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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (astralcodexten.com)   2157 thread views

ACT: Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

astralcodexten.com

I'd guess the vast majority of you read Astral Codex Ten regardless of whether it gets posted here, but Scott's latest culture war (adjacent) post is not to be missed.

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Kinda funny that the 2020 one considers deploying a $1000/mo UBI is infeasible in the question to Yang, but then later that year the gov't would distribute significantly-sized checks to people with relatively little difficulty due to Covid policy.

Spending huge amounts of money for one year is very different from spending huge amounts of money every year, indefinitely. Imagine you went on a lavish vacation, staying at fancy hotels and eating at expensive restaurants for a week, and then your kid asked you "why can't we always live like this? After all, we just did so with relatively little difficulty for a week."

Not to mention, we've been paying the price for our massive money printing that year ever since with major inflation.

I think that “infeasible” was in the sense of financial solvency, like free college for all, or anything about social security. Not in the sense of the government being unable to mail a check.

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