Isn’t there a way to spend the money you’re going to spend on that to spend it on like food availability, or affordable housing, or education…?
I think this sentence is what I was trying to point out. Basically, it’s not a question of “pay for X or Y” but a question of “do we have the votes for X, will Americans reelect us for Y”. Let me detail:
Americans don’t care about or understand the deficit
There has never been a true austerity party in the US. Bush Sr. ran on cutting taxes. Bush Jr. ran on massive tax cuts. Trump’s taxation policy was a massive billionaire tax cut. Every single time a Republican has been in office for the past three decades they’ve exploded the deficit by cutting revenue without substantial enough spending cuts. They still win reelection.
Americans “concerned about the deficit” typically fall into two camps: those who erroneously compare it to a household budget, and those who engage in vague pronouncements about its “impact on our children”. So one who seems to have a concrete idea of what will happen but is wrong, and one who seems not to know what the consequences will be but are worried sick about them.
The reality is that the immediate and long-term impacts of the deficit are small, and the immediate and long-term impacts of failing to invest in infrastructure and social spending are very high
What Americans should be concerned about vis. the future of our children is producing a new generation that is healthy, educated, productive, housed affordably, expanding in size, and comfortable in illness and old age. We should care about being able to get around the country fast without boiling the oceans. We should care about being able to survive natural disasters, global pandemics, terrorism, war, and resource shortages. These are all things worth creating deficit for. The adage “you have to spend money to make money” makes sense here.
In summary
I agree that we should be spending money on social support- but the failure to do both isn’t because there’s a limited amount of money we have to spend on one or the other, it’s a lack of control of the levers of power and a failure of will.
Okay, I see where you’re coming from. I agree with it too. Thank you for typing this out! (So beautifully too. I’m on mobile so expect abysmal editing and a wall of text. Sorry not sorry.) I will say that I was definitely coming from it from the perspective of “you’re allocated x number of $ to do your work.” Which, as you’re getting at, really isn’t the true issue. It’s a systemic one.
Interestingly, a lot of my “politically charged conversations” basically end up going down this path. But, how does one fix a systemic problem? Every time I try to come up with any sort of solution it basically turns to “damn I hope someone smarter than me has ideas cause mine are ‘burn it down’”.
You’re not totally wrong with “burn it down” in the sense of bureaucracy. The sociologist Weber felt they were actually efficient systems up to a point, and even necessary for democracy, but then became the worst nightmares that we could never undo. And as we see much more recently, Graber argued that any time you asked the government to streamline, it would just increase regulations, paperwork, bureaucrats needed for the aforementioned, etc.
So we have this necessary evil to start the kind of system we wanted in place, it’s only getting worse, and any candidate with smart ideas who wants a chance gets sucked right into it. “Reform” only reproduces the problem in a slightly different direction. Like Akira or a T-1000 I guess.
Interesting. Okay, so let’s say, we do “burn it down”. Is it just the human condition? Are we doomed to repeat everything even if we could start anew tomorrow?
I guess what I struggle with is, while I hate current status quo, I don’t see a situation where things are better if we did burn it down. In fact, they’re exponentially worse after all structure is hypothetically burned.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.
I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.
Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.
Care to elaborate? I probably have, I was raised in that environment, though, I wouldn’t call myself right leaning on most things.
I think this sentence is what I was trying to point out. Basically, it’s not a question of “pay for X or Y” but a question of “do we have the votes for X, will Americans reelect us for Y”. Let me detail:
Americans don’t care about or understand the deficit
There has never been a true austerity party in the US. Bush Sr. ran on cutting taxes. Bush Jr. ran on massive tax cuts. Trump’s taxation policy was a massive billionaire tax cut. Every single time a Republican has been in office for the past three decades they’ve exploded the deficit by cutting revenue without substantial enough spending cuts. They still win reelection.
Americans “concerned about the deficit” typically fall into two camps: those who erroneously compare it to a household budget, and those who engage in vague pronouncements about its “impact on our children”. So one who seems to have a concrete idea of what will happen but is wrong, and one who seems not to know what the consequences will be but are worried sick about them.
The reality is that the immediate and long-term impacts of the deficit are small, and the immediate and long-term impacts of failing to invest in infrastructure and social spending are very high
What Americans should be concerned about vis. the future of our children is producing a new generation that is healthy, educated, productive, housed affordably, expanding in size, and comfortable in illness and old age. We should care about being able to get around the country fast without boiling the oceans. We should care about being able to survive natural disasters, global pandemics, terrorism, war, and resource shortages. These are all things worth creating deficit for. The adage “you have to spend money to make money” makes sense here.
In summary
I agree that we should be spending money on social support- but the failure to do both isn’t because there’s a limited amount of money we have to spend on one or the other, it’s a lack of control of the levers of power and a failure of will.
Okay, I see where you’re coming from. I agree with it too. Thank you for typing this out! (So beautifully too. I’m on mobile so expect abysmal editing and a wall of text. Sorry not sorry.) I will say that I was definitely coming from it from the perspective of “you’re allocated x number of $ to do your work.” Which, as you’re getting at, really isn’t the true issue. It’s a systemic one.
Interestingly, a lot of my “politically charged conversations” basically end up going down this path. But, how does one fix a systemic problem? Every time I try to come up with any sort of solution it basically turns to “damn I hope someone smarter than me has ideas cause mine are ‘burn it down’”.
You’re not totally wrong with “burn it down” in the sense of bureaucracy. The sociologist Weber felt they were actually efficient systems up to a point, and even necessary for democracy, but then became the worst nightmares that we could never undo. And as we see much more recently, Graber argued that any time you asked the government to streamline, it would just increase regulations, paperwork, bureaucrats needed for the aforementioned, etc.
So we have this necessary evil to start the kind of system we wanted in place, it’s only getting worse, and any candidate with smart ideas who wants a chance gets sucked right into it. “Reform” only reproduces the problem in a slightly different direction. Like Akira or a T-1000 I guess.
Interesting. Okay, so let’s say, we do “burn it down”. Is it just the human condition? Are we doomed to repeat everything even if we could start anew tomorrow?
I guess what I struggle with is, while I hate current status quo, I don’t see a situation where things are better if we did burn it down. In fact, they’re exponentially worse after all structure is hypothetically burned.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.
I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.
Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.