Assuming my assumption is correct, I hope you're just recognizing the fact that MAGA didn't get where it is today without massive help from non-MAGA Republicans (in Congress as well as outside), in numerous ways. So you're not going to see the outcome you're waiting for if that's the case.
That explains a large part of why democrats were able to lower the debt - the republicans in congress wouldn't go along with efforts to raise the debt.
Cutting taxes without cutting spending raises the deficit and seems to be the GOP's most common fiscal policy.
They increase the deficit because they increase spending and then "cut" taxes. Often they don't effectively "cut" taxes for you and me: the tax burden for many Americans is raised, except for a select few who get tax cuts.
This was happening well before Trump, into Reagan. The only reason this works at all is because they get to say "oh we cut taxes!". But tax burden is very complicated, and nobody is analyzing that for the common voter.
Complete nonsense in practice, obviously - but political gold! Voters get all the same public services, lower taxes, and to think they're being responsible with money. And if you're a 65-year-old legislator, you'll be dead and buried before the consequences start to bite.
The best way to make sense of the GOP is in it's opposition to wealth redistribution. Primarily downward wealth redistribution. That's their north star.
Upward redistribution is mostly OK though, they consider it just giving rich people their own money back
Democrats Change In Deficit
----------- --------
Joe Biden -$999B
Barack Obama -$747B
Bill Clinton -$383B
Jimmy Carter +$25.3B
Republicans Change In Deficit
----------- --------
Donald Trump +$2.108T
George W. Bush +$1.541T
George H. W. Bush +$102B
Ronald Reagan +$73.7B
Gerald Ford +$47.5B
Richard Nixon +$9.4B
Dwight Eisenhower -$3.2BThere's nothing "these days" about the idea: that's how all debt should be looked at. How much in interest will it cost you, and are the benefits you get worth that cost?
Borrowing money at 2-4% to build water/sewers infrastructure so your population does not die, and thus allows for better economic growth, can pay for the borrowed money easily. Or roads, bridges, rail, schools, scientific research, etc.
If you're borrowing money because you have low revenues due to tax cuts (especially in top tax brackets), then perhaps your ROI won't be as good.
Deficit spending causes inflation, and that type of inflation is a hidden, regressive form of taxation. It hits everybody, but the poorest suffer most when all the essentials get more expensive. The government creates new money, but really the value of that money comes out of everybody's income and bank accounts.
If additional government spending is truly necessary, it should be funded through transparent, progressive taxation, so that it only affects those who can afford to pay the tax, and so that the voting public is aware of it.
Unforunately, you're unlikely to win an election on the promise of raising taxes. The hidden tax of inflation, on the other hand, is so perfectly hidden in plain sight that most people don't notice it unless it gets out of hand.
Can you share more about this? I'm unfamiliar with a post-World War II civil war risk. Who were the conspirators? Who would be fighting whom?
> Nowadays the American Left is Center Right, but back then the American Right was Center Left. Things change, things stay the same.
I don't think this is the case. Populism has confused some folks about where things stand. There also seems to be this default assumption, kind of like the End of History, that being "left" is associated with moral goodness and so haha the American left is only just center right, ergo not quite good enough yet! I'd challenge that assumption. Frankly, the center is often the best because moving too far to one side or the other is destabilizing. Communism would be awful, as would other authoritarian ideologies like fascism.
FDR Democrats: fixed the Great Depression by bailing out the people not the banks (construction of roads, bridges, schools, dams, airports), regulated the banks, legislated protections for unions, electrified rural America, ended elder poverty with Social Security, won WWII, won the peace after WWII. Paid for it by taxing the rich, paid down the debt by taxing pensions.
Clinton Democrats: cut the government to the bone, "DOGE but real," massive tax hike on top workers, massive tax cut on capital, kicked offshoring into gear (NAFTA was voted against by most House and Senate Democrats), teed up the China WTO admission for Bush, and handed him a massive budget surplus with a bow on top ready to be pissed away on not one but two pointless Republican forever-wars. Oh, and bonus Epstein connection.
These are not the same. FDR Democrats would see Clinton Democrats as 100% DINOs, doing everything that Republicans say they want. The DINOs can only be identified as non-Republican due to their fiscal restraint which has not been a Republican quality since Eisenhower. Obama Democrats were better, but chose to bail out the banks not the people, didn't pass single-payer healthcare, and didn't end Bush's forever wars. Biden ended Afghanistan and quietly started enforcing Trump fair trade policies. So the Democratic party has been moving left at a snail's pace after reaching a zenith of "Republicans but less shit," but they are still far, far from FDR. Who was in turn far from actual socialists or communists. Here's hoping that on this next swing of the pendulum we land on FDR again, yeah?
In any case, you cannot average your way to enlightenment. If you want that, you must learn about actual policies and actual history.
But I think your own argument betrays itself and proves my point.
> but they are still far, far from FDR. Who was in turn far from actual socialists or communists. Here's hoping that on this next swing of the pendulum we land on FDR again, yeah?
When you write this, you're basically arguing my very point - that the center is the best because moving too far to one side or the other is destabilizing. In your own words you've basically boxed in the Democratic Party in the center and you're just arguing FDR was in that center but further to the left. Ok? Yes I agree. If you go center right a bit, or center left a bit, what's the real difference besides the mascot?
But even from the great things that FDR did, just because they worked at one point in time doesn't mean they are forever and always the best idea going forward.
> Here's hoping that on this next swing of the pendulum we land on FDR again, yeah?
Depends on the details. If we stop MAGA, DSA, fix crime, lower taxes, lower spending, streamline the government to be more effective (this could include something like government run healthcare by consolidating agencies), or other various ideas I'm always on board with talking through the pros and cons.
As an aside I always liked Teddy Roosevelt too. Maybe my favorite president aside from the usual suspects like Washington or Lincoln.
-edit-
As another aside I don't think we have to have a pro-capital regime that's also against many of the ideas you might be in favor of. The Nordic countries for example are the most capitalistic countries on the planet according to many measurements.
I genuinely believe that if FDR or an FDR-type did not exist, then communism would be the status-quo of developed nations. The US would turn communist after a bloody civil war. We would ally with the Soviets after. Together, the US, Soviets, and Europe would easily win WWII. At that point, Communism is set as the world order and would continue throughout the 20th century. Many parts of history would turn out "good" - no cold war, no Vietnam war, no Red Scare. Many other parts would turn out bad.
What FDR did was just enough to buy a few decades of peace before the capitalists ransacked the government again. By then, Communism was the ultimate enemy for obvious reasons. The propaganda was far too strong for any kind of revolution, and technology improved enough that people weren't nearly oppressed enough to care about any revolution.
Oh, and we probably would've gotten the civil rights era a couple decades earlier.
When you say things like "buy a few decades of peace before the capitalists ransacked the government again". What are you even talking about? I'm genuinely perplexed. Capitalism didn't, for example, cause World War I or even World War II - World War II was caused by the rise of Nazism, a nonaggression pact with Communists, and then the attack and partitioning of various countries in Europe by both the Nazis and Communists. In Asia, again, fascist powers attacked capitalist societies such as the United States. How would the US, Soviets, and Europe (who is Europe?) win World War II when from the beginning the Soviets and Nazis were aligned and jointly invaded Poland?
I would certainly grant you that, perhaps the United States would have experienced additional strife or maybe even a civil war had conditions gotten bad enough, but I can't for my life ever think that such a thing was even moderately serious. Even in countries where Communism completely took hold, capitalism found its way back because humans by intrinsic, evolutionary nature, always arrive at the same foundational conclusion which is property rights, cooperation for the greater good without coercion, and abstractions such as code or even money.
The #2 economy in the world is run by the Communist Party of China. #1, if you measure in material terms rather than financial terms.
The 1991 talking points are stale. Time passed, and the private owners of the US economy sold our industrial base to the communists in order to stuff their bank accounts. Private ownership provided the means, motive, and opportunity. I am a capitalist despite what it has done to my country, not because of it.
Well if you can even get accurate measurements out. Nobody really knows, for example, whether the population of China has been severely undercounted, or truly how much debt has been amassed, or what the next crises may be, similar to over-building in housing.
You also can't ignore the history of these countries in modern context. China has become more capitalist over time because communism was not working. The comment I was replying to was talking about World War II so of course pointing out the tens (hundreds?) of millions of lives lost due to communism is just participating in the discussion that was put forth here. I'd say the greatest gift China continues to give the United States is hamstringing its economy. They'd easily be #1 right now if not for the CCP.
> Time passed, and the private owners of the US economy sold our industrial base to the communists in order to stuff their bank accounts.
Not just that, but in order to get Americans the cheap baubles they so desire. But that seems less of a criticism of capitalism and more of a government failure.
It's a government failure all right: a failure of the government to tell the shareholders to stop selling out America.
Part of the reason, maybe the biggest part, that communist nations struggled is because the world's largest world power, which held 50% of the global GDP post WWII, openly opposed them as much as possible. It wasn't just war, it was trading, economic attacks, propaganda. Capitalism seeped back into communist nations because they saw the US was rich, whether that was true or not, and wanted to be more like the US. This was orchestrated intentionally over decades, this was literally the US' #1 goal.
And, to be fair, the US was rich. By circumstance. Post-WWII Europe was destroyed, we held 50% of the world GDP basically by default. Then our richness eroded as communist nations developed extraordinarily quickly, and threatened the US hegemony. Then we imploded our richness from within by throwing away the concessions FDR bought. The average American got poorer and poorer, and the golden age became known as that. Nobody really noticed because technology advanced, so people were poorer, but it was hard to tell. By the 80s people knew. Then we got Reagan, and things only deteriorated further.
That's not to say that communism is good or would have been good. It would have just eliminated a lot of strife in the world and would basically align all developed nations on one singular ideology. Would that ideology then be overthrown? We don't know, but I highly doubt it. People in the US would still be living good lives, except for a very small pool of elite few who got their shit rocked. Everyone else would still enjoy the advances of technology, and they would be content. The USSR would have been much more successful with the US ideologically and economically backing them. It would also be very hard to have a war at that point: over what? All of our post-WWII wars are over communism.
I mean, think about it. The USSR was the second world power, and it was very close! Despite the largest economy and military in the world doing everything in their power to ruin them. Imagine if, instead, those two powers worked together. Imagine where the USSR would be.
Also, the USSR was more progressive than the US. I'm talking gay right, rights for minorities. We would've gotten the civil rights era decades earlier. Gay marriage way, way earlier.
Anyway, I'm not a communist, and I'm happy with how the US turned out for the most part. I just think about how different history would have been if just one president was changed. I do truly think that if FDR was never president, most if not all developed nations would be communist to this day. I think people really do not appreciate just how close the US got to being communist. It was really, really close. We were going down the exact path of every communist nation that followed. There's some sources from the early 20th century, it's interesting to read.
> I mean, think about it. The USSR was the second world power, and it was very close! Despite the largest economy and military in the world doing everything in their power to ruin them. Imagine if, instead, those two powers worked together. Imagine where the USSR would be.
This is a very one-sided view. The USSR, by the way who was in league with the Nazis until Hitler betrayed them, also did everything in their power to ruin liberal democracies. Imagine, if instead, the USSR had worked along side the United States instead of opposing it!
The USSR also created things like gulags. Ever been to one? I haven't but I've heard they're not that great. Why did the USSR have to create those? Why does China even to this day have to disappear people? Fall in line with our ideology or die? Sounds a lot like Nazism to me. Meanwhile in the United States you can literally live life as a communist if you so desire. Why is one society more tolerant, wealthy, and happy and the other largely no longer exists? Because around the world people chose to not go to the gulag, to think for themselves, and to make the best use of resources available to them.
I find this USSR revisionist history to be a bit jarring. The USSR didn't even get along that well with China who was a fellow communist state. How can you argue that if everyone was communist we'd all get along when even the communist states (and those they subjected, such as in Eastern Europe) didn't get along?
> you're just arguing FDR was in that center but further to the left
I'm arguing on your terms in the hopes that when you see the output of the "center" function change dramatically with zoom level you will trust it a little less as a source of foundational truth.
Centrism is like listening to only pop music. Many, perhaps even most good ideas can be found there, but the top slots are all bought and paid for and what do other people know anyway. Political ideas, like songs, should stand for themselves and earn their place. We should be glad that our ancestors were bold enough to occasionally push for new ideas or else they would have thrown all good ideas of history onto the refuse pile alongside the bad ones.
> I don't think we have to have a pro-capital regime that's also against many of the ideas you might be in favor of.
Of course. I'm a capitalist, in the words-mean-things sense of the term where "capitalism" means "private ownership of the means of production." Skin-in-the-game capital allocation is special and we shouldn't throw it out with the bathwater. But people who call themselves capitalists generally have politics closer to "Elon's 0.25% taxes are too much and your 25% taxes are too little" than "a laissez faire garden is a garden of weeds," which is where I stand. It's OK to believe that a softmax function is the best way to run an economy (I do!), but it's a fact that this pushes people down and one had better develop some Nobblesse Oblige to compensate or we will not see eye to eye.
People who call themselves centrists generally look for the center between recent presidents, who were all economic-right neoliberals from the perspective of policy accomplishments. Whereas I take the perspective that the neoliberal economics common to both parties is exactly what fucked up this country and needs to be undone.
> But even from the great things that FDR did, just because they worked at one point in time doesn't mean they are forever and always the best idea going forward.
Yeah. The economy has become more productive since the days of the Dust Bowl, so we should be more ambitious with our demands than FDR was.
I'm not following. Can you expand upon this? I'm certainly not arguing that the center is the only source of good ideas - both MAGA and DSA have had great ideas, or at worst identified very real problems that weren't being addressed, but that's different from being run by, say, those organizations completely which would shift us to the far right or far left.
We can debate the zoom level but I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying the center isn't left enough? It's too far to the right? If you wanted to argue that FDR's policies were barely moving the needle on the left and they're still right-leaning, I say call me an ultra-conservative then because while I don't really have too much of an issue in the grand scheme of things about the New Deal policy suite (which has a mix of good and bad effects and assumptions as all policy does) to imply that such policies aren't to the left seems to me to be an arbitrary goal post move. Idk. Moving to the left or the right isn't a given, nor is it a given that such a move is good for any given society. People seem to have confused Progressivism with Progress. It's not a given, just as the End of History wasn't a given either.
> People who call themselves centrists generally look for the center between recent presidents, who were all economic-right neoliberals from the perspective of policy accomplishments. Whereas I take the perspective that the neoliberal economics common to both parties is exactly what fucked up this country and needs to be undone.
Sure, but your prescription seems to be (and correct me if I'm wrong) to throw the baby out with the bathwater - in other words destroy the institutions (either the MAGA or DSA version). Neoliberalism certainly has had a lot of issues but day-to-day life is pretty great for the vast majority of people under those regimes. Free speech, freedom of religion, free markets. Not bad at all.
> The economy has become more productive since the days of the Dust Bowl, so we should be more ambitious with our demands than FDR was.
Sure but your demands from extraction don't come from "the economy" they come from real people. That's where the rubber meets the road in a lot of these schemes and you start to lose contact with reality and what people actually want. For example, I think the economy has become more productive, my demands are the government does XYZ - maybe that doesn't align with your XYZ. Now what? You're just rehashing the current state at that point.
Elon was bitching about paying 0.25% tax on twitter the other day ($500M/yr on $200B/yr) and here I am paying well north of 25%. I could advocate multiplying his taxes by 100 and still be advocating for comparatively regressive taxation. I don't think you are honestly engaging with how fucked this has gotten.
I don't disagree with raising taxes on these billionaires or whatever. If for nothing else but personal preservation and because they failed in giving back to society.
Though I would like to see which dates were used to calculate them. And if it was from ”first day to last day of office” it would also be interesting to calculate with a certain ”lag” to account for the fact that effect of some legislation may not show until a bit later.
In the sense that the President (and the executive branch behind him) almost always have greater unity of purpose (it should! The President technically picked them!) and therefore clarity of vision than Congress.
But Congress (as a largely power-distributed, multi-state-representative body) is ultimately empowered to say yes or no.
As a realpolitik result, Congress (of same or opposition party) generally lets the President lead with a proposal, and then adjusts it to their satisfaction into something that can pass.
Congress would likely be realistically unable to generate a yearly budget, if left to their own devices, due to competing interests and priorities.
Having a starter plan from the President cuts through some of that, even if they strike large sections of it.
In theory.
In reality the US Congress hasn't passed a full real budget since 1996 (for the 1997 fiscal year).
Our system of government is hopelessly broken.
Also the correct measure is % of GDP
Democrats Change in Deficit
--------- -----------------
Joe Biden -6.1% GDP
Barack Obama -6.4% GDP
Bill Clinton -5.0% GDP
Jimmy Carter -0.2% GDP
Republicans Change in Deficit
----------- -----------------
Donald Trump +8.6% GDP
George W. Bush +11.0% GDP
George H. W. Bush +1.1% GDP
Ronald Reagan +0.2% GDP
Gerald Ford +2.3% GDP
Richard Nixon +0.7% GDP
Dwight Eisenhower -1.1% GDP
Change in U.S. Gross Federal Debt Democrats
---------------------------------------------------
President Start End Change
---------------------------------------------------
Joe Biden $28.386T $37.375T +$8.989T
Barack Obama $11.876T $20.206T +$8.330T
Bill Clinton $4.351T $5.770T +$1.419T
Jimmy Carter $0.706T $0.995T +$0.288T
Republicans
---------------------------------------------------
President Start End Change
---------------------------------------------------
Donald Trump $20.206T $28.386T +$8.180T
George W. Bush $5.770T $11.876T +$6.106T
George H.W. Bush $2.868T $4.351T +$1.483T
Ronald Reagan $0.995T $2.868T +$1.873T
Gerald Ford $0.484T $0.706T +$0.223T
Richard Nixon $0.366T $0.484T +$0.118T
Dwight Eisenhower $0.266T $0.293T +$0.027T
These are changes between fiscal-year endpoints, not the exact amount of debt incurred during each president's time in office.Fiscal years do not line up with inauguration dates.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/...
Despite being witehouse.gov, I am pleased to see that this is one page that Trump has not yet updated to read "Republicans Rule Democrats Drool" over an editorialized fever dream replacing inconvenient data. Grab it while it lasts, and let's hope that accounting remains boring enough to repel such attention!
So cutting debt, cuts GDP.
Also. Not sure GDP is completely normalized verses inflation.
Other way around.
Debt comes from spending, that spending is on stuff, which drives GDP.
So whole concept that we could reduce debt by increasing GDP and tax it, is not how the money actually flows.
This is why in economic downturns, often the best solution is more debt, by more spending. And trying to fix economy by 'austerity' makes things worse.
Of course, also I don't know solution, or what the 'right size' debt should be. Just that it isn't black/white.
Democrats Change In Debt/GDP
----------- ------------------
Joe Biden +0.1 pp
Barack Obama +22.2 pp
Bill Clinton -9.4 pp
Jimmy Carter -3.1 pp
Republicans Change In Debt/GDP
----------- ------------------
Donald Trump +18.9 pp
George W. Bush +27.3 pp
George H. W. Bush +12.6 pp
Ronald Reagan +19.8 pp
Gerald Ford +2.3 pp
Richard Nixon -4.7 pp
Dwight Eisenhower -16.1 pp President Change pp
Eisenhower -1.8
Nixon +0.8
Ford +0.8
Carter 0
Reagan +0.5
GHW Bush +1.8
Clinton -6.1
GW Bush +4.3
Obama -6.6
Trump +11
Biden -5.8
Lower what?
First, all values should be in the same unit; switching from B to T worsens readability here.
Second, it should include the total change as % of GDP as a range across their 4-year term; comparing by actual economic output fractions is better than raw or inflation dollars alone.
Third, the raw dollars should be inflation-adjusted to allow comparison; as presented, no comparison other than sign +/- is meaningful, and especially not of scale of +/-.
What's funny is that this era (the 1950s) is often fetishized by people who absolutely oppose the policies that made that possible, including a top marginal tax rate of 91% and a CEO to median worker ratio of 20-25x instead of the 400x+ it is now.
So the Cato Institute finally realized something that hasn't been true for 50+ years. What we're witnessing is the looting of government coffers and transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich on a scale never seen before. And they don't care about the consequences because capital is mobile. They'll simply leave.
I can't speak to the Republican politicians if the era, but all the Republican voters I know where legitimately focused on fiscal issues and balancing a budget until Trump showed up. Most of the older Republicans in my family have since left the party and registered independent, the younger Republicans I know are just about Trump though and, similar to Trump, don't really seem to hold any principles that underlie their views on any one topic.
The Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and immediately put an end to that game. Democrats say that the budget was balanced under Clinton, and it was, but it took a Republican Congress to force him to do it. (This also worked pretty well at starving Clinton's priorities, as you say.)
So neither side looks very good. Republicans spend like crazy when in power (though Trump is far worse than the average Republican administration), and get budget-cutting religion when out of the White House. Democrats occasionally talk about the budget, but don't do anything when in power.
The one historical example we have (post Andrew Jackson) of a fiscally responsible administration was a Democratic president hamstrung by a Republican Congress.
Technically, Clinton and a Republican congress solved the deficit during his terms (1993-2001), albeit in large part via post-Cold War dividends from BRAC et al.
Wikipedia has a nice graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
The longer term plan would have been to solve the US debt, which was obviously larger. And tbh, will only realistically be solved via running persistent inflation.
Honestly, Congress should pass a law requiring presidents to only publicly communicate budget projections up to the end of their term.
No current term-savings, no announcements.
This a big worry. I thought Trump was for old angry people shaking their fist at sky. The ones with dementia. Why are young into him?
In both areas, the young people I know that are Republicans, and pay any attention to politics, seem to mostly be attracted to his energy and wild promises/claims. They also tend to laugh at the things that I expect many here are concerned by.
Big claim, but as a consequence you're seeing his support tail off substantially in younger voters as the rubber (his campaign claims) meets the road (actual governing, policy, and results). https://www.chip50.org/blog/whose-approval-disapproval-of-tr...
His rhetoric on the campaign trail was attractive to people who didn't think past first order effects ('Yeah! Fewer migrants! They took our jobs!'), but the net effects are becoming evident to those same people, even if they don't understand why.
* I'm explicitly differentiating "Trump voters" from Republicans-who-voted-for-Trump (aka the temporarily endangered mainstream Republicans)
At that point, there's going to be a huge shakeup in the Republican Party, and the American right wing more generally, because from all indications, he's the only thing holding that coalition together, and they do not have a successor who could do anything like the same.
TL:DR Brainrot
The Democratic Party has been the left-wing party since around the turn of the 20th century. Yes, there was a flip, but it was (roughly) under Teddy Roosevelt. Not Franklin Roosevelt.
And the comment you are replying to didn't mention Franklin Roosevelt. Are you in the right thread?
To be fair, US political culture (and capitalism in general) contain deep, deep contradictions so it's going to require a whole lot of glue and squinting to say that there is any coherence to any US political party...
The person you're responding to has it correct, though, that there was an important cultural shift around Johnson and Nixon and the Southern Strategy and all that... not that these cultural politics could ever touch the materialist facts of capital.
1. FDR made concessions to the working class in the Great Depression to stave off a communist revolution and protect the status quo. Yet this earned the Democratic Party almost unbroken control over Congress until the 1990s;
2. In the wake of desegregation and the civil rights movement, all the slaver-wannabe Southern Democrats (ie the Dixiecrats) left the party and became Republicans. This was an intentional effort by the Republican Party called the Southern Strategy;
3. Despite 60 years of control over Congress and the loyalty of the working class that went back to FDR, Bill Clinton decided "no, we need to be Republican Lite". This was the so-called Third Way neoliberlism. This is the era when we got the 1994 crime bill, welfare "reform" and NAFTA; and
4. After 40+ years of the destruction of real wages, working people were finally seeking a change in the 2010s. White working class people, who were once loyal Democratic voters, went to Donald Trump. I still believe to this day many of these people would've voted for Bernie Sanders had he been the candidate over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton.
But there's no flip here. The Republican Party just got more insane, overt and racist and the same donors that back Republicans successfully turned the Democrats into the controlled opposition party.
While I agree, surely the assumption that the Democrats will be more fiscally responsible isn't true either?
This is more an issue with modern political expectations imo – compounded by challenges of aging demographics.
I can only give my view as a Brit, but I think the same applies here as in the US. Here people expect far more from the government today than at any point in history. Some of these exceptions are reasonable, but many are not.
But either way, despite huge government revenues theres just never enough money to fund all of the social programs voters ideally want. And under this pressure the only option to win elections is to borrow.
I guess to frame it another way – what spending would people want to see the politicians cut? I suspect the only way Western governments will get spending under control is to understand that government can't solve every problem, however nice it might be if they could.
See the sibling thread parallel to yours, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329791
Democrats have a track record that speaks to them being more fiscally responsible than GOP, in spite of the rhetorical narrative.
You can't assume anything about the next crew. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. But if you're predicting fiscal responsibility, past performance favours the Democrats.
Listening to Americans talk about energy and vehicles feels like going back in time, they’re stuck in the past and things that worked then and the world is rapidly routing around them. Quite sad to see.
Oman!
It’s not possible to make any predictions about the petrodollar in this context.
We know what should happen. But it is like trying to predict earthquakes.
People used dollars rather than yen or pounds because it the US was the largest and a rather free and stable economy. That still mostly applies.
The argument in the linked article:
>Since the 1970s, global oil transactions have been priced and conducted almost exclusively in U.S. dollars. That arrangement has given America an unparalleled advantage, effectively creating an economic blackmail chip.
I think is bunk. A country pricing in Euros would make no difference apart from traders needing to check the dollar euro rate.
While the argument can be made for it's economic effect and power today vs 20 years ago, I don't think it was overhyped then.
You can't clear nation-scale oil purchases by looking at the exchange rate, which is predicated on there being sufficient liquidity at that price for the transaction you're looking to make.
The petrodollar is both a demand and supply solution, and you're looking at this in micro rather than international macro terms.
The demand explanation is simplest -- the largest producers of a limited-source, universally-required commodity demand that purchases be made in US dollars.
As a result, all countries need access to dollars in order to make those purchases at scale.
Enter the supply side, where dollars both aren't and kinda-are physical. They aren't, in that international transactions are obviously executed with digital balances. They are, in that arbitrary countries can't just "create" dollars as needed: they must get those dollars from someone who has them.
Ultimately... the US Federal Reserve, who is empowered to create new dollars.
Putting all of this together, you have an aggregate demand for dollars of {US federal budget, similar to other countries' monetary demand} plus {international float for transacting dollar-denominated commodities}.
It's that second piece that people are really referring to when they say things like 'the petrodollar allows the US to run deficits that would negatively impact other countries' currencies'.
Because as Doctor Strangelove quipped, it is not only necessary but essential for this system's smooth functioning that the US produces large enough numbers of excess dollars to meet international demand.
The fly in the ointment, so to speak, has been the 00s+, initially War on Terror, now War on Et Al., US weaponization of the dollar against countries doing things it doesn't like.
Hence Russia/China's dream of breaking the petrodollar.
One piece of evidence - around 2020 the US went from being an oil importer to an oil exporter and people hardly noticed.
I also think if Saudi asked to be paid in Euros rather than USD it wouldn't make much difference. People just change currencies into what they need. They are just tokens to facilitate the trade of goods and services like oil for Ferraris in Euro or oil for Boeings in USD. The forex markets are huge.
The forex vs oil scale is valid point, and it'd be curious to compare it across the decades.
Per some preliminary numbers, Brenton Woods being abandoned in 1971 led to market forex volume substantially growing every year.
Oil:forex looks like ~1:150 in 1980, scaling to 1:500 in 2010.
So indeed an increasingly smaller portion of the forex pie.
nothing is being done in the national interest
(not saying every GOP congressman is personally like this, but they're actively aiding and abetting)
* https://www.cato.org/commentary/sadly-fiscal-restraint-no-lo...
When you've lost the Cato Institute…
More recently in 2025, "The petrodollar, not GOP fiscal restraint, is what sustains our unsustainable debt":
* https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5465671-republican-fisca...
(Not that I believe the folks at the top at the GOP really cared about it.)