Dark Matter’s example is another episode of confusing a household economy with a country economy.
Sure, very true, although these sorts of things make for good comparisons because people can relate to them.
The thing is you're not actually disagreeing with me. I fully admit we'll have no issues paying the bondholders this year or next, that's what the market cares about. We're not going to pull a Greece or a Rome/Nazi Germany this year, or even within the next 10 based on current data.
But all of our obligations aren't on the books, those multi-decade trend lines still show the gov increasing until something breaks, and the big parties seem fine with all that.
For all the protesting about how "always wanting more government" is an unfair carrature, my bet is most of the people claiming I'm wrong will be fine with the next massive expansion of gov (Obamacare didn't go far enough) and whatever expansion comes after that (high quality pre-school perhaps, or maybe some 'fix' for inequality), and whatever other expansions of government come after that.
A command and control style massive bureaucracy which by it's nature grows, seeks power, and deliberately makes things complex to justify it's existence has costs by itself.
I'm not sure what a good solution is for "the Clean Water Act", but there is the Welfare example where we could replace dozens of programs attempting to micromanage the poor with just giving everyone money and let people run their own lives.
What’s the credit rating of the United States these days?
Very good. People are still mailing us credit cards, the bond market thinks we don't have any problems in the next 4+ years.
However by the point when the bond market starts to worry, we'll already be deep in a hole, so deep it will take massive amounts of pain (i.e. breaking pensions, etc) to get out if getting out is the solution.
Out "debt" is not our "commitments", the later doesn't show up on the credit rating. One of the lessons of Greece, Detroit, etc, is you really want to worry about these sorts of things BEFORE the bond market gets concerned.
“Free stuff” is just the delegitimization of political beliefs that are not your own.
Then stop selling these programs as being "free", i.e. paid for by someone else.
IMHO a flat tax is one of the things which makes sensible evaluation of the gov possible. I.e. if we want universal health care, then let everyone pay for it so that everyone has skin in the game.
It is deeply corrupting to vote yourself benefits that "someone else" will pay for, whether that person is "the rich", "future generations", or "the jews", and that practice roundly deserves to be called out.
Asserting that “government is too large” assumes all those agreements have been reached.
No, it's simply asserting that we're past the gov's marginal rate of return. That the damage done by an extra dollar of government outweighs it's investment return.
Let's say you want the gov to do something it currently doesn't, and you therefore want taxes to go up.
My response is, if it's important, why not redirect current gov spending? Is every dollar the gov current spends really a better investment than what you want? Is raising taxes really the least destructive thing to do to the economy?
Every dollar in current gov spending shouldn't be immortal to budget cuts and invulnerable to evaluation of effectiveness.
It seems more like an a priori assumption about how democracies behave rather than a theory backed up with empirical evidence. I can’t think of a single, stable long-running democracy that has actually fallen into autocracy due to debt from buying public benefits (Greece is a young democracy that was never all that stable, and hasn’t fallen yet).
Public benefits seem to be the backdrop, a stressor (or maybe symptom) of the system rather than the "cause" per say.
Greece's problems seem to be that there's been this massive social contest over control over the government. Business has used it to kill other businesses, the 'people' have used it to give themselves benefits, politicians have used it to get themselves elected.
And we're on that path, now that we have Medicare/Social Security/Medicaid, could we 20% of the nations GDP on the military if we had something like WW2 happen again?
My flexibility and ability to respond to unusual situations decreases sharply if I've max'xed out my credit cards, have no savings, and also have dependants to support. At some point, I have a problem, and yes, any particular purchase on my cards will be unconnected to it.
Further, all of this meddling in the economy has pretty direct consequences itself, one being regulator capture, another being growth in bureaucracy.
...the actual history is that government is almost always too large and too small at the same time. Too large as in, brutally enforcing one group’s interest, while too small as in ignoring or dragging its feet on others.
There are things the gov does well, or that it has to do, and there are things it does poorly.
Ideally we'd cut the "too large" parts and expand the "too small" parts... but in practice it mostly doesn't work that way. The "too small" parts are excuses to raise taxes, the "too large" parts are too painful to remove.
Who wants “unlimited government”? Peeps on the liberal side don’t’ want that. They just want more then conservatives do. This does not equal unlimited.
Not, "more than conservatives do", just "more".
Every new group of "politicians" gets elected on promises of "more" spending, or finds "new" things that the gov "needs" to do. Every dollar of current gov spending is well defended by people who know darn well that they're screwed if it stops.
Other than after a war neither side has a clue how, or any desire to, reduce spending on any gov programs.
Gov spending as a percentage of the GDP is basically a linear line trending up, get rid of military spending and it's even sharper. In practice, I see no reason to think that long term the gov won't grow until something BIG stops it.
This is especially so when Congess is too dysfunctional to act as a meaningful check most of the time.
The GOP currently controls both sides of Congress. The IRS may still be suppressing free speech, no one has been punished for this, much less arrested. This was a VERY high profile issue they spent a lot of time on.
This isn't an example of Congress being too dysfunctional (although it often is), it's more that IRS (by itself) is too complex and large to reasonably answer to Congress.
My expectation is that if the Dems were still in charge there'd be no investigation and we wouldn't be wondering if the IRS had stopped because we'd be sure they were still at it.
an honest look on why many groups do not want limited government rather than they are wrong-headed.
In general the growth of government is NOT to protect civil rights or anything similar, it's just people wanting free stuff and/or "equality" for everyone. The state is effectively God for a lot of people, it's supposed to fix all problems, even the ones created by the state's own mismanagement.
The people who want an unlimited gov do NOT want (or envision) it used against them.
A President Trump could easily be dysfunctional enough that we turn to someone worse or really test how good the system is at controlling someone like Nixon.
I get why people want civil rights, law enforcement, etc. The flip side of those are people wanting sex police to 'control' gays, prevent abortion, and run the war on drugs.
IMHO "wrong-headed" is letting someone put together a system which will, sooner or later, be used against you. "Wrong-headed" also includes letting someone break economic systems we depend on via debt, hyperinflation, regulatory capture, etc.
@saul-degraw
Lucas' work drew heavily from the fall of Roman (and other) Democracies and should be viewed as a summation of histories various warnings.
One danger of the all powerful state is 'bread + circuses' where the people vote themselves benefits until the credit cards break. Alternatively we could have a fiscal problem which breaks the state, normally of the state's own making. In Lucas' example the state doesn't function because various interests have engaged in regulatory capture. The more people who depend on the state, the more of a problem it's lack of functioning is.
Then a strong man emerges to 'fix' things. The strong man is able to get more power by causing more problems. Roman Republic becomes the Roman Empire. Germany the failed state gets Hitler. Serbia gets Slobodan Milsevic. Zimbabwe gets their leader, etc.
Alternatively, another danger is where groups know darn well that they're going to be abused by the state if the wrong guy is in charge so they hold a civil war to see who gets to do that.
Modern day Iraq probably fits that description, but Egypt and Sudan probably do too.
The state, even the modern state, is not intrinsically a force for good, it's just a massive multiplier. A good state can deal with big problems, a bad state is a genocidal nightmare, the difference between them can be a decade or two.
One thing the article made clear to me is that respect for democracy respect for the different views of others. In your telling, only a belief in libertarianism can save democracy.
People who are attracted to power are often people who shouldn't have it.
Somehow I doubt the Dems using the IRS against the GOP showed 'respect for the different views of others'.
Sooner or later, Trump or someone much worse than him will be in charge.
That includes the 44% of Trump supporters who answered affirmatively on that black people are “lazier” than whites:
From the graph, I'd say "40%".
And Hillary's supporters "only" have a 25%.
Similarly for the 40% who answered the same way about “rudeness”.
That's 44%, and here Hillary's supporters are at 30%.
Ignore Trump and his supporters entirely and just talk about Hillary. Her numbers are also shockingly high, everything you've said could just as easily be claimed against her supporters.
Instead of what appears to be double-digit numbers of the GOP base.
Various people want to tell that story, some to drum up minority support for Hillary, others to keep the whole racism issue alive as a dragon which can be slain and which must be causing all sorts of other problems currently.
But when we dig into those numbers, what we find is not only Trump's base, but also plus a third of the GOP as a whole, and a third of Hillary's base. So something like 40% of the nation.
I find it more useful to describe acts or thoughts. 40% of people hold racist opinions on these topics. That feels like a very different statement than saying 40% of America is racist.
We really should be able to examine what's going on in society, and especially disparate impacts, without having the "you're a racist" brick thrown.
My expectation is various "black" issues are fueled by the war on drugs and other gov policies which have backfired. But in order to have that discussion, we probably need to admit these issues exist.
j r: And the questions from the survey seem pretty good for sussing out who does and who does not do that.
That's asking a lot from a survey, especially one which excluded anyone who answered "don't know" to any of the questions. I think this is a link to the original findings. http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/USA-ELECTION-RACE/010020H7174/USA-ELECTION-RACE.jpg
Looking at the numbers... a third of Hillary's supporters also agreed that Blacks are "more violent" than whites, roughly in line with the members of the GOP who voted for someone other than Trump.
So US, as a whole, is roughly 40% racist. And if all of Hillary's voters also voted for Obama, then a third of the base who voted him into office are racists.
Or maybe this survey wasn't a good way to measure racism.
DarkMatter: I think we’re protecting jobs and entrenched interests. Lots of gov spending on the drug war means lots of other economic actors are dependent on that spending.
Jaybird: At least this makes sense to me. “We’re creating crime where, otherwise, crime wouldn’t exist to pay for cops/guards.”
Another, maybe better, example is China's One Child Policy. They're going to need people in the next generation (so even the direct effects are bad), the indirect effects are also bad (male imbalance, etc), but the state agency which runs this is really powerful (it needed to be in order to force sterilization on unwilling people).
State agencies & agents have a lot of influence on state policy, they don't vote for their own termination.
If I have “taking drugs is bad” as a philosophy, and I let someone take drugs when I might have stopped them, then I have done something bad, and therefore I’m a bad person.
Philosophically, it's not just "drugs = bad" driving this. We also have "more state power = good" and "state power never has unintended side effects".
A large police force can be used for all sorts of things directly expands the power/budget of people who control/influence the gov.
The drug war is a way to express that ideal, if we didn't have that we'd have other "needs" which require the expansion of state power.
We get stories like this every few years. The next thing the drug warriors will do is take the licenses of any doctor who gives out "too many" (or "too long", or whatever) prescriptions, which instantly means really bad things for chronic pain sufferers.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The American Interest: A Republic If You Can Keep It”
Sure, very true, although these sorts of things make for good comparisons because people can relate to them.
The thing is you're not actually disagreeing with me. I fully admit we'll have no issues paying the bondholders this year or next, that's what the market cares about. We're not going to pull a Greece or a Rome/Nazi Germany this year, or even within the next 10 based on current data.
But all of our obligations aren't on the books, those multi-decade trend lines still show the gov increasing until something breaks, and the big parties seem fine with all that.
For all the protesting about how "always wanting more government" is an unfair carrature, my bet is most of the people claiming I'm wrong will be fine with the next massive expansion of gov (Obamacare didn't go far enough) and whatever expansion comes after that (high quality pre-school perhaps, or maybe some 'fix' for inequality), and whatever other expansions of government come after that.
"
A command and control style massive bureaucracy which by it's nature grows, seeks power, and deliberately makes things complex to justify it's existence has costs by itself.
I'm not sure what a good solution is for "the Clean Water Act", but there is the Welfare example where we could replace dozens of programs attempting to micromanage the poor with just giving everyone money and let people run their own lives.
"
Our long term growth rate has trended down as the gov has consumed more and more of the GDP. We're now at 2% ish when times are good.
You look at the long term effects of 2% vs. 5%, and it's 50 year effects on how rich people will be, and it's hard to call these "weightless" effects.
That's over and above what happens if/when we drive over a fiscal cliff and the bond market steps in.
"
Things will break and cause LOTS of pain far before we hit that point.
Washington style "cuts" normally mean "spend less than we planned", not "spending went down".
And the long term trends are really one sided and clear.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3bGnkNeoPxk/SbEbx4MWJrI/AAAAAAAACfA/AIxIVAJ5tTc/s400/Government-Spending-Graph.PNG
"
Very good. People are still mailing us credit cards, the bond market thinks we don't have any problems in the next 4+ years.
However by the point when the bond market starts to worry, we'll already be deep in a hole, so deep it will take massive amounts of pain (i.e. breaking pensions, etc) to get out if getting out is the solution.
Out "debt" is not our "commitments", the later doesn't show up on the credit rating. One of the lessons of Greece, Detroit, etc, is you really want to worry about these sorts of things BEFORE the bond market gets concerned.
"
We have 80+ years of data (as opposed to his single day).
"
@saul-degraw
Then stop selling these programs as being "free", i.e. paid for by someone else.
IMHO a flat tax is one of the things which makes sensible evaluation of the gov possible. I.e. if we want universal health care, then let everyone pay for it so that everyone has skin in the game.
It is deeply corrupting to vote yourself benefits that "someone else" will pay for, whether that person is "the rich", "future generations", or "the jews", and that practice roundly deserves to be called out.
"
No, it's simply asserting that we're past the gov's marginal rate of return. That the damage done by an extra dollar of government outweighs it's investment return.
Let's say you want the gov to do something it currently doesn't, and you therefore want taxes to go up.
My response is, if it's important, why not redirect current gov spending? Is every dollar the gov current spends really a better investment than what you want? Is raising taxes really the least destructive thing to do to the economy?
Every dollar in current gov spending shouldn't be immortal to budget cuts and invulnerable to evaluation of effectiveness.
"
Public benefits seem to be the backdrop, a stressor (or maybe symptom) of the system rather than the "cause" per say.
Greece's problems seem to be that there's been this massive social contest over control over the government. Business has used it to kill other businesses, the 'people' have used it to give themselves benefits, politicians have used it to get themselves elected.
And we're on that path, now that we have Medicare/Social Security/Medicaid, could we 20% of the nations GDP on the military if we had something like WW2 happen again?
My flexibility and ability to respond to unusual situations decreases sharply if I've max'xed out my credit cards, have no savings, and also have dependants to support. At some point, I have a problem, and yes, any particular purchase on my cards will be unconnected to it.
Further, all of this meddling in the economy has pretty direct consequences itself, one being regulator capture, another being growth in bureaucracy.
"
@chip-daniels
There are things the gov does well, or that it has to do, and there are things it does poorly.
Ideally we'd cut the "too large" parts and expand the "too small" parts... but in practice it mostly doesn't work that way. The "too small" parts are excuses to raise taxes, the "too large" parts are too painful to remove.
"
@greginak
Not, "more than conservatives do", just "more".
Every new group of "politicians" gets elected on promises of "more" spending, or finds "new" things that the gov "needs" to do. Every dollar of current gov spending is well defended by people who know darn well that they're screwed if it stops.
Other than after a war neither side has a clue how, or any desire to, reduce spending on any gov programs.
Gov spending as a percentage of the GDP is basically a linear line trending up, get rid of military spending and it's even sharper. In practice, I see no reason to think that long term the gov won't grow until something BIG stops it.
"
The GOP currently controls both sides of Congress. The IRS may still be suppressing free speech, no one has been punished for this, much less arrested. This was a VERY high profile issue they spent a lot of time on.
This isn't an example of Congress being too dysfunctional (although it often is), it's more that IRS (by itself) is too complex and large to reasonably answer to Congress.
My expectation is that if the Dems were still in charge there'd be no investigation and we wouldn't be wondering if the IRS had stopped because we'd be sure they were still at it.
"
@leeesq
In general the growth of government is NOT to protect civil rights or anything similar, it's just people wanting free stuff and/or "equality" for everyone. The state is effectively God for a lot of people, it's supposed to fix all problems, even the ones created by the state's own mismanagement.
The people who want an unlimited gov do NOT want (or envision) it used against them.
A President Trump could easily be dysfunctional enough that we turn to someone worse or really test how good the system is at controlling someone like Nixon.
I get why people want civil rights, law enforcement, etc. The flip side of those are people wanting sex police to 'control' gays, prevent abortion, and run the war on drugs.
IMHO "wrong-headed" is letting someone put together a system which will, sooner or later, be used against you. "Wrong-headed" also includes letting someone break economic systems we depend on via debt, hyperinflation, regulatory capture, etc.
"
@saul-degraw
Lucas' work drew heavily from the fall of Roman (and other) Democracies and should be viewed as a summation of histories various warnings.
One danger of the all powerful state is 'bread + circuses' where the people vote themselves benefits until the credit cards break. Alternatively we could have a fiscal problem which breaks the state, normally of the state's own making. In Lucas' example the state doesn't function because various interests have engaged in regulatory capture. The more people who depend on the state, the more of a problem it's lack of functioning is.
Then a strong man emerges to 'fix' things. The strong man is able to get more power by causing more problems. Roman Republic becomes the Roman Empire. Germany the failed state gets Hitler. Serbia gets Slobodan Milsevic. Zimbabwe gets their leader, etc.
Alternatively, another danger is where groups know darn well that they're going to be abused by the state if the wrong guy is in charge so they hold a civil war to see who gets to do that.
Modern day Iraq probably fits that description, but Egypt and Sudan probably do too.
The state, even the modern state, is not intrinsically a force for good, it's just a massive multiplier. A good state can deal with big problems, a bad state is a genocidal nightmare, the difference between them can be a decade or two.
People who are attracted to power are often people who shouldn't have it.
Somehow I doubt the Dems using the IRS against the GOP showed 'respect for the different views of others'.
Sooner or later, Trump or someone much worse than him will be in charge.
"
As the gov controls more and more (and gives out more and more), it becomes more and more important to make sure "your" guy is at the top.
“So this is how liberty dies–with thunderous applause.”
-Padmé Amidala
On “Coates: Why the Media Didn’t Bother to Verify if Hillary Clinton’s Remark About Half of Donald Trump’s Supporters Being ‘Deplorable’ Was True”
From the graph, I'd say "40%".
And Hillary's supporters "only" have a 25%.
That's 44%, and here Hillary's supporters are at 30%.
Ignore Trump and his supporters entirely and just talk about Hillary. Her numbers are also shockingly high, everything you've said could just as easily be claimed against her supporters.
"
Various people want to tell that story, some to drum up minority support for Hillary, others to keep the whole racism issue alive as a dragon which can be slain and which must be causing all sorts of other problems currently.
But when we dig into those numbers, what we find is not only Trump's base, but also plus a third of the GOP as a whole, and a third of Hillary's base. So something like 40% of the nation.
"
@kazzy
We really should be able to examine what's going on in society, and especially disparate impacts, without having the "you're a racist" brick thrown.
My expectation is various "black" issues are fueled by the war on drugs and other gov policies which have backfired. But in order to have that discussion, we probably need to admit these issues exist.
"
@j-r
...when everyone's super no one will be.
-Syndrome from the Incredibles
We're lowering the bar on what it takes to be a racist to the point where it's no longer useful.
"
That's asking a lot from a survey, especially one which excluded anyone who answered "don't know" to any of the questions. I think this is a link to the original findings. http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/USA-ELECTION-RACE/010020H7174/USA-ELECTION-RACE.jpg
Looking at the numbers... a third of Hillary's supporters also agreed that Blacks are "more violent" than whites, roughly in line with the members of the GOP who voted for someone other than Trump.
So US, as a whole, is roughly 40% racist. And if all of Hillary's voters also voted for Obama, then a third of the base who voted him into office are racists.
Or maybe this survey wasn't a good way to measure racism.
On “Quartz: Chronic pain patients are suffering because of the US government’s ongoing War on Drugs”
@jaybird
Another, maybe better, example is China's One Child Policy. They're going to need people in the next generation (so even the direct effects are bad), the indirect effects are also bad (male imbalance, etc), but the state agency which runs this is really powerful (it needed to be in order to force sterilization on unwilling people).
State agencies & agents have a lot of influence on state policy, they don't vote for their own termination.
"
@densityduck
@jaybird
Philosophically, it's not just "drugs = bad" driving this. We also have "more state power = good" and "state power never has unintended side effects".
A large police force can be used for all sorts of things directly expands the power/budget of people who control/influence the gov.
The drug war is a way to express that ideal, if we didn't have that we'd have other "needs" which require the expansion of state power.
"
@jaybird
I think we're protecting jobs and entrenched interests.
Lots of gov spending on the drug war means lots of other economic actors are dependant on that spending.
"
test
"
We get stories like this every few years. The next thing the drug warriors will do is take the licenses of any doctor who gives out "too many" (or "too long", or whatever) prescriptions, which instantly means really bad things for chronic pain sufferers.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.