGBT for Trump” scribbled on it and the other was a push against Target having rainbow t-shirts.
Gay Marriage? There never was a reckoning about it. The two camps are “we’ve never had a problem with monogamous pairings that make property values go up” and “nope, still mad, but back burnered, and I’m going to stop drinking Bud Light.”
For what it’s worth, I think that there does need to be a reckoning on SSM.
(I will say that I have seen a handful of LGB terfy types who have expressed regret about winning Obergefell. The Ioz types who explain that gay sex used to mean “furtive and exciting” and now it means “missionary position” and the JK Rowling types who are irritated that the front has moved to the whole Trans thing which, for whatever reason, pisses them off.)Report
The answer to your first question, if we confined it to “something the Dems could have done” which seems to be your implicit assumption is something between “definitely not unless they could all collectively see the future” and “lol of course not what’re you smoking?”
Yes, Trump was never big on the anti-gay thing and so basically represented an implicit point when the right conceded on SSM- they never admitted it of course and it was abandoned at the same time they were throwing a lot of other principles overboard so what can ya do?
Heh, you clearly didn’t pay attention to the SSM issue much before the mid aughts. In the 90’s a lot of the gay rights groups thought SSM was a terrible idea because it was “heteronormative”.Report
When it comes to Republicans, I think that “Iraq” is probably the answer that would get most of them on board. If you’d be willing to accept “we should have left about a day and a half after they caught Saddam”, we could get almost all of them that don’t have “Cheney” in their name somewhere.
Ah, “Heteronormative”.
In some ways the whole “kink at pride” debate is still playing out.
Trump is one hell of a compromise, it seems. On that, at least.Report
I think the only way Iraq is the answer is if they didn’t invade in the first place.Report
An answer you’d accept or an answer they’d give?
Because “the US should have left Iraq in 2006” could, seriously, get everybody but the Cheneys on board.Report
It never ceases to amaze me that anyone would hold Democrats responsible for the quality of Republican candidates. Or vice versa, if the question ever came up in reverse.Report
For what it’s worth, I think Trump is inevitable not because of the whole left v. right thing, but because of the whole populist v. elitist thing.
Swapping out Romney literally does *NOTHING* to fight against Trump’s inevitability. Take out Romney, put in Clinton. Take out Clinton put in Jeb.
It’s 2024.
We have Trump.
And *NOT* because he’s Republican. Let’s face it, he’s a piss-poor Republican.
(If you want a good Republican, you have to go to the Cheney family.)Report
Trump is a republicans because that was his path to power. Characterizing him as a populist remains the most hilarious thing you do around here. He definitely uses populist rhetoric but don’t govern as a populist last time and isn’t this time.Report
Would you then agree that the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow?Report
At one point in history yea they were. And?Report
As a registered Democrat, I agree with you.
I prefer voting third party, though.
You?Report
You and me both but I got what I wanted which was to find out if this was simply an appeal to counterfactuals (it seems to be) or if there was any deeper meaning or implication (seems to not be the case) so I’m actually pretty content with the response I got.Report
For the last dozen years, someone or other has occasionally tried to make the case that just because Mitt Romney was the Republican most palatable to Democrats, the Democrats had some obligation to support him, even over the candidate of their own party, that it was just plain mean of them to campaign vigorously against him (binders of women! 47%! dog on top of car! out-of-touch venture capital guy!), and that, therefore, we have only ourselves to blame when the Republicans nominate someone worse.
It didn’t make much sense then and doesn’t make any more sense now. The only people responsible for the quality of the Republican candidates are Republicans.Report
Agreed entirely which was why I inquired in the first place.Report
Oh sure it does.
There is a very important tendency in life wherein bad people tend to have fewer choices and fewer opportunities in life than not as bad people.
_Libs_ _are_ _bad_ _people_, especially as it pertains to representations and advocacy in our political culture. Therefore, they don’t get the same consideration that another maybe apolitical, maybe right-of-center group of real Americans might get. I suspect libs are going to find this out to their displeasure over the next weeks and months relating to Trump’s EOs and reorgs and whatnot.
As it pertains to Romney, the point being is that libs have a narrower set of choices than they think they do, so they should not disdain opportunities such as Romney like they do.Report
“Here’s the compromise choice.”
“I decline the compromise choice.”
“Here’s Literally Voldemort.”
I mean, it could be argued that Biden was a compromise choice for Literally Voldemort. A guy from Scranton, New Jersey. Capable of standing up to Corn Pop. The most entertaining guy at the poker table. Someone you could work with, right?
Well… as it turns out, Biden may not, in fact, have been running the show.
And so we’re at Literally Voldemort again.
I just keep wondering if *ANY* compromise was possible.
“No, no compromise was possible” is a straight answer.
And now here we are with Literally Voldemort.
New Polls!Report
I think compromise is possible but still don’t follow where you’re going with this. Yea it was stupid to compare Romney to Hitler. It was also stupid to say Obama was a Kenyan born Alinskyite radical black Marxist. And yet. It would be nice if we could establish a consensus that those sorts of politics are stupid and at best unhelpful. But if that’s really what we’re waiting for I think we will wait long.
Meanwhile the GOP stonewalled Obama from 2010 on, culminating in the Senate refusing to even have a vote on an open SCOTUS seat. Was all of this conducive to the kind of comity we’re hoping to establish? I don’t think so. And while I don’t normally like to put on my partisan hat like this I think it’s impossible to have a conversation about the behavior of the Democrats without these facts informing it, along with the unfair attacks against Mitt.Report
Where I’m going with this is: “If compromise is possible, where would you compromise?”
And if the answer always comes “I shouldn’t have to compromise with those jerkfaces, even if not compromising means that I have to live for four years under Literally Voldemort”, then we get to live under Voldemort for four years, then under Umbridge for four years, then Voldemort again…Report
If they’d listen to me they’d win so much they’d be getting sick of it. Same goes for the Republicans.Report
The “compromise” is vote for our guy rather than yours (who did. you know, win) or we’ll nominate someone worse? That isn’t anything anyone recognizes as a “compromise.”Report
No compromise it is, then!
If, at some point, you think “maybe I could have won a bit less at some point, maybe here, maybe there”, please let me know what you come up with.Report
Jay, a point of order, what you’re describing: “vote for our horrible guy or we’ll nominate someone worse” is not compromise, that’d be what is more commonly known as extortion.Report
Wait, Romney was horrible? The former governor of Massachusetts? That Romney?
Is there *ANY* Republican that isn’t horrible?
(Is the answer “Liz Cheney”?)Report
Well let me turn it around- Obama was horrible? Why is it that moderate Republicans didn’t vote for him. Oh, wait, some of them did vote for him which is why he beat Romneybot quite decisively.
And the base question remains ludicrous. And, yes, from a liberal standard Romney was the same semi-neocon, blatant republitarian motherfisher that ran the country into a ditch for eight years from 2000 to 2008. I mean, the a-historicness of the whole premise is somewhat insane- these guys drove you our of being a fishing libertarian- they were so bad, but after 4 years of Obama suddenly it would be incumbent on liberals to support Mitt fishin Romney of the House of vulture capitalists because if liberals didn’t, ohhh the right will coalesce behind someone worse!Report
Fair enough!
Good news. The Republicans have abandoned Neocons to the point where the Neocons seem to find themselves more welcome among the Democrats than among the Republicans.Report
Yup, the joke of course being that Neocons have so beclowned themselves they don’t bring any voters of significant numbers- so they’re basically libertarians now. The Dems definitely wasted their effort trying to tout neocons support. I can see why they tried, of course, Haley showed such alluring numbers prior to bending the knee- it’d have only taken a fraction of those voters to work and, if it’d worked it, would have been so easy in coalition and policy terms but it didn’t work. The lesson: don’t listen to neocons, don’t waste time on them.Report
And they’ll nominate someone worse anyway when they get the chance. What’s the old saw about the bird in the hand?Report
Except I gave an example in this very article that there wasn’t.
Hell, Obama didn’t sign a significant piece of legislation in his final six years in office other than sequestration and a minor tax increase.
Come on, man!Report
Google is your friend:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/07/22/improper-payments-elimination-and-recovery-act-cutting-waste-and-fraud-governmentReport
And how successful was it?
Because you don’t exactly seem to know.Report
Do you think you know? Or that Elon Musk knows?
I’m happy to concede that having a conversation like that on the merits requires a level of research no one on this blog is going to do. However to the extent we’re arguing about what was in the platform and legislation actually accepted by the administration I’d say the evidence is clear.Report
You clearly don’t.Report
There has been sunlight for nearly two decades. It’s called USAspending.govReport
And yet all this graft continues unabated no matter who is in the White House.
Curious, that.Report
Because Congress directs it.
Did you not take civics in school? Are you that unaware of how federal spending works?Report
We haven’t had regular budgeting since at least the Obama Administration.
Do try again.Report
I agree we haven’t had regular order appropriations. It was a problem in the GW Bush administration when I joined federal service. Again that’s a Congress issue. President still turn in their budget requests largely on time.Report
And that means the federal government operates without a strict budget.Report
Not true either. The president makes a request. Congress passes a budget resolution. Committees develop appropriations. After a CR or two those appropriations get passed. Once passed the executive branch executes them. The process works as designed.Report
Except we don’t have a normal budget.Report
And if Clinton had killed or captured Osama bin Laden on one of the three golden opportunities he had, maybe 9/11 never happens.Report
Yea I recall those debates. Clinton was very prominently confronted about these kinds of counterfactuals by Chris Wallace and it was such a big deal it dominated a whole news cycle. I’d say Clinton had the better of the exchanges but I suppose ymmv. I would also say though that the GOP called it ‘wag the dog’ when Clinton did attempt a strike on bin Laden when he was in Sudan, which suggests to me that if Clinton wasn’t taking the threat seriously enough then neither was any politician on the national stage at the time.Report
Remember that only Democrats have agency.Report
Not any more. Looks like Trump does.
That’s one of the main reasons you wish for better opposition, remember?Report
When did I ever say that?Report
That wasn’t a reply to you. Reading comprehension.Report
I think it’s really good for posterity that we host the neocon writers we host- it’s always good to remember just how they used to argue and how they were; if for no other reason than to remind ourselves of why it is that Trump, of all people, was able to utterly defenestrated them out of their own party.Report
And I’m a neocon apparently now?Report
As far as I’ve seen from your writing style and your substantive positions the answer to that question would be: absolutely yes, always have been, my goodness how could you possibly think otherwise?
And I don’t even use it pejoratively, it makes me feel like I’m in my 20’s and 30’s again when I read your stuff.Report
I’m not, man.Report
Okay, let’s hear it. Name, let’s say, five major things you vehemently disagree with the neocons about. Only one of them is allowed to be Trump related and at least two need to be about the Bush Era, 2000-2008.Report
I’m not a neocon. You’re just using a random insult that at this point has no true meaning.Report
It would take me thousands of words to unpack but I believe that most current political debates can still be traced to the crisis of trust in government unleashed by the GWOT. If I wanted to really get aggressive I’d say it’s had the mirror image impact on our polity that winning World War 2 did. Trump is of course very much a part of that.Report
I’d agree and you and I probably also find a certain bitter commonality in that we both think that Bush W still wears the feces caked crown of the most destructive American President for the welfare of the union in modern American history. Trump is horrible but for all his embarrassments, idiocies and flailing he hasn’t come close to W yet in terms of material devastation to the American standing and welfare.Report
I’d go further back to St. Ronny with his “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” comment.Report
It could be just presentism and the fact that Ronal Regan was before my time but by the numbers for tax cuts, budgets exploded and horrific utterly useless wars embroiled in Bush W seems to have Ronny beat handily. I am not even sure how to balance Iran Contra against W’s torture regime, but I feel that the latter is even more atrocious than the former.Report
Torture is definitely where America sold its soul. A huge reason why I didn’t vote for BHO in 2012 was the fact that Guantanamo remained open.Report
Obama had two choices on the subject- consume his entire term punishing, persecuting and reversing W’s atrocities or sort of mumble past them, stop doing them where possible and do other things. I don’t think it speaks well of him that he chose not to do the former but it’s very understandable that he looked at his historic mega-trifecta and said “I’m expected to squander this on Bush?!?!” and went for the ACA instead.Report
I’d agree as well.Report
Bill Kristol of all people is one of the best voices against Trump and Trumpism out there. He is a lot better than some of the older Democratic politicians who are apparently resenting the volume of calls from their constituents.Report
It doesn’t matter. He has no credibility on any topic.Report
Agreed.Report
I think it’ll be useful because it’ll show people how much spending appears to be for Bullshit Jobs but in fact is related to specific things that the government was specifically directed to do.Report
Every congressman’s wasted spending is some other congressman’s jobs program.Report
The author fails to mention a couple of really easy methods to shore up the Social Security trust fund: remove the wage limit on the tax, and means testing benefits. Heritage ran some numbers here: https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/saving-the-american-dream-the-heritage-plan-fix-the-debt-cut-spending
It’s only 3 weeks into the Trump administration’s efforts to curb spending, but they’re just nibbling at the edges.Report
Do you also remove the benefit cap?Report
Means testing will take care of that.Report
And even that hits opposition.
Paul Ryan couldn’t even get that with the Trifecta.Report
Governing is hard and sometimes unpopular. Republic, democracy, etc.
I’m sure there’s a trade to be had there somewhere.Report
No side really wants to touch entitlements at all, which is how we arrived here in the first place. Paul Ryan and Jack Kemp were basically it for the last 50 years.Report
According to this page: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go they’re 45% of federal spending. I think my nibbling at the edges comment stands. What DOGE is doing now is opiate for the masses.Report
This article encapsulates much of the point I’ve been trying to make in the comment threads of various posts over the last several days: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-losing-court-boring-reason-adminitrative-procedure-act-rcna191113
There are lawful ways for the DJT administration to do what it wants to do. He’s just to lazy to do it. That we probably all expected. What should shock Americans is we have half the country ready to skirt the law right along with him.Report
The American people are fed up.
That’s how he got a second term in the first place.Report
These actions won’t actually do away with the “fed up”Report
It’ll just switch sides.Report
The objective that Trump and Musk have articulated is one that can be lawfully pursued, and if it’s true that the American people are really fed up, then there is the political will out there to propel pursuit of those objective through Congress. If the people really want spending cuts, they’ll get them, good and hard.
It’s entirely reasonable to ask that these spending cuts be pursued in a lawful way. Which means they be done by Congress. That’s not an ask that puts this goal out of reach. Republicans control the White House and both Houses of Congress, and in Congress they enjoy a degree of party unity and direct control by the President that Democrats could only dream of in even their best recent political times.
If spending cuts can’t make it through Congress under those political conditions, that gives lie to the postulate that there really is sufficient political will for making spending cuts — at least, when those cuts are actually articulated rather than referred to in broad sweeping terms. And, if it’s true as you suggest that the American people are fed up, this might not turn out to be true!
Whether or not that’s true, doing this in the lawful way, the Constitutional way, ought not be controversial to anyone. Putting something like entitlement cuts through the political process of Congress is as small-d democratic an ask as can be made.Report
You know, you’d think one wouldn’t have to spell it out as explicitly as this, but then we’re living in an age where “We’re sick of it” counts as cogent political analysis.Report
I think that there’s room for “Congressmen/Senators are corrupt and only imperfectly represent their constituents”.
There’s no shortage of anecdotes about how the sausage *REALLY* gets made, after all.Report
What if instead of corruption we read it as doing the art of the possible? Congressional horse trading has generally worked pretty well for this country.Report
So the status quo?
I submit: The status quo is an unstable equilibrium.Report
Why though? I realize I’m asking a lot of voters who live in the most prosperous nation in the world, with a standard of living that’s the envy of the world, but requiring them to articulate why they’re ready to trash their own country doesn’t seem like too big an ask.Report
Injustice, man. Sometimes you experience injustice and you just want to set things on fire.Report
The arsonist is burning his own house down.Report
I don’t agree with everything they’re doing, but chainsaw time is now or we won’t have a choice in the matter.Report
Why not?Report
I presume the answer is: if we don’t start cutting spending now, our ability to spend on anything will eventually be swallowed up by our need to make minimum interest payments on the debt.
I recall my days as a Young Republican, when I made this argument. That was the early 1990’s. My own political preferences have changed since then, but the argument has not. OP is right (elsewhere in the thread) that the key number is interest on the debt as a percentage of GDP. FRED has the numbers:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S
You can correlate the ups and downs on the chart with all sorts of things that may affirm your priors or mine, assign the deltas as a delayed response to X or Y event based on X or Y based on your priors. But if you ask me, the table says to me: deficit spending, above a certain threshold, seems to make the number go up about a year later.Report
Russell’s point seemed a lot more ominous, and you’re citing the same view you held 30 years ago. Perhaps it’s not as dire as is being portrayed.
Besides, we haven’t heard word one about paying down the debt (most of which we owe to ourselves).Report
Trump won a plurality of the vote and his disapproval ratings are rising fast:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
Harris won 75 plus million votes and that is not exactly a small minority.
Trump and Co. do not have the mandate they think they have.Report
Which is why they are moving fast and breaking things.Report
Very nice article. Well done! Not shocked at the response from this group.
One thing”
” We pretty much have to raise payroll taxes to deal with Social Security and Medicare at some point.”
There is another unpalatable option. Raise the minimum age from 67.Report
That still would be cutting benefits, reaching its goal by reducing the number of recipients as opposed to by reducing the amount of money being paid.
But you are right, it’s something that could be done, if there is the political will to do it.Report
They have started to raise it, just not for anyone nearing retirement.Report
With sincerity, OP, I would like a bit of insight into something you wrote. “I am philosophically against tax increases as a general principle.” Which one of these statements is the closest to what you meant by that:
A) I will never support a tax increase under any circumstances or for any reason, period full stop; or
B) I will only support a tax increase under extraordinary circumstances such that I cannot conceive of them realistically manifesting in the foreseeable future; or
C) Although some circumstances might justify a tax increase in the future, those circumstances are not present now; or
D) Even if someone were to present a strong argument that raising taxes would produce a net benefit to the economy, backed by overwhelming evidence, I would nevertheless reject the proposal because it is simply impossible that such arguments and evidence exist even if I couldn’t immediately think of a critique; or
E) My default preferred policy is to not raise taxes, and even if someone were to present a strong, evidence-backed argument for why we would generally benefit by raising them, I would only go along with it if the evidence for the proposal were overwhelming, and even then I would still be pretty grumpy about it.
I’m just looking to understand better what you wrote, because it would help me understand your overall argument for why spending cuts have to happen rather than tax hikes. I do not intend to offer any sort of argument for raising taxes. In fact, as I write, I do not intend to further comment on your response beyond thanking you for making it.Report
He *DID* go on to say “But some tax increases are likely necessary at this juncture.”
So he’s not saying “NEVER NEVER NEVER”.
He’s saying “I’m against it but things have gotten so bad that I am willing to accept it as part of turning this dang thing around”.
It’s the downsides of compromising, I guess.
(Is there anything you’re personally opposed to that you think we should probably have to stomach for a while before things turn around?)Report
Yes: high interest rates. I hope not, but I foresee another wave of depression in real property values. Hopefully it doesn’t ripple out into the financial sector as badly as the last one did.Report
With government control of the interest rate, this isn’t a problem that would work itself out correctly.Report
Define correctly.Report
One of the big problems with increasing taxes is our political system will just spend it and the deficit will remain.
We need a way to force politicians to pay for the goodies they promise or to revoke those goodies when the spending doesn’t appear.
There are political forces to spend. There are political forces to oppose taxes. They’re not actually matched against each other in a way that balances the budget.
For example, if every dollar of deficit spending was subtracted from some political sacred cow (Social Security) so that payments were lowered, then we’d always have a balanced budget. Every program that handed out free whatever would have tax increases to pay for it.
Or alternatively, every GOP effort to reduce taxation would also include actual cuts to something specific because the alternative is they’re lowering whatever.Report
We have such a way. It’s called elections.Report
There are political forces to spend. There are political forces to oppose taxes. They’re not actually matched against each other in a way that balances the budget.
The people get what they want. Good and hard.Report
Ooo, I like these. (I know it was not meant for me but, whatever)
I am somewhere with both C and E.
The challenge with your E is “overwhelming evidence”. I doubt there is such a thing since it would mean both sides agree on it. I would expect one side or the other to disagree just because the other one likes it and I cannot imagine the “overwhelming” nature that would overcome that in today’s partisan bickering.Report
The American Federal government vastly under taxes for the the government that the American voter currently expects to have. The American political system spends an awful lot of energy to avoid ever thinking about that fact in a way that isn’t a partisan attack. The contradiction is paper overed by the bond market’s willingness to finance it.
Eventually after a self-inflicted crisis you might get serious about how much tax you need to fund what you want but you’re light years from the maturity to handle that conversation right now.Report
The problem is one of historical percentage of GDP.
No matter the tax rate, the effective tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is historically 18-22%.
Stronger economy, more tax revenue.Report
“No matter the tax rate, the effective tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is historically 18-22%.”
That is a every interesting statistic. That really shows that consumer behavior is greatly affected by tax laws and people find a way around high taxes.
Definitely better to expand the economy for higher dollars collected.
This is born out in personal income tax collected over the years.
Fiscal Year Revenue
FY 2023 $4.44 trillion
FY 2022 $4.90 trillion
FY 2021 $4.05 trillion
FY 2020 $3.42 trillion – COVID
FY 2019 $3.46 trillion
FY 2018 $3.33 trillion – Trump tax reduction
FY 2017 $3.32 trillionReport
That isn’t an economic law, its a political one. Typically when American’s rejig the rates they also adjust the exclusions. You could increase the share of GDP the government takes in to balance expectations, you just don’t because debt has always been easier than doing that.Report
It means tax rates affect behavior.
Effective tax rate is all that matters.Report
There is literally HIV being transmitted from mom to baby because of the illegal shutdown of US AID and now Trump’s State Department wants to spend 400 million dollars on Tesla cyber trucks. This is not about efficiency. It’s a smash and grab.-Brian Schatz
Musk and Trump have no right to lecture anyone about waste, fraud, and abuse and letting a bunch of 19 year old hopple heads into the data proves it more so.Report
Russell Vought’s daughter has cystic fibrosis and is helped by a miracle drug wholly or partially developed from NIH research and grants. He wants to cut it to the bone. These people have no moral standing, only rank hypocrisy and power grabbing fantasies of total control and domination.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/project-2025-vought-medical-funding/Report
Should we let Musk and his epigones do this work? Who knows?
https://x.com/AaronBlake/status/1890071364239061279?t=Yh5itGc_1-WONKOwBLT9CA&s=19
If only we had voted for Romney, amirite?Report
Oh by all the gods they are STILL not letting that go, are they.Report
I’d be interested in seeing Reuters’ report on defenses against deception, now that I think about it.
Oh, it’s talking about automated defenses… like automatically figuring out who is doing the phishing on the other side of a bot farm. Reading the contract, this is actually a fairly interesting thing to be researching.
Kinda surprised it went to Reuters instead of a handful of autists in Silicon Valley, though.Report
Wastefraudabuse demands that we must destroy the National Parks, some of the most popular things in the United States: https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/yosemite-national-park-in-chaos-20163260.phpReport