Also on a side note, I love how sneaky that NY Times article leaves out the option to cut defense. After all we can NEVER reduce our military industrial complex, only cut everything else to the bone.
After national defense, you mean.
Not really, but for as bearish as I am on the government in general, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a bright spot, and they do very good work at forecasting, auditing, and evaluating tax cuts, tax increases, budget cuts, and so forth. The average person can have faith that the CBO does mostly good work because politicians on both sides of the aisle really dislike the department when they tell the truth about their plans.
If you want to attack efficiency, you have a lot of work to deeply change how the government, and in fact many aspects of our public / government works. How they use contractors, the kinds of contracts they're allowed to enter into, the reviews and permitting and public commenting they need to engage in, unions, labor rates, etc. That would be as big a challenge as the above debate.
That isn't fraud or corruption as most folks understand those terms. It is more simply not designing for efficiency. People are more concerned with other factors like fairness transparent process.
I've dealt with both commercial contracts and government contracts.
Commercial contracts are more lucrative with overhead rates that are truly illegal on govt contracts.
For states and cities, see local government websites for reports. Or you can start here:
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/
On the state/city level, all the money is going to former employees for labor performed in previous decades. The scheme is voters today purchase government employee labor for lower cash outlay today hence lower taxes today, then subsequent taxpayers pay higher and higher taxes as the can gets kicked down the road.
The reason this is different from regular old debt is that via questionable accounting methods and actuarial assumptions, the cost of the deferred compensation is presented as absurdly low compared to what it really is. So it does not show up on any official figures anywhere, just greater and greater portions of the government budget go to paying benefits.
This is why contracting out services makes public sector CFOs so happy.
Replace a large % of your civil servant workforce with a company that specializes in that one function, eat potentially higher or inflated OPEX, but no long-term costs regarding pensions. If the requirement for services change, scale down the contract.
There is magic, the rise of productivity. It just didn't reach the ordinary people.
Quite a bit of my university work in the early 2000s revolved around studying and modeling pension-type retirement plans, primarily in the United States (Chicago and Philadelphia mostly come to mind), but a little in foreign countries. While EU pensions tend to be in worse positions, it's a distinction without a difference: Pension reform is basically impossible. Catastrophic bankruptcy and refusal to pay benefits is coming to a theatre near you, because the political will to even begin meager cuts (and so-called "drastic" cuts are indeed merely meager) does not exist.
Politicians who propose meaningful cuts to pensions are guaranteed a single term in office while the candidates waiting in line promise to keep the Ponzi scheme going.
I support pensions, but this has to be done at the federal level, and funded heavily through taxes and pro-natalist policies to keep demographics correct. Cities, states, counties and companies are not able to adequately fund defined benefit pensions.
Luckily, most Americans have pensions outside Social Security, so you won't end up in a situation where nobody has a pension if it collapsed. It would still be bad, but not as bad as if the federal government had a pension monopoly.
If I was a pension rep or director for the cops, teachers, firefighters, or whatever, best believe I would maximize my members' benefits to the maximum extent the law and guidelines allowed. That's really all that is happening with these unions. Sure, there is some corruption going on (when isn't there in any large organization, much less government agencies) that isn't helping matters, and there are idiots that are making things worse. But these issues are in the seriously tiny minority of the real problem: People who could not do math properly or were corrupt from the get-go set up an insane pyramid scheme built on ridiculous population growth and capital appreciation models, and no one wanted to stop the music for decades on end.
The most likely scenario by a WIDE margin is that pensioners are wiped out or forcibly restructured in a court of law, getting a small reduced fraction of their promised ("guaranteed") benefit. It just is. In America, we don't fix gradual issues - there is simply no incentive to do so. We ignore them until they blow up and then we do something about it. This sounds stupid, but it's perfectly rational on an individual level.
That probably depends on the culture.
My experience from Finland is that there is always a pension reform going on, or at least people are planning the next reform. It's been recognized for decades that the pension system is unsustainable, and reforms have gradually made it more sustainable. Pension growth is now based on a mix of price and wage growth, the initial pension is based on lifetime contributions rather than final wages, retirement age automatically follows changes in life expectancy, and so on.
Older generations certainly got a better deal, and young people are always cynical. But as people age, they tend to gain confidence in the system, as they have seen it change over their careers.
The US seems to have money to throw all over the world for this kind of bloodthirsty waste, if it cuts it can cut there. People getting back money they put into Social Security should be the last thing to go.
The US spends hundreds of billions on these wars of choice, that can be cut very easy.
Though the answer to your suggestions is that any populist conception of the American Empire is delusional. Like a mafia they will take your money and spend it in whatever way they damn well wish, and there's nothing you can do about it
They spend this money in order to prevent having an actual war later.
Also a lot of the aid is actually jobs program where the aid recipient is required to spend the money on American made goods.
So it's not quite as simplistic as you're making it out to be.
No, we that served don't.
> They spend this money in order to prevent having an actual war later.
Having spent a good part of my life prepping for Fulda Gap defense against the USSR I know that is incorrect.
The US has spread NATO right up to Russian doorstep, on the cusp of inside their early warning systems for missiles, having fomented revolution and armed the Western Ukrainians in their civil war against the Eastern Ethnic Russian Ukrainians.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Arab Spring turned Winter - more of American Adventurism than critical national security objectives.
Am all for a strong military, just not it being overutilized for incorrect purposes.
That's... interesting.
I don't know what point that serves, but I do find it difficult to see membership as something imposed on them. If they weren't allowed to join, I don't really know where that would go?
To this day, Fulda Gap Defense is a part of US military practice in Europe. Most people that work for a NATO flagged unit practice this also.
> but don't think that the countries that were beind the iron curtain should have been allowed to join nato?
First of all, US leaders from the past have made numerous promises not to extend NATO that far East.
When you take what was intended to be a defensive alliance and extend it right up to a potential enemy's doorstep, inside their missile defense early warning shield, when you foment a number of color revolutions in another country's sphere of influence (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, etc), and threaten their sphere of control, you are not just on the path to war, you are provoking it.
I also find it funny how the infographic doesn't show a scenario where only defense cuts are made, because it would show us how cutting defense spending is a really simple path toward a balanced budget without changing anything else.
Another example of the flaws of this argument/article is how Social Security is self-funded, and not in any financial jeopardy on its own. [1] Some of the other entitlement programs on the list also work that way.
Regardless, my understanding is that a government's budget never has to be balanced. It doesn't operate like a family household. Oftentimes, national debt is used for pursuits that return on their investment.
You're saying our only options are for taxes to rise, benefits decreasing, increasing retirement age, or snowballing debt. But why are those our only options? I think that argument is flawed and short-sighted. I don't think slowing population growth rate automatically means that those are our only options.
I only like one of those options: taxes on the wealthy and ultra-wealthy have a lot of room to rise. Jack them up, billionaires shouldn't exist, and people like Jeff Bezos shouldn't have a single-digit tax rate.
The other part would be looking at government inefficiencies and flawed policies that aren't on your list. For example, should we not talk about how suburban development and the interstate highway system is a monetary drain on wealth?
It's really obvious to me how building more sewer, road, and utilities per person and forcing everyone to own one car per capita or more is a dumb waste of money on a national level, and our government on every level plays a heavy hand in subsidizing that development pattern.
It would be really easy to afford my tax rate increasing to a much higher level if I wasn't forced to own more than one car just to get myself to work. It would be easier for me to afford housing if a bunch of single family home owners weren't preventing dense housing from being built.
But no, let's add one more lane and make our retirees work until they're 85 rather than fixing our structural problems that make America a very expensive and energy-wasteful place to live.
Because when you think about it, wealth is basically access to energy, and America is squandering their own wealth by dumping it into their GMC Yukon Denali Ultimate with 14MPG.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/info-2020/10...
Not sure what your point is. I'm not sharing the article/infographic and animated budget scenarios as "this is what needs to happen" from some party's perspective. The point is a graphical display of the size of different buckets (which I take as fact) and the sliders that you can play with. The cases being presented are just examples. You can mentally slide the bars / cut line and see how much is required.
> "I also find it funny how the infographic doesn't show a scenario where only defense cuts are made, because it would show us how cutting defense spending is a really simple path toward a balanced budget without changing anything else.
I don't know if you have looked at it, but the defense bar is as big as each of the Medicaid, other mandatory, and "all other" spending bars each. You would have to cut the entire defense budget and still not solve the problem, and only make a fractional share of what is achieved if you implemented cuts to those other programs.
> "Another example of the flaws of this argument/article is how Social Security is self-funded, and not in any financial jeopardy on its own. [1] Some of the other entitlement programs on the list also work that way."
Maybe you have to redefine your definition of self-funded. Sure it is self-funded, as long as taxes increase a lot, given the demographic wave coming. If taxes don't increase, or one of these other options, it will run out of funds. If we don't agree on that, we have a problem. This is the entire debate about the problem we face.
> "Regardless, my understanding is that a government's budget never has to be balanced. It doesn't operate like a family household...."
Well, correct, but the question is how deep do we go into the hole. If you read the story, and the charts, you can see the projections of debt going to 200% GDP. At that point we will be paying enough interest on our debt to have funded several large programs themselves.
> "You're saying our only options are for taxes to rise, benefits decreasing, increasing retirement age, or snowballing debt. But why are those our only options?"
And the other options are?
> "The other part would be looking at government inefficiencies and flawed policies that aren't on your list. For example, should we not talk about how suburban development and the interstate highway system is a monetary drain on wealth for the majority of the country?"
Sure, talk about it, but can you change the bulk of the US to capture whatever benefit you can from that change, within 50 years to save the programs needing the money?
> "I know I've spent a lot of time on this one issue as a specific example, but it's really just one of many ways in which being smart and efficient about the use of the vast wealth generated by the US would go a long way...."
The talking is all good, but the bottom line is will your proposals come up with the money in time?
We can start changing it today, and save ourselves the pain of having to deal with it when we retire.
It would also improve the quality of our day-to-day life on many dimensions, long before we do.
What the grandparent poster is alluding to is that our culture is sick with a myopic, penny-wise-pound-foolish mentality, where people are personally spending tens of thousands of dollars for a service that could be provided collectively for thousands of dollars. While also complaining about outrageous taxes.
The fancy little sliders are reinforcing the idea that “the money must come from one of these things” when it really should just come from progressive taxation at a reasonable rate instead of letting the wealthy off easy.
The Republican Party cut the taxes of the wealthy in 2017 and increased the deficit by doing so. They can’t be trusted to give advice about government spending because their basic party platform is that government is bad, the wealthy need tax relief, and their actual legislative track record is increasing the deficit. And yet here they are telling us through their study and this complimentary article that the only way to cut the deficit is to fuck the poor and the elderly.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571754894/charts-see-how-much...
Pensions are unheard of now, and companies are still struggling to keep up with them, likely meaning lowered wages for the next group(and no pensions). Tough luck.
I fully expect to pay social security my entire life to subsidize those getting it now, and to be dead before I'm ever able to collect a dime.
Honestly, even having paid into it my whole life, I wish they'd just kill it off. It's an unsustainable pyramid scheme, especially as birth rates flattened. Even if I do live long enough to collect, I don't want that burden on the next generations.
The age is going to keep being raised. A quarter of Americans don't even live to 'full retirement age.' And when it's raised so high it's profitable, the USG is just going to raid it like a slush fund.
Pensions and SocSec were both Ponzi Schemes, Only government could allow something so fraudulent to legally exist. (Interesting Fact, the original SocSec retirement age was 2 years higher than the Life Expectancy Age, now it is something like 8-10year lower... )
It could have kept working provided the population continued to grow at an ever increasing rate keeping the worker to retired person ratio at 10:1, but 2 or 3 generations of declining birth rates, and low immigration means the scheme is coming apart
More so your 401K is currently, and will continue to be reduced in value as the boomer take more and more capital out of the market for their final years. I think we will need to reassess what "normal" returns on a 30 year portfolio looks like as well, in addition to inflation which I think will stabilize at more than the target 2%..
Simply put.. we are economically stag net, and if you are under 40 retirement will be much harder
It is so simple a calculation and so ridiculous a situation, as you say (but in a different way than you mean), that this is a huge problem that will have to be confronted.
The CBO generates those kinds of calculations, and they're not a group known for making up things out of thin air.
Is this a real question? Top few percent of capital owners captured nearly 100% of productivity inrease that came from last few decades of technological development.
It's obvious who should be taxed.
On the one hand (hopefully meaningful to this crowd) is that when confronted with the sheer numbers and details involved, and what tradeoffs can/would have to be made to make a dent in the coming demographic-driven bankruptcy, the people who have to keep things running are trying to come up with the actually workable or "implement this decision" plans with the resources they have. Not aspirations.
Take a look at this for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/06/upshot/balanc...
See those numbers/scenarios, there is no getting around the severity of what needs to happen.
Then on the other plane, there are people (politicians, and people in general in the country) who deal in "symbols" and qualitative statements about what they think who is entitled to, what was promised, etc. "Eat the rich!" etc.
And lately it seems, rarely the twain shall meet. Or at least, it's quite rare to find leaders who are equally incentivized or capable of handling both sides of this adeptly. Also, the people who don't understand the numbers generally tend to shout and insist they're right. The numbers people don't usually shout. Also, and this is an evolving thought -- I don't think democracies are very well suited to allocating the pain of a country's long-term downturn very well, or having people understand when your country's resources are actually decreasing.
One thing is for sure -- there is a massive unpleasant reckoning coming in terms of what benefits and tax rates people believed they would experience. There is no magic getting out of this hole.