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Status quo bias isn't lost on me, but I think the stakes are too high for "slash everything and then closely reevaluate which good stuff we should be spending cash on." (Ideally, essential programs wouldn't be dependent on federal grants, but, well, relevant xkcd.)
I dont see how that is a relevant xkcd. The stakes of our spending programs are generally terribly low. We know this because the first thing the complaining parties came up with to try and hammer was international free AIDS drugs. Is it possible to think of a less relevant program to a plumber in Iowa, bank teller in Virginia, or a drug dealer in Chicago? Maybe. They'd have to think hard though. REAL hard.
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If essential programs shouldn't be dependent on federal grants, this is a fantastic opportunity to figure out what those essential programs are, and then get them off of the government teat or otherwise de-risk them.
Keep in mind this is just an EO and not something more critical, like a government funding shutdown or some other financial crisis. If there's really some widget farm in Nebraska that is federally funded and keeping the lights on, Trump can greenlight it tomorrow. That won't be true in the event of an actual crisis.
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But the stakes of status quo are too high. Our interest owed alone is more than we have allocated to the military. And that’s just with current spending. We cannot sustain ourselves as a country if we end up spending more on interest owed than anything else in the budget. Obligatory welfare spending, which includes social security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare reimbursements, and subsidies to institutions to provide aid are a huge and ever growing burden on the American taxpayers and thus a huge drag on the economy. Quite frankly we’re broke and in fact underwater in ways that will become apparent fairly soon. Any shock to the status quo— our status as reserve currency, a trade war, a large scale war, and we will have a catastrophe on our hands because we no longer have the option to simply money printer go brrrrrr our way out of a fiscal crisis. And if you look to countries where these sorts of currency collapses happened, they’re to quote the President “shithole countries”.
I think doing it this way might be a bit ham handed, but the alternative to “shut it all down” might well be “whelp we tried to get our fiscal house in order, but nobody was willing to cut any programs. I guess we just go along here.” Which I think would be a huge problem because the chickens of too much spending will come home to roost on the taxpayers’ backs or on hyperinflation or both.
What reason is there to believe that this is intended to be part of a plan to balance the budget? That's not the stated purpose, nor did Trump seem to care about deficits during his first term.
I am not sure if this is actually part of a balance-the-budget initiative (this seems to me to perhaps be part of his ongoing operation to essentially purge the executive branch) but Trump has spoken before about the need to balance the budget.
He's also apparently pushed Congress to do away with the income tax, which I don't think is feasible without some extreme budgetary slashing (even if we do ramp up tariffs).
Trump has promised tax cuts, spending increases (on the military, and by implication on immigration enforcement) and a balanced budget. This is fundamentally non-serious, but par for the course for politicians.
Trump has always come across to me as someone who thinks that you can blow past arithmetic by force of personality. His lenders and business partners learned that not even Trump can do that long before he went into politics, and nothing in his first term suggested that thinks have changed.
Yes. I am not saying I think the math works, merely pointing out that there are some reasons to think it's part of a balance-the-budget initiative.
I am coming to believe his first term might not be particularly illuminating when it comes to What Trump Will Get Up To This Time Around but we'll see.
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There's lots of speculation about America becoming brown Argentina. Why not more like Japan, which is also slowly strangling itself under stagnating productivity and a lolhuge debt?
Honestly either one is bad. What we need is to set ourselves on a steady fiscal course and restructure our economy towards productivity and growth and thus create prosperity. The fiscal part is quite simple — starve the beast that’s eating up not only the vast majority of our money, but creating so many burdens on productivity that even if the government was solvent, it would still be almost impossible to create growth.
The burdens are enormous. You have thousands of regulations to start even a simple business are pretty high. Theres OSHA, labor laws, if you’re doing food service an entire Bible of health code laws. Some rules are necessary, obviously, but at a certain point, you become your own enemy. We can’t create small businesses and new products as we could if you didn’t have so many rules and regulations to follow.
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