There'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 +/-.