[hallway_monitor]

What would you cut? I don’t know what I would, but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

I know there’s a lot of hysteria around this, but I’m still at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will come out ahead. At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK. From a long-term financial stability standpoint it’s really not.

[dragonwriter]

> What would you cut?

Were I concerned about fiscal balance, I wouldn't view cutting as the best way to solve the problem, I would raise high-end taxes.

> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

Insofar as that’s true, it is a direct result of the actions taking thus far this administration, not something they are correcting—and not through fiscal imbalance causing wider problems but by a broad economic collapse directly (which, because the broad economy drives revenue, has fiscal balance problems as a second order impact.)

[bruce511]

It's worth noting that this "financial crisis" (which I disagree with) has been brought on by Republican governments. Bill Clinton left a budget surplus which is the easiest way to pay down the debt.

Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...) But hear me out.

Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than the current debt. With pretty much zero achieved. Focusing less on projecting power, and more on self-defense might deliver better returns.

Of course the military budget can't (and wont) be cut because it's not about the military. It's a carefully controlled jobs program that moves money from the federal piggy bank to pretty much every district in the nation. So it becomes a game of "cut x, but not y, because y is made in my district. It's easier to cut less-specific programs (like Medicare) because that isn't district specific.

Then again maybe the tide has turned, and they could cut military spending. The CHIPS act funneled tons of money to Florida and yet Floridians hated it.

[hallway_monitor]

Thanks to you and GP for a reasoned response. Appropriately taxing the wealthy is 100% something we also need to do and yes, I am skeptical that the current administration will move in that direction. Ditto cuts to the monstrous military industrial complex.

I think I’ll refrain from responding to the more inflammatory replies but what really sounded the financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given to the house on February 5th by Arizona rep David Schweikert. He makes a really compelling case about the dire state and future of the government’s financial position. If indeed I have been hoodwinked as other comments seem to think, I am open to being convinced otherwise. But this talk is well documented, and seems like a plea from a man who is desperate to sound the alarm so we can prevent disastrous consequences for millions of people in this country.

[1] https://youtu.be/TCyysMU66VA?si=Fjhx2xgYZ0upkxeo

[mindslight]

Talk of "financial alarm" for a government with monetary sovereignty is specious. It will mislead you into analyzing government finances as if they were household finances, whereas governments use newly created money rather than going bankrupt. And for our government, this really just means less newly created money going directly into private pockets.

It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve" neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of government debt that is owed to private parties is essentially savings accounts for institutions and other countries who believe that USD will hold future value better than other assets. The other part of the government debt that is owed to a different branch of government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham accounting measure to support the political martingale.

The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership position when all of our industrial, scientific, military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright facilitating that destruction.

[bruce511]

Alas I can't watch the YT link right now, so I can't comment on that.

However I will point out that the goal of the current "effeciency drive" has nothing to do with the deficit. I confidently predict that the deficit will be larger, not smaller, at the end of this administration. Primarily driven by tax cuts on the aristocracy.

While personally I don't think the deficit number is terribly concerning (it behaves very differently to personal debt) its interesting to note that Republicans, not Democrats are responsible for most of it.

[rainsford]

I think the "hoodwinking" is about the immediacy of the problem, rather than whether it exists or not. Most of the current rhetoric and "efficiency" actions are centered around this idea that we're rapidly approach some near term fiscal cliff that requires action that's drastic in the temporal sense to avoid disaster. No time thinking things through or even following the law, it's a five alarm emergency that requires immediate action! This is where you get ideas like randomly firing new government employees before you even figure out what they do just because they're easier to fire. It doesn't save much money and has a lot of downsides and might not even be legal, but when time is of the essence you could maybe squint and see the argument.

But the reality is that time is not of the essence. Infinitely growing government debt does seem kind of unsuistainble long term, but the scale of the debt combined with the lack of any specific immediate forcing function would seem to favor actions that are drastic in scale but that can be spread over time. In other words the government needs to significantly increase revenue and/or decrease spending, but it doesn't need to do it tomorrow. It's nearly the complete opposite of what's going on now, where making cuts yesterday is considered vastly more important than actually getting to a place where spending and revenue are aligned long term.

[righthand]

> but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

Do you have proof of this? Otherwise you are spreading propaganda and lies. “We need to cut stuff because the party I support says so” isn’t proof of a financial apocalypse and is only fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s the very hysteria lying in which you refer.

[adamtaylor_13]

Do they have proof that 33+ trillion dollars in debt will begin snowballing larger than any country can actually service?

Do we need specific evidence about how debt interest works?

Sorry for how snarky this sounds but your response sounds like you don’t believe that the interest on over 33 trillion dollars is a big deal (and it’s growing…)

Please educate me if that’s not how interest or debt works (again I am dead serious here) but it seems disingenuous to claim that some sort of proof is required to point at the debt and say “Ah that’s not a problem unless you PROVE it’s a problem”

[righthand]

Big scary number does not mean system is broken. That is hysteria. I am not the one making generalized statements about financial apocalypse without some sort of notion of proof. Studies, links, evidence if you’re going to cry apocalypse and be taken seriously.

[stevenbedrick]

First of all, I don’t accept the a priori premise that cutting is needed. But if I did want to cut, I would want to have an actual plan for how to figure out what could be cut and what tradeoffs were involved, and then to execute that plan in way that balanced as many equities as possible and was done in a way that followed some sane and transparent process (as well as relevant laws).

Part of that might involve being able to show some kind of financial analysis about what was being cut, to justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.

Needless to say, what we are seeing now is… none of those things.

A good example of what a saner process might look like would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see how it all went down. They spent six months making a plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it passed with major bipartisan support).

[acdha]

> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

The people you get your news from are lying to you, trying to get you to sell out your future to their profit.

The economic issues we’re facing right now were created by the current administration installing heavy taxes on imports while simultaneously creating a nationwide shock with federal spending. This is like declaring that you should save money and doing so by not paying your rent, skipping the doctor, and pushing your car into the sea.

If we rolled back to January 19th, when the economy had been growing steadily and all signs projected that trend to continue, the long-term problems still weren’t catastrophic. The primary problem was that Republicans broke our balanced turn of the century budget when they cut tax rates and started a couple of recreational wars, setting a pattern which has continued where we’re told that we have to give up things the public benefit from because the alternative of rich people paying taxes a few points higher is too miserable to even consider. That debt is a concern, but not as a fraction of the massive American economy – it’s like the difference in medical concern between noticing that you’re gaining 10 pounds a year versus 10 pounds in the last week.

The reason the lying about the crisis has ramped lately is that some of the tax cuts which racked up trillions of additional debt in Trump’s first term expire this year and others in 2028, but the Republicans want to cut taxes even further. It’s mathematically impossible to do that without unpopular cuts to things people like, such as Medicaid or children’s health insurance (CHIP), which is why they’re trying to distract with gross exaggerations of the currently-negative DOGE savings and trying to manufacture this air of impending disaster so people don’t think there’s a choice. While the choice is no longer as easy going back to Biden’s economic growth, it could simply be letting tax rise to the levels we had 20-30 years ago when the economy was thriving.

[p_j_w]

> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.

[sanderjd]

If your plan doesn't include passing bills through Congress that increase tax revenue and cut popular social entitlement programs, it is not targeting this problem.

A few dudes firing a bunch of people entirely through executive action has absolutely nothing to do with the financial problem you're worried about. The federal payroll is not a significant cost, and the executive branch doesn't control the budget.

It is no different than a magician doing misdirection. It's up to you whether you want to buy the act.

[telephone4]

I don't think you understand how money works. Federal debt doesn't matter beyond its relationship to taxes and inflation. The US needs to raise taxes and address inequality through greater investment in public services and infrastructure, as well as stronger regulations on consumer goods pricing, not less.

[tbrownaw]

> Federal debt doesn't matter beyond its relationship to taxes and inflation

Much like household debt doesn't matter beyond it's relationship to household income?

[marsovo]

Macroeconomics is very different from microeconomics. Your spending is my income and my spending is your income. If the government spends a dollar, where does it go?

Presumably it goes to some sort of goods and services. The employees pay income taxes. The businesses pay corporate taxes. And so on.

Similarly, when a business lays off 10,000 people, it's not their problem anymore. Whereas from a macroeconomic policy perspective, "everybody" is the government's responsibility.

[ncallaway]

National debt and household debt are very different things, because most households aren’t able to print money

[abootstrapper]

> What would you cut?

Nothing. Tax the billionaires.

[throwaway2037]

It wouldn't raise enough money. Probably better to say: "Tax the multi-millionaires", or even people who earn more than 1M USD per year.

What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?

[josephcsible]

> What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?

Doing so by lowering the active income rate wouldn't raise more money, and doing so by raising the passive income rate would kill investment and job creation and send us into a depression.

[gortok]

That already seems to be happening. Business leaders with capital are actively trying to replace workers with AI or offshoring; so what would be the extra damage from codifying that we want folks to put their money here?

[mrguyorama]

>but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

No you don't know that, because it is outright wrong.

We could hold this level of debt for decades and safely reduce it over a long time frame. Plenty of other countries have done that plenty of other times. Christ, most of Europe only just got done paying us off for WW2!

Indeed, we had almost no debt at the turn of the millennium, after Congress during Clinton's admin cut a bunch of stuff after significant PUBLIC DEBATE, but Bush got us into multiple outright false wars to drop bombs in the desert for two decades and now all of a sudden the republicans are concerned about fiscal responsibility?

Fuck right off.

> At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK

That's literally what they are doing. The proposed budget is just more tax cuts for billionaires. Stop being so goddamned gullible.