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Re:The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospec... by WalterBright on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @11:11PM (#43640253)
> The deficit should count, but since Federal taxes haven't been increased to service it it doesn't, so there is that

Inflation is the result of the deficit, and it is the equivalent of a tax. This is why politicians work so hard to deny that inflation comes from the deficit.

Want more examples of burdensome regulation? Try Lina Kahn of the FTC with her frivolous (but very expensive) lawsuits. Regulation is why the California high speed rail failed to be built, and why Biden's big spending program to install car charging stations resulted in zero chargers being built. Nearly every aspect of a car is subject to regulation, which is why they pretty much all look the same (unlike the variety in earlier years). EV regulation have been resulted in massive costs for the auto industry.

As for oil and gas, Biden blocked the pipelines that would have saved a ton of money.

The only unregulated market in the US is the software industry. And look how spectacularly successful it has been!! Prices have been driven down to literally zero! I'm in the software business, and I do not need approvals, permits, licenses, or any regulations pertaining to the software I write and sell.

(Other than laws against fraud, theft, etc.)

Re:The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospec... by mindslight on Thursday April 10, 2025 @01:15PM (#43646043)
> Inflation is the result of the deficit

This is extremely myopic.

Price inflation is the result of the explicit government policy that says price inflation must happen, and that enough new money will be created (monetary inflation) to make it happen. The part of the deficit that is debt owed to non-government entities is those entities wanting the large-scale equivalent of a savings account, and is not any more inflationary than a savings account. The part of the deficit that is "debt owed to the Fed" is monetary inflation. The other nongovernmental "debt owed to the Fed" like home mortgages is also monetary inflation. If the monetary inflation from that part of the deficit did not occur, then the Fed's technocratic mandate would be to lower rates even further to send even more new money to the banking industry so that price inflation would still occur.

This is the dynamic we've been suffering for the past 40+ years of fake "fiscal responsibility", that has seen the government starved of being able to spend for deliberate purposes like mitigating the damage to our industrial base from offshoring. Meanwhile all that monetary inflation still had to occur, so most of that money was just dumped into the banking sector. This mainly bid up the asset bubble, but to close the feedback loop that new money still has to get back to the consumer price index. This happens through consumer goods that can be financialized (housing, cars, insurance, education). Which is why those things have shot up in price - to bring up the average while manufactured goods have continued to go down in inflation-adjusted terms.

Re:The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospec... by Teever on Saturday April 12, 2025 @01:31AM (#43661609)
I've engaged with you on economic topics in the past and I've just read this thread. Suffice it to say you have some relatively unorthodox perspectives on economics and regulation so I was wondering -- What regulations if any do you consider necessary?

Why?