[MisterKent]

Two points that are often missed:

1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.

2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.

The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.

[munchler]

"We spend too much" is a political opinion, rather than a statement of fact. Only Congress can change the amount of money spent by the government, so the executive branch's actions are unconstitutional, no matter how large the crowd cheering it on. This is exactly the sort of mob rule that the Founders wanted to prevent.

[Sysreq2]

I keep harping on this - but two points:

1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.

2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.

[xphos]

I feel funny to say it, but I think we have an income problem, not an expense problem. Republicans just spend money and then cut taxes.

If people believe we need what we are spending on, we need to tax the difference. It sucks to pay taxes but we need to do it

[janandonly]

I read about a guy in Turkmenistan who would as a punishment be taxed 20%, and I thought, living in Western Europe or North America is kind of a financial punishment .

Mind you, taxed 20%, not 20% extra. Source: https://www.jw.org/en/news/region/turkmenistan/Turkmenistan-...

[ThunderSizzle]

How much tax is enough? The government would, without playing a deduction game, would love to take 20-30% of my income, while having devalued my dollar by 50-100% in the last 5 years. My salary goes half as far.

Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?

Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.

[Tadpole9181]

It's telling that you didn't even consider that the taxes would come from businesses. The businesses that created the majority of inflation by gouging consumers out and bleeding them dry every tiniest opportunity they legally could.

[xphos]

I mean practically this take is so wrong. If the (US) government is just so hell bent on taxation how the heck did we get to the point where taxes on income went from 90% (~1950) on top bracket to less than 35%? Business tax was (35% 2008) -> 20% (2020).

Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.

Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)

[crabmusket]

> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money.

All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.

[Sysreq2]

Right but until Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Executive Branch has an empty wallet and maxed out credit card. Funding doesn’t go out all at once either. Some programs don’t start until later in the year for example. They typically aim to distribute 1/12th of the yearly allowance per month. Sometimes agencies will over spend early and have to be austere later (like FEMA last year).

Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.

Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.

They are two distinct things.

[skywhopper]

None of that has anything whatsoever to do with what DOGE is doing.

[skywhopper]

The debt ceiling is entirely artificial, and ought to be unconstitutional. Congress decides how much to spend. Issuing debt when necessary to pay for those allocations is implied.

Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.

[insane_dreamer]

The military is over half of all Fed discretionary spending.

Another huge expense is servicing our debt.

Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.

By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.

[guax]

I went to search, the us gov has a nice website about the dev. Til.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

The debt graph caught my eye. I did not expect it to be that stable for so long. I wonder what happened in 1981, impossible to say.

[refurb]

> I wonder what happened in 1981, impossible to say.

Total federal income was flat after the early 80's recession, then grew by 60%+ over the next decade, despite the Reagan tax cuts, increasing $400B.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFR

Federal spending continued to grow.

That's what happened.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment

One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.

Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)

[ankwardat]

Musk is stealing data to use for his own gain, and installing back doors so he permanently has control over government. It will take decades to undo the spyware he's installing.

[cr__]

So raise the debt ceiling?

[ankwardat]

These are the biggest contributors to undoing Clinton's balanced budget in the 90's:

* Bush Jr Tax Cuts

* Useless Iraq war

* Too Big to Fail Bailouts of Banks

* Trumps tax cuts

* COVID spending

When billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations pay episilon to zero in taxes, maybe they should pay their share. Taxing the rich would solve the problem overnight.

[loanedempathy]

Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.

Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.

The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.

[dragonwriter]

> Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.

It's really not that hard to have that combination, i.e., "authoritarian populism".

[loanedempathy]

You'll note that I used the word despot, and not authoritarian. This was not an accident.

[vkou]

> Congress needs to find their balls

Some of the GOP tried to do that a few years ago, and went against Trump.

They were all destroyed.

There's no longer an escape hatch from this.

[amanaplanacanal]

They should have convicted him when they had the chance, either time they had the chance to do it. But party over country seems to be the motto.

[loanedempathy]

To misquote Death of Stalin, they had they choice between his conviction and his revenge. They picked poorly.

[rayiner]

It’s quite debatable what the founders intended here. Congress has the power to appropriate funds, it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.

Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.

[tptacek]

This is tantamount to saying that the executive not only has a line-item veto, but that it's non-overridable. Seems wrong.

[secos]

This planet money article lays out the arguments for both with lots of interesting links to follow. https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/02/18/g-s1-49...

[unclebucknasty]

>cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession

This is not correct.

The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.

The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.

That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.

[rayiner]

> The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds.

That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:

> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying

There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.

[unclebucknasty]

Your conclusion directly contradicts the Code you quoted.

From the Code:

>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...

The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".

However, your conclusion adds:

>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.

The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".

This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.

[mpalmer]

Cutting matters not one bit if Congress doesn't pass tax cuts. Voters don't care about the national debt if they don't see more money coming to them.

[whall6]

I actually think that they would still care. It weirdly feels cathartic to know that we are no longer spending federal taxpayer dollars on “zombie apocalypse preparation classes” no matter how insignificant it is to the budget. What is the best way to eat an elephant?

[mpalmer]

I don't see how an informed person who cares about the rule of law feels cathartic about what is happening.

[MisterKent]

We don't. Rules are all essentially fictional, and an agreed illusion that we've all been conditioned to see as an immutable.

What the past few decades did was push enough people to the point of no longer seeing the value in continuing the illusion.

I am terrified of the long term ramifications here. But again, I do see how we ended up here.

[cwalv]

I think you're both right. The don't care (without a tax cut) until the most ridiculous line items are made public.

[mpalmer]

Problem is the ridiculous line items wouldn't make a shadow of a dent in the federal budget. Certainly won't lower your tax bill.

[mpalmer]

Bad metaphor. What's the best way to lose weight? Elon thinks it's cutting your arm off.

[dboreham]

Voters generally speaking don't pay federal income tax, or pay so little that it won't make a difference.

[KennyBlanken]

The Impoundment Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the house and unanimous support in the senate. It was a direct rebuke to Nixon deciding he had the presidential authority to not fund programs he didn't like.

It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.

The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.

It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.

As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."

[georgemcbay]

> it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.

It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:

"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."

https://casetext.com/case/in-re-aiken-cnty-2

Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.

[munchler]

Forget the Impoundment Act -- this is a Constitutional issue. The Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the President is required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which budget authority is provided by the United States Congress. Shuttering USAID, as Trump and Musk have done, goes way beyond mere line item impoundments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York

[zdragnar]

However, they claim that USAID was spending far too much on projects that were not in line with their objectives. Not even Congress can create an agency that is fully autonomous with zero oversight from anyone within the government.

Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.

[Volundr]

Can you clarify what USAIDs objectives are and which programs are "far outside those objectives".

Most of what I see being complained about can easily fall under socioeconomic development, which is ostensibly one of the objectives.

[daveguy]

All of these agencies had multiple levels of oversight both within the executive and through congress. Trump eliminated inspectors general positions providing oversight.

The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.

Trump is taking a shit on the US Constitution.

[rayiner]

From your source:

> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.

[skissane]

The current SCOTUS majority isn't afraid to overturn 50 year old precedents. Given they overturned Roe v Wade, why not Train v City of New York too?

But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.

[johnnyanmac]

Depends on the lens. Depending on your tolerance for debt, we can argue that we objectively spend too much. Another lens can be that we don't collect enough taxes and therefore we don't have enough to spend.

Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.

[sbochins]

This is a silly charade. To actually cut the debt, it requires congress. Not just saving a couple millions dollars and posting on twitter about it. We’ll need to cut Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the military, etc. All the popular stuff that was never easy and will never be easy to cut. We’re not spending 2 trillion per year on condoms.

[bamboozled]

Won’t wiping all this stuff just lead us into a Great Depression anyway ? I’m not an expert on the topic but my basic understanding was that we (government) just decided we didn’t have any money, so everything just stopped.

Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it back will surely have some dire economic impacts?

[intended]

Yup. I’ve seen 2 grand disasters like this each worse than the last. Demonitization in India, Brexit, and now this.

None of those other events had the same depth of damage going on here. America is dead, and doesn’t know it yet.

The only reason people aren’t saying this everywhere, is because this is unbelievable.

[throw16180339]

Firing this many government employees, canceling grants, and imposing tariffs guarantees at least a recession.

[TylerE]

Yes. These cuts will set our nation back by decades. Institutions are being destroyed, and with them cultural and institutional knowledge that will never come back.

[sroussey]

The government can just print money. So much so that inflation goes crazy and the national debt is pennies. Same with your savings. We have a lot of savers that are old. Wait until they are gone.

[secos]

or raise taxes.

[ZeroGravitas]

They are raising taxes.

Income tax on everyone earning g less than 360K is going up, plus tariffs which are regressive.

They're also cutting taxes for those earning more than that, the top 5%

https://itep.org/a-distributional-analysis-of-donald-trumps-...

[ijustlovemath]

Which would probably raise less than a modest wealth tax on billionaires, but we know that will never get traction (even though its an extremely popular policy)

[oezi]

What I don't understand is why they want to cut the debt or the budget. Previous terms have shown that increasing spending and racking up debts isn't leading to loss of polls. Why are Trump and Elon going on this cutting spree instead of doling out tax cuts and increasing pork to their constituents on borrowed money?

[crooked-v]

Because the Project 2025 plan includes de facto destroying as much of the government as possible to make it easier to replace people with pure cronies.

[James_K]

2 is not a fact in the slightest. The American government is guilty of under-investment in perhaps every area outside of military. The notion of bipartisan climbing public debt is also false. Bill Clinton brought the government into running and Democrats have had consistently better budget responsibility than Republicans, though the reason for this is more that the Dems fund government through taxes where the Republicans fund government through debt to give out tax cuts. The actual levels of spending are not so much changed because it turns out that most of the money spent by government is quite important and you can't just get rid of it.

[oezi]

So why are the Republicans now trying to reign-in the spending? It worked well for them in the past to rely on debt. Why should they care now?

Is it about funneling this money into their tax cut? Why not just run up more debt?

[chgs]

They aren’t

[James_K]

There are practical limits to the amount of debt a government can take on. Additionally, the government usually collects debt from the wealthy, who then make money back through interest payments. The "fiscal responsibility" of the Democrats is how private individuals actually extract value out of the government. Republicans issue debt, Dems use tax money to pay the interest. I think the wealthy have become more sceptical about the ability of of government to pay back these loans.

There are reasons why both parties allowed the system to remain as it was. I find it's increasingly true that new politicians don't understand the value of the systems they are meant to control. They see Chesterton's Fence and tear it down with abandon. Someone like Trump has no clue why politicians act the way they do. He lies and bullshits and does whatever he wants, and it works in the short term, but the long term effect is disastrous. These people are taking a private equity approach to government. Buy it cheap and load it up with debt, then sell as much as you can and let it crash to zero. This is more looting than governing.

[biophysboy]

The estimate should at least be within an order of magnitude; otherwise, the estimate is pointless.

Also, I am booing them because all of the doge line items on their website are in the millions, and our debt is trillions.

[softwaredoug]

Do we spend too much? Or do we not take in sufficient revenue?

All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s, but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can’t just be canceled by executive order.

[rawgabbit]

It is more we believe in magic. We hand out tax breaks like they are candy, cripple the government, and believe some DOGE waving a chainsaw will fix the budget. Extending the Trump tax cuts is estimated to cost $4.6 trillion over ten years.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tax-cuts-extension-republ...

[whoitwas]

GOP has made it it's mission to ensure the federal government doesn't function my entire adult life. They've been working to destroy the middle class since long before I was born. They continue with this mission now and have really turned up the heat. They're currently working to cut taxes for those who make >$360k/year and also eliminate medicaid while INCREASING the deficit by $4.3 trillion.

[matthewdgreen]

The people coming in with a hatchet are not planning to reduce spending. They’re planning to use any money saved to fund an enormous tax cut that will primarily benefit the very rich. https://www.courant.com/2025/02/12/congress-budget-tax-cuts/

[oezi]

They didn't need to cut so aggressively the first time around when they did the previous tax cuts, didn't they?

[mandmandam]

Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and should be around 10% instead.

The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.

Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.

[yadaeno]

I agree but condemning government budget cuts because USAID seems reactionary. I think the spirit of cutting budget is still overall popular, and is impossible to do painlessly.

Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.

~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.

[oezi]

I don't understand why the US is forgetting that it isn't alone in the world. Spending a little money on international aid has been exerting American soft power for decades and likely flowed back multiple times in additional trade.

Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?

[jwkpiano1]

That’s for _Congress_ to decide, not the executive. That’s the issue here.

[insane_dreamer]

> ~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.

if only that's what they would spend it on. Instead, it's going to go to the military.

[refurb]

USAID is not "international aid". It's an arm of the CIA that uses "international development" as a cover for it's activities.

Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.

That doesn't sound like international aid.

Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".

One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.

[corimaith]

The two are not mutually exclusive, providing HIV assistance or maternal aid both is definitionally international aid while also furthering US interests. If you define international aid as purely unconditional or even counterproductive to self-interest then you'd be hard pressed to find any sort of example, nor would it be a definition I would think many agree with.

[refurb]

If you're arguing other countries will suffer with the end of USAID programs, that will be a hard argument to win.

Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability is a high price for other countries to pay and I'm sure is a net negative for them.

[corimaith]

>Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability

You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.

[refurb]

> You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.

I should rephrase that to "political instability with regards to the perspective of locals".

I agree the US is seeking "political stability" with these activities. But it's on US terms which is often in direct opposition to the locals.

And I'd argue my view is not "dubious paranoia". The purpose of USAID is to use development activities as a cover for interference in other country's politics.

[MisterKent]

People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first"

The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.

[mandmandam]

> We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.

Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.

And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.

[FireBeyond]

We have this myth of the founding fathers as wisened, street smart old men. In reality, many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.

[Dracophoenix]

Past a certain point, age has little to do with prudence. There are rational and knowledgable teenagers just as there are middle-aged dullards.

One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.

[FireBeyond]

Of course. Although being self-sufficient does not mean that you have a fully developed brain and cognition, either.

And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.

[Keyframe]

many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.

really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).

[FireBeyond]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-the...

"As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than 40 years old in 1776 ... more than a dozen of them were 35 or younger."

Peter Salem was the youngest signatory at 16.

Alexander Hamilton, 21. Thomas Lynch, Jr, and Edward Rutledge, 26. George Walton, 27, and Thomas Heyward, Jr, 29.

[corimaith]

What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past? I don't think there are any, the frenzy of the masses has never ended well, and ironically just ended up in actual dictators taking power in the end. Social media just inflates the problem even more.

[mandmandam]

> What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past?

I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].

What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.

And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.

[corimaith]

>populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people.

I'm asking in retrospect to the overall well-being on the nation in actual policies and results, not in it's political dominance. As recently as the Cultural Revolution we can see what happens the excesses of the mob are released.

>What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals

Well I think you're attacking a strawman here, there will be situtations where their writings are not so relevant, but this situation of populism very much falls into category where their writings are relevant and specfically designed to anticipate for.

If you don't believe that, well then explain what are your alternative solutions to populism and if they are more poltically viable than what the founders proposed. I suspect if you weigh them all, the founders' ideals will come out on top.

Don't underestimate history, don't think you are really that different from our past. Plato might have lived 2000 years ago, but we still influenced by him today precisely due to the timeless quality of his ideas. Same as the Founders, you might disparage them for slavery that was common at the time, but their sincere devotion to republican ideals were acts of extraordinary moral upstanding that were rare both then and today. That's why we greatly respect them, not just in USA but around the world.

[jfengel]

They didn't seem to reckon that against representatives who are sent to reflect the will of that same general public. They are not incentivized to contradict their constituents. In particular they do not have the responsibility to represent the demographic of their losing opponent, and in many ways are encouraged to do exactly the opposite.

It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.

[rayiner]

“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas.

The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.

[derriz]

How is soft power is a fake concept?

At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.

Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.

It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.

[rayiner]

“Soft power” as a term of art used by liberal internationalists is bullshit. It’s just a way to proselytize foreign countries in a way that makes them resentful.

E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.

[alienthrowaway]

> Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so

This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.

Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?

[oezi]

This is the same way to say that friendship is a fake concept just because it is intangible.

Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.

[insane_dreamer]

If you think "soft power" is a fake concept, you have very little understanding of how American foreign policy actually works in other countries.

For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.

[ergl]

Is this comment satire?

[actionfromafar]

It's the most unhinged thing I have read all week, and that's saying something these days.

I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.

[ok_dad]

No, this is the type of thing that MAGA folks have been fed on their media and social media feeds. They’ve been taught that everything complex in government and in politics and in geopolitics are deep state conspiracies and lies in order for the left to maintain power. They think that what’s going on now is a turn to normalcy and that America was hindered by the policies of the left. They truly believe this stuff. It’s insane how different their world is, they don’t live in the same reality as the “other side”. I’m not sure how to fix this, how do you convince someone of reality when they insist on some hallucinations being real?

[TomK32]

It'd be fantastic if surveys would allow those surveyed to do a minute or two of research before answering or correcting their answer.

[jfengel]

They are voting based on their opinions without doing additional research. Getting at that opinion via a poll is informative, and letting them research it would actually be counterproductive.

[shadowgovt]

The booing will start when Americans realize what a delicate web of interconnects they live in. It hasn't really sunk in yet, but these "waste" jobs tend to be there for a reason, and this whole project is the ultimate exercise in flattening Chesterton's Fences and seeing what happens.

(I'm reminded of the Golgafrinchans from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They sent their "useless" third of society into space... The folks who did jobs like telephone cleaner or insurance salesman. The remaining two-thirds of the population died from a plague sourced from a dirty telephone.)

[istjohn]

That's one way to frame it. Alternatively, one could argue we don't tax enough, and that's due to large tax cuts, first under Bush and then under Trump. Now Trump wants more tax cuts.

[jhp123]

if you take a dollar from government spending, then 60 or 70 cents of that is coming from the bank accounts of retirees, disabled people, and the poor. If you return that dollar as tax cuts, as Trump has proposed, then something like 80 cents go into the bank accounts of the rich.

The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.

[turtlesdown11]

Strong points in the face of this inaccurate, politically biased ledger that has revealed zero fraud, corruption or waste.

[MisterKent]

I am maybe cynical, but I sincerely doubt there's no fraud or corruption in the government spend. Among trillions of dollars of money being spent by people who can easily siphon some off, etc.

Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.

I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.

I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.

[rincebrain]

It's also a very hard line to draw, in some cases, since you can have the right things happening for the wrong reasons.

If a bill contains funding to help fix a main street in a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster, is that corruption?

What if there's 500 other destroyed main streets and that one got picked?

What if it was destroyed by decades of the local gov't neglecting it?

What if it was included because you directly bribed the person writing the bill?

What if it was included because you did some horse trading and gave them something they wanted in another bill you wrote?

The intent there is not to argue that defining corruption is impossible or futile, but that some people might reasonably argue different sides of whether something was corruption without either side obviously being morally bankrupt.

[EasyMark]

his cuts are max 0.1% of government outlays, yet the MAGAs are acting like it's slash and burn and worshipping at the idol of their cult of personality(ies?) . Anyway it's so obvious to anyway who steps back and turns off the political blinders. Just look at the sheer number of lies coming from Musk and Trump about the "savings" ,about millions of people over 100 getting social security checks, that the few million of probably waste of money USAID was spending is evidence to cut without any other proof the entire USAID organization, even though it's a $50 billion dollar outlay. It's so effing sad that people fall for this, and that our education system is such a failure on probably the most necessary modern skill other than literacy--critical thinking.

[garden_hermit]

The insane thing of all this is that the 1% being cut is almost entirely in investments: money for research that drives economic growth, money for the USAID that provides the US influence around the world, cuts to CDC staff that could help mitigate expensive pandemics…the list goes on.

So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.

[rayiner]

[flagged]

[djur]

First, what was done with the money:

> The $2 billion was used for the "decarbonization of homes" in low-income communities and paid for new household appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities.

Second, the claim that it was given to Stacey Abrams, from the LinkedIn post cited in the article:

> The coalition includes Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), United Way, and Habitat for Humanity International and today, we've applied for $9.5 billion — part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act — to directly fund residential decarbonization and electrification... The application is already supported by 321 partners who have pledged to decarbonize housing units across 46 states and every EPA region. It also includes 156 communities pledging to decarbonize housing units, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities, and rural and Tribal communities.

It appears that Stacey Abrams was in some way involved in organizing a coalition of existing nonprofits to apply for congressionally authorized grant money. There is no evidence I can see that she received any of the money or that any other impropriety was involved.

"$2 billion to Stacey Abrams" is a falsehood, even based on the content of the inflammatory Fox News article.

[JeremyNT]

2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining global hegemony through military dominance.

Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.

[pclmulqdq]

You should look at the CBO's reports on this. Most of the budget is spent maintaining Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. The sleight of hand involved in the idea that the military budget is "most" of the spending is by calling large parts of the government's spending (but none of its military spending) "mandatory," and then slicing up the "discretionary" portion only, most of which is the military.

However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory spending and interest, there would still be a government deficit.

That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4 trillion.

[insane_dreamer]

That's because the SS/Medicare are not discretionary which means that those are basically predetermined and not set by Congress every year.

So when we talk about the "budget", what really matters as far as politicians are concerned, is the discretionary part, which they can control (and which in theory voters have some control over through their election of congressmen), and defense takes up at least half of that.

[rayiner]

The full budget is $6.9 trillion, not $4.4 trillion.

[pclmulqdq]

I am bad at addition, but I was going from 2023's numbers, which were indeed close to $6.4 trillion, not $4.4 trillion. Mandatory spending alone was $3.8 trillion.

[dboreham]

Because people have been gasslit into believing that social security and medicare are funded by the same-named payroll withholding contributions.

[MisterKent]

I think many who are okay with our civil spend may take issue with our military spend.

I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should be spending the money.

I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I assure you I am not.

However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got here (DOGE being acceptable).

And from that I blame almost everyone in politics and every person tangentially related to those in politics.

[jfengel]

A lot of people think they government isn't overspending. They're the bond buyers, who loan the US government money at remarkably low interest rates. That's a true market signal, regardless of what people tell pollsters.

Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.

[largbae]

I think you're on a reasonable track, but this isn't the whole picture. Most international treasury demand is the direct result of trade deficits in dollars.

If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business customers selling products internationally in that currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus of USD as well.

So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate" in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash under the mattress.

Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that signal is lit.

[jfengel]

Inflation is about 3%. That's higher than optimal but hardly a crisis. It does not suggest a broad negative judgement.

Those dollars instead seem to be going into the stock market. Too many, I would say, and I think the Fed is making a mistake in trying to lower interest rates. But it does suggest that investors do not anticipate a sudden crisis of the government.

[Fade_Dance]

Of course it's worth noting that the bond market has massively sold off since inflation hit. The counterpoint is that it's arguably just going back to the mean, but nonetheless, it's a fairly historic move.

US yields at the long end (the part of the curve that is sensitive to long-term stagflation and inflation) don't necessarily indicate that participants believe that the spending isn't a problem either. Once yield started to rise, the U.S. massively twisted issuance back to T-Bills, which are short duration and essentially risk-free. Fragility on the long end is being carefully managed.

To some extent, you are seeing some financial repression, ie the shape of the yield curve is being actively managed. This expectation is built into the bond prices as well. If the long end starts to break down, nobody expects the treasury to start issuing even more long bonds. They naturally would expect them to pull back and start issuing more T-Bills and only term out the debt once the market/liquidity can handle it. There is some conversation right now about leverage limits in the banking system/SLR being expanded, so there is more capacity to warehouse the debt on the banking side. That's pushing in the direction of financial repression (where the banks are "incentivized" to shape the curve in a desired way).

0% interest rates were leveraged against the Fed Put, and it's arguable that there is a Treasury Issuance Put that is currently baked in.

I think that the issue is broader than this though. It's about much more than just the inflationary effects of spending. It's an ideological battle as well. As for bonds, there's also the fact that US bonds are a "there is no alternative" asset to some degree. Remember that bond investors got their faces ripped off in the initial rate hike cycle. There's a good parallel to commodity futures prices here, in that prices of commodity futures are terrible indicators of the actual price in the future. There is a distinction between where a market clears and a bet on future prices. It is a somewhat subtle distinction, but it is grossly underappreciated. That said, of course you can isolate the inflation expectation aspect of the bond market and you are probably correct that this indicator does not red flag inflation driven by excess spending. Of course, growth expectations are also fairly healthy. So it's hard to say what it would look like if inflation expectations stayed high and growth expectations started to fall. Then the bond market might look quite a bit different. We haven't seen a true stagflationary market in 50 years.

[rayiner]

Without looking it up, what do you think is the military budget in comparison to the whole budget.

[sroussey]

Europe has a problem trying to spend a minimum 2% of GDP. We easily to 10x that.

[amenhotep]

So do you think that the US GDP is $4.21 trillion, or do you think that the US spends $5.83 trillion on the military?

[sroussey]

Yeah, I am a dummy, I was thinking as percent of budget not GDP. Yikes!

[rayiner]

We are at 3.37%.

[EasyMark]

1. I can't agree with this. We have AI to raise flags and we have computers to make payment and bookkeeping trivial.

2. we may or may not spend enough. what we don't do is collect enough taxes to pay for it, that is the failure.

[rstat1]

>We have AI to raise flags

That it would like get wrong more often than not. No thanks.