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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   32019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Don't worry, the plan is to cut taxes as well.

Is this the plan where you cut taxes by x and then cut spending by 1/3 of x?

The tax cuts will pay for themselves :V

You can tell which party is out of power by which one becomes what Krugman calls "debt scolds." Worrying about the deficit is always, 100% of the time, no exceptions, an ironclad rule of the universe for all of time and space forever and ever amen, a soldier argument meant to attack whatever the deficit-increasing policy is itself. In this case, for those who make your criticism, it's usually the very idea of billionaires keeping more of their own money.

For DOGE, it's the legions of Democrat-voting federal workers who would be better unemployed.

The federal debt will only be dealt with when America is facing total destruction. Medicare, Social Security, military, and debt servicing will never be cut. America would sooner commit suicide. Worrying about the debt is not a serious argument or point of persuasion.

I do not think the US was facing total destruction when the Clinton-Gingrich regime ran surpluses. Obama-era sequestration wasn't big enough to "deal with the debt" but it was a big step in the right direction.

The actual politics is that deficit-reducing policy is only possible under a Democratic President with a functional conservative Republican majority in at least one house of Congress. The good news is that this could become a long-term norm if Trump trashes the Republican party's reputation, but not by enough to overcome Senate malapportionment.

The US can keep borrowing indefinitely as long as the dollar is the global reserve currency. That reserve currency status is a central cause of the trade deficit that the current administration is railing against. Ending the trade deficit, the stated goal of this administration, will therefore necessitate a much more fiscally disciplined federal budget moving forward.

Except that there have been moves away from the petrodollar as global currency. Saudi Arabia nearly dropped the Petrodollar, and the Russian sphere from what I gather has already switched to the Ruble. China wants to make the Renbei the reserve currency. If (and I think it’s a when ) the world stops using petrodollars, not only will the debt and trade deficit matter a lot, but given the number of dollars in circulation globally, we’re talking about Zimbabwean levels of inflation.

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