[advael]

This whole framing is nonsense. The US is the reserve currency of the world, and its influence in both economic and soft power has had massive ROI for the entire economy for decades. There is no other government that plays this role in the global economy, and it's a ridiculously advantageous one. The fact that a balance sheet shows the sum of the investments to achieve and maintain that as a deficit is not a reason to freak out, this is a drastic misunderstanding of how nation-scale economics work that comes from people who are only familiar with household and business budgets

But if we were concerned about the budget, contractors are drastically more expensive than federal agencies and are much more dubious in their value proposition for the state or the public. It's just that the people involved made their fortunes on cushy government contracts and corporate welfare, so they won't go after it. The whole "fiscal conservatism" concept has always been a massive grift and this is the most blatant and obvious it's ever been

And you're absolutely right in saying that the Democrats are on the same grift, as their strategy has shifted to triangulation in the last 40 years, though the economic shocks they tend to produce over this insanity are generally smaller. The fact is, neoliberal economics has failed to produce widespread domestic prosperity, was likely an attempt to loot modern economies for an oligarch class from the beginning, and people keep accepting doubling down on these policies because they've been systematically misinformed about economic cause and effect through trite little analogies

[BrenBarn]

What measures do you suggest to take things in a different direction?

[advael]

Here are some easy ones off the cuff: Kill a massive amount of wasteful private contracts. Remove the entire means-testing bureaucracy from every social program. Put more funding into stuff that actually gets ROI, like the IRS, the FTC, and the CFPB. Don't shoot ourselves in the foot by killing massively beneficial soft-power investments like USAID. That one in particular is essentially handing the mantle of cultural and economic hegemony to China on a silver platter. Maybe you don't believe America should be a hegemonic empire from a moral perspective, but it's hard to argue that it's not a beneficial position

The agenda here is just very clearly not efficiency, but cronyism, enabling autocratic control, and culture war vendettas. It really takes willful ignorance to think this is going to be good for the country overall. It will mostly be good for Elon Musk and his buddies, and maybe only in the short term

More broadly, I'd like to see the US return to a state of regulating finance and enforcing anti-trust in a sane manner. The boom-bust cycle and total crackdown on labor and consumer protection has turned the domestic economy into a casino that impoverishes the vast majority of its citizens, and the effect of bailing out this corrupt financier class every time they crash massive sectors of the economy has been the destruction of the real economy, an enduring public distrust of the government, and a class of insulated plutocrats who have been shielded from the consequences of their mistakes, believe themselves untouchable, and have now orchestrated a total takeover of the political process. We had economic stability before, and it was looted by the greed of our financial and industrial sectors.

Of course this all seems like a pipe dream. Those guys won. They have assumed control and they don't have to give a fuck what people on some forum say about them