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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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If you cut and reduce the deficit, then one time emergencies won’t hurt as much. That is, being fiscally responsible is better in bad times compared to being fiscally irresponsible.

The US is phenomenally wealthy - more so than peer developed nations. Despite this, it spend proportionally less, even after you factor out the large gap in military spending. This is a policy choice. We're not out of money. We're not brushing up against some hard upper limit of what a government can spend without wrecking the economy. We've chosen an arrangement where we get lower taxes and more consumer spending over higher taxes and more government services. This has consequences. Some of them are positive, but sometimes it's going to mean you underinvested in public services relative to the ideal case.

As I said in my other comment, it's not like Congress was forced to choose between $100b to UA and $100b to FEMA.