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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.

We have a massive problem. 2T deficit p.a. We have an NGO network funded by our own government working against us. And indeed, it is almost certain that any of these stories are being coordinated by current USAID employees (in part why it was absurd for the judge to issue a TRO re thr admin leave). That is, we are paying the American executive to try to undermine the American executive.

No sorry I don’t care about this. Sorry it sucks but we can’t afford it and it needs to be cut. This is the way.

OP isn't talking about whether these things needed to continue to be funded indefinitely. The problem is that instead of "we will fund no further studies, no argument" the order literally caused studies to be halted midway through. Which would be fine if the study was a passive observation of the mating habits of roofing bats in the wild; less fine when it means the volunteers have already begun potentially dangerous treatment regimens, and are now being dumped out into the world. (It's not even as though they can continue taking experimental drugs on their own dime to avoid withdrawal; if the study's over the study's over.)

Lots of people answer this kind of talk with "it was a clean break, or the tiniest amount of leeway being used by everyone and their dog until the whole DOGE died by a thousand paper cuts". But come the fuck on. Leaving clinical-study volunteers hanging is ridiculously evil in principle, and I just can't accept that it was this or setting such a precedent for leniency as to scuttle the entire DOGE endeavor. Really now. The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

Because you aren’t working with people who want to cut. So every carve out you give will be expanded beyond belief. Half measures rarely work against an entrenched enemy.

The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

No, it's literally impossible. Remember, you're dealing with people with sufficient motivated reasoning to pretend to be confused about words like "man" and "woman". People with years of critical theory training that teaches that meaning is subjective, and concepts constructed.

The place where Elon's people draw the line doesn't have to be accepted by the woke activists, though. DOGE can just come up with a common-sense criterion that makes sense to them, and if someone tries to argue in obvious bad faith that their bullshit study is on the right side of the line, they can just say "no it isn't; you may not appeal this decision; goodbye, please don't email us again". This would undoubtedly still cause a ruckus, and it might even have a few false positives, but it would still be immeasurably better than not having common-sense exceptions at all, and I genuinely think it should be trivial for DOGE to implement if they really have the stuff.

Like, why are you acting as though trivial word-salad smoke-and-mirrors would leave them helpless and befuddled? Isn't cutting through the obfuscation and identifying the good government programs from the woke hustlers supposed to be what they're for? If they're not up to this then one wonders why an elite crack team led by one of the most successful men in the world is needed for this job. You could get the same effect if you told an AI to cut all government programs no matter what, gave it access to a government email, and let it loose.

The DOGE (and Trump more broadly) is fighting a bureaucracy hostile to them. The activists are the people carrying out the orders.

Doing it before-the-fact rather than after-the-fact enables what is essentially a DDOS attack on the decision-makers. Doing it in this order makes a flood-the-zone-with-appeals strategy work in favor of DOGE instead of against it.

The argument against that is that if I have funding and I think I won’t next week, if I get a reprieve by “putting medical devices in bodies”, then I might just do that. Or maybe a drug that needs to be strictly monitored, again, if I will lose everything if I don’t and I get to maintain funding and my job if I just start the trials and hope that the funding doesn’t dry up, why not?

And this would actually be worse for those patients who are being asked to start said trials knowing that the funds might not be there to finish. I’ll be honest, any doctor at the moment trying to recruit people for a NIH trial on a serious disease like cancer knowing that the funding won’t be there should have his license yanked. We know these trials will be stopped, and we know that those recruits will waste time and possibly risk health doing a trial that will stop. And those patients lose time for treatment.

That’s where ripping off the bandage helps. We know the trials are stopping mid trial so people signing up now should know better.

We're talking about months-long trials that were already ongoing when everything was suddenly put on hold with no forewarning. Obviously no one should be starting any more trials for the time being; and doubly-obviously, any doctors trying to blackmail the government by suddenly adding dangerous procedures to an ongoing trial should be sued with extreme prejudice. (They shouldn't be hard to catch, the whole deal with clinical studies that get government funds is that you register what you said you were going to use the money for in advance.)

We have very rich liberals in Washington. And wiring money takes less than 24 hours. If people cared as much as they whine about it - someone would have picked up the slack already.

Coordination is hard. I think it's unsurprising for liberals' position to be "we have a coordination machine, it's called the government, please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason". (Even if there are obvious rejoinders.)

please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason

The conservative then proceeds to holds up a mirror. "Just build your own foreign aid organization."

I'm honestly surprised they don't. It would be such an obvious PR win, even if they don't actually care about the affected people.

If you prove it can be done without the state, then you'll have a much harder time arguing that it should be the responsibility of the state.

I can't take Trump seriously about the deficit when he openly plans on insulting massive tax cuts that will massively outdo whatever nibbling around the edges DOGE manages to accomplish.

A lot of that is make believe. There are a ton of expiring provisions that will “cost money” to extend but won’t raise or lower current taxes. At the same time, there are some tax relief they want.

I mean, do you not count tariffs as taxes? If you eliminate the 25% tax on the profits of China-to-Amazon Inc, but instead charge them 25% on everything they bring from china, are you cutting taxes? Or just shifting the tax burden?

Sloshing tariffs and corporate tax around is well and good, but what about the rest of the tax cuts promised, amounting to a fiscal hole somewhere in the neighborhood of $5T?

Overtime pay tax cut could be anywhere from .25 trillion to 3 trillion? Sounds like they just wanted to throw a few extra trillion in there.

I'm upset he wants to expand salt deductions though. Reducing those last time was a huge coup. Guess tech bending the knee means he needs to give something back.

The analysis seems pretty reasonable to me. It's hard to put an exact number accounting for how people will react to the new rules environment. But it's even harder to imagine this all penciling out.

Yeah, Trump's tariff announcement today was good actually. Certainly much better than his previous ideas.

  1. Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

  2. VAT offsets. If European countries average 20% VAT and we average 6% sales tax, that's the equivalent of a 14% difference in tariffs that need to be accounted for.. Edit: I am wrong. Thanks to @The_Nybbler.

There's a good chance Trump could lower taxes in the US in a revenue neutral way.

A VAT isn't similar to a tariff at all, and reciprocating Euro VAT with American tariff is harm to Americans with no purpose. The way VAT works is an American hammer costs e.g. $10 in the US and $12 in Europe because of VAT... but a European hammer of the same base price ALSO costs $10 in the US and $12 in Europe. There's no unfair practice there.

If you set the tariffs off against sales tax, you've made a truly horrible incentive; it makes it easier for states to raise their sales taxes up to Euro/Canadian VAT levels.

i still dont get why people think VAT is comparable to tariffs? is trumps idea of "fair" that we keep taxing our own products with VAT but make an exception american imports?

Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

Except that others don't charge us tariffs, we charge ourselves tariffs. It's more like "we charge ourselves what others charge themselves". When you formulate it that way it becomes clear why this is a losing proposition.

If it's purely self charging then why are there retribution tariffs? Obviously when you raise the price of a good when produced by foreigners such that you give your internal market an advantage it is bad for those foreigners. They need to pass the cost to the consumer but that would make them uncompetitive. The winner of tariffs is special local interests, the loser are general internal interests and foreign competitors. The only interests influential in foreign states are the foreign competitors thus foreign states oppose it.

The whole "the consumer pays 100% of the tariff" has ben debunked a million times. The cost is never passed on 100% to the consumer.

Can you provide more information on this? I'm curious what proportion is, as I'd assume it'd be fairly close intuitively, and I've never seen anything otherwise.

A quick peruse of google scholar give this paper: https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1814161

It suggests that for a change in tariff rates, less than 1/3 is reflected in end consumer prices.

Sorry I don't have more sources, I haven't read many econimics papers even though I'm an economist 🙃

That's okay, that is more that sufficient - thank you!

I don't see what that has to do with what I wrote.

I've always thought reciprocal carbon taxes on imports would be an amazing scissor-wrench to throw in the works.
Get the free traders arguing with the greens about why you can import silicon made with coal in China at 0% tax, but silicon made with coal in the US gets taxed and regulated to death.

First time I’ve ever heard of tax cuts being insulting

It's not necessarily just nibbling around the edges. There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.

DOGE started with USAID because the spending was so ludicrous and so obviously geared towards sinecures for the uniparty political machine.

It's been what, 3 weeks. They've cut $100 billion so far. Give it time. If they're allowed to cook, it's going to be a lot, lot more.

Here's the doom loop chart

For those of you too lazy to click on the link; the CBO has crunched the numbers and the net effect on income due to transfers (i.e. medicare, medicaid, SS, etc.) beings to be a net negative starting at the middle quintile.

Phrased differently: the top 60% of Americans have less income, on net, because of the massive transfers to the bottom 40%.

Culture war angle: Which quintiles are the sources of new business formation, full time employment, responsible family practices etc?

60+ years of Great Society-ism and horrific perverse incentives for family formation and work mean that we now have a situation where 40% of the population can be - indelicately - called a drag on growth and prosperity. 40%.

Even Sarah McLaughlin can't save this DOGE, and this DOGE can't save America.

What is surprising about that chart? What did you expect? Obviously the transfers benefitting the poor come from the rich. People have been voting for this for the last century, and will keep voting for it. The state's share of the economy will keep growing, first to european levels, then beyond. And it doesn't matter to people how rich in absolute terms "the poor" are, or how much wealth gets destroyed in the process. I find the impulse difficult to understand, perhaps an extreme rawlsian risk aversion (like an insurance against relative poverty) coupled with the egalitarian ideal of equal social status leading to a demand of equal income.

Did you intend to offer a serious reply, or just use my comment as a way to jerk the spotlight towards yourself?

The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.

Even if they do find $1 trillion in fraud, he’s proposed five trillion in tax cuts. That math is harsh.

Total government revenue is less than 5 trillion. You are comparing annual vs total numbers.

They've cut $100 billion so far.

doge-tracker.com/ gives 45.6 billion, of which 37.5 billion comes from counting the full annual salary and benefits of the staff accepting the voluntary retirement scheme as a saving, even though they are still being paid for another 8 months. Given the number of staff involved compared to normal Federal employee turnover, the real saving here may be negative. And of course, this saving goes away if the government can't eliminate the work the retired employees were doing.

That leaves about $8 billion in unambiguously real savings, of which $4 billion is the illegal cut to the overhead on NIH grants.

I think the difference between the $100 billion being bandied about and the doge-tracker numbers comes from assuming that the entire USAID budget is zeroed out, and that this counts as a DOGE saving.

There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.

SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?

They've cut $100 billion so far.

Have they cut or have they just put a temporary stop on expenditures? How many programs have actually been durably cancelled, either by the executive or by Congress?

SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?

The US is definitely getting as least bang for their buck with military contracts. Any reason to believe that the other are different?

The military presumably wastes money on slow rolling procurement and other things of that nature. A full quarter of defense spending is salaries, and perhaps there are people drawing a salary that don't need to be there.

SS is a cash transfer program that spends less than one percent on administrative overhead, so savings from firing useless employees would be minimal. The only possible avenue for waste would be actual fraud on the part of the recipients. I doubt that this is anywhere near 30%, but I don't expect either of us could convince the other on this point. However, the longer DOGE goes on without announcing finding this fraud, the more skeptical we should be.

A full quarter of defense spending is salaries

I would go the other way. Salaries should be a bigger fraction of the military budget.

There could be massive savings also in Medicare and Medicaid if they only stomp their feet and use their massive scale to cut costs.

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