In practice the current budget bill is wildly unbalanced and will vastly extend our debt, despite extensive cuts to important programs.
We either need massive cuts in mandatory spending (fundamental changes to social contract) or increased revenue (politically not viable).
There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.
I don't think this is really supportable. Obviously one can appeal to the practically endless examples of countries that destroyed their own economies with debt. Of course the obvious argument to this is that this hasn't happened to the US. But there were extremely unique, and liminal, circumstances that explain this, that a search on "exporting inflation" [1] can largely explain. And those days are mostly behind us.
We can see this playing out in practice. Current interest payments on the debt are now $1.1 trillion per year. They've grown exponentially, far faster than the debt has. [2] The reason for this is that we can't just handwave away inflation so easily anymore, so we're now experiencing more like what would happen to other countries that let their money printers get a bit too excited. The Fed is keeping rates high in hopes of bringing inflation down, but it's just not really working. What this means is that when the government sells treasuries (which is how they 'print money') they need to offer ever higher interest rates. Notably even 20 year treasuries right now are offering yields of about 5%, so it seems most are not enthusiastic about things getting much better.
I think we're well on our way to becoming another of history's cautionary tales that the next great power will also certainly think doesn't apply to them, because if something hasn't exploded in 50 years, that must mean it'll never explode.
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The alternative is to pay an ever increasing amount of interest on our ever increasing debt.
The other alternative is to default on our debt obligations.
Neither option is good.
These three words are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting.
Is that really true? Seems like its just an issue of how you frame it.
It makes it clear that the fundamental issue is not government revenue, but government spending. Every single time you give the government $1 they find a reason to spend $1.05. Why would you expect this to change if you give them $1.05, instead of them now just finding a reason to spend $1.10?
I think that democracies are probably just fundamentally incapable of caring about long-term problems like debt when acting irresponsibly has substantial short-term benefits. It's almost like some spin on a tragedy of the commons.
You do know the military spend on research dwarfs any other federal agency, right? The DoD research budget is about 5X that of NASA.
This gets to the point early where it’s easy to be in favor of cuts in the abstract but much harder in practice once you see that it touches something you favor.
The charitable reading of parent's comment is "reduce the spending on the parts of the military that aren't research (or research solely dedicated to killing people)".
I'm sure they were thinking more along the lines of bombing various countries (or $40MM birthday parades) rather than the next onion routing protocol coming out of the Naval Research Laboratory.
You can still disagree with that, of course, but responding to the steelman version of someone's argument is much better than a snarky "You do know XYZ, right?".
If you really want a balanced budget, you need to figure out how to slow the growth of mandatory spending and increase revenue. Neither of which Trump or the GOP seem interested in doing.
Total Revenue: 4.9 trillion
Mandatory Spending: 4.1 trillion
Net Interest: 0.9 trillion
Discretionary Spending: 1.8 trillion
Yes, we could zero out discretionary spending and just barely eke out a balanced budget. We either need more revenue OR a complete reset on the social contract for a long-term balanced budget.
I.e. if there are 100 cement trucks in the economy and 95 are allocated for state projects, the private sector needs to produce additional cement trucks under the increased burden of taxation. In the near term, cement construction costs have been increased. From this point, perhaps another bureau will enter by nationalizing the cement truck industry, "To secure our vital national interests and remain competitive"
Without decentralized market price signals, we are unable to value the end goals of the state's construction project. More troubling still, we wouldn't know of how the market may have allocated those trucks or if those trucks would have been used in a more productive way. However, we can observe empirical historical examples of lowered productivity which correlates with central planning.
I'm sure it'll also have other deleterious effects on the economy such as brain drain which would be difficult to reverse.
Citation absolutely required. Amongst other things, NASA has set huge piles of money on fire (literally!) building a rocket program that should probably be shut down entirely. Now, whether or not these particular scientific programs are a net positive investment is a more subtle point that is certainly up for debate, but "NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy" is pure assertion.
Speaking as someone who is generally pro-science -- to the point where I actually went out and got a PhD, in science -- we can't just assume that "science" is net beneficial to society. From direct experience, most science is just useless crap, and a lot of scientific funding is pure political patronage, dressed up in a white lab coat.
I do think it's a situation where the line item is fairly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but in a world where the government is quickly going broke, hard choices must be made, and cutting this kind of stuff will also not be the end of science.
You have to be painfully credulous to believe that that NASA would find anything to the contrary.
While you're at it, I'm also curious how you think cutting profitable departments (such as CPFB) or white-collar law enforcement helps anyone other than the president's friends.
The OP asked for an answer, and the fallacy I’m trying to point out is this assumption that “all” research is generally worthwhile. And I don’t mean just that there are exceptions, but swaths of topics and institutions and researchers and methods that aren’t really adding anything of value. Some areas, like aerospace, have been the focus of intense research for a long long time. This is to the point where SpaceX has been able to walk in and build a space program from scratch. I don’t mean to minimize their hard work, but it just shows that we’re not in the 1930s anymore. It makes sense that you should occasionally adjust your priorities from time to time based on your needs.
I don't think all research is worthwhile; I think grant proposals should get shot down if the lab/idea isn't up to snuff.
I'm happy for companies to do R&D! There's lot of examples over the years (Bell labs, Google, etc). I just don't think it makes sense in high risk situations with long reward lag times.
Private investment is risk-averse: they will support reliable short term gains over dubious long term breakthroughs. That's fine, but history has shown it's not the best way.
No, public research is an investment. The job of the government is to spend money on things that help the country's people. That includes roads, the military, and science.
Even then ROI for taxpayers is staggeringly huge in the long run. Calling it a "net-loss" is ... well. It is flat-earth level thinking.
And once again people are mad and trying to cut off their nose to spite their face.
That’s not what is being done by this admin, however. AI-generated tariff rates on 2-letter ISO country codes are not targeted in any meaningful sense.
Hobbling the workforce is not a plan for success. It is robbery by the oligarch class.
This isn’t the same as a full revolution, where you rewrite the entire government, not just the bureaucracy (I.e. get rid of Congress, Supreme Court, executive branch and replace them with something new).
If the problem you your thinking is the amount of bureaucracy, what's your specific complaint? It costs too much? Nothing gets done? There's wasteful spending?
We have two options (if you take a balanced budget as a worthy goal, which is debatable)... 1 - rebuild the social contract from the ground up, with massively reduced mandatory spending
2 - increase revenue
Address deficit spending? Trump and the GOP do not care about that at all, they're looking at increasing the deficit dramatically.
The GOP has done an amazing job selling people on topics like the deficit, trade, big tech and doing the opposite and people still fall for it.
>No don't cut that!
No one likes austerity. It doesn't matter what it is you should be 100% onboard with cutting pretty much absolutely anything possible the federal government is doing.