> vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly

I wish you luck. Endless promises and short term thinking are the main things the system incentivizes. Each politician is temporarily renting their seat, paid for by other people. Each bureaucrat is studiously, steadfastly avoiding learning anything that threatens their continued employment, which is paid for by other people.

Eliminate candidates who promise to lower taxes (slows down debt repayment substantially) and those who promise new or expanded services. Who's left? "I'll tax you a little more and not spend that money" is a tough pitch, even if it would be helpful for the debt.

I think Clinton was the last us president to balance the budget and start reducing the deficit so I guess see what he did.

See what Clinton did? Well, he said he'd create a plan to balance the budget. And he did. It was a ten-year plan, and it involved doing very little for the first eight years, and then doing the real work in years nine and ten - that is, after Clinton was out of office, even if he got a second term.

Then 1994 happened, and the Contract With America. The Republicans took both the House and the Senate, and they passed a balanced budget , then, whether Clinton liked it or not.

So that's what "Clinton" did. He pretended he was going to do something, and the Republicans called his bluff, and made him do it.

Note well: Republican majorities in any other set of circumstances have not yielded a balanced budget. I'm not saying that they're the answer (what they did under Trump shows that they very clearly are not the answer for fiscal responsibility). All I'm saying is that "Clinton balanced the budget", while technically true, isn't really the way that played out.

So all we have to do is engineer a scenario where one party screws over the other one by accidentally doing good governance.

Or just hurry up and invent ASI and let it be someone else's problem to take care of this crazy human zoo.

> The Republicans took both the House and the Senate, and they passed a balanced budget

And Clinton signed it, which is what matters. Now the Republicans have both the House and the Senate plus the WH, where's the "balanced budget"? Nowhere, don't ask for it, nobody is going to sign it either - ask for $ 1.5 T Mil Bill and record deficits if you want it to pass.

Do you know what the 1995 Mil Bill asked for?

The Contract With America was a one-off stunt, in other words - mud in the eyes of the electorate. Old glory stories are worthless when they contradict the present reality,

The two parties were run by literate, service minded, adults back in the day.

If you believe in fiscal responsibility of any kind, if you believe said is critical to the survival of the republic, if you want a better future for our children and grandchildren, then you can't possibly vote for either of these parties today. They are both complete and utter failures with no improvement in sight.

“Promise endlessly” is an oft touted criticism of social safety net programs, when the reality is that reducing vast tranches of corporate welfare is typically more than enough to solve budget shortfalls.

> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?

Maybe we should consider the possibility that there is no such candidate, or if there is, they cannot compete against the 'populists'. What then?

> they cannot compete against the 'populists'

You have to consider the fact that the populists are only popular because all the other parties in the last 20 years have made endless promises to the voters and failed to accomplish a tenth (if I am being generous) of what said they would do.

At some point, the blame as to lie also with whoever came before them too.

> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?

Who could you vote for, in any democracy, that would fit this?

Also, how many voters would have the wherewithal to identify such a person?

I believe voters are unfortunately useless.

In my country people voted in a party as majority that, not once left their terms peacefully in the past. AFTER our genZ ousted the other party, that came to power as a majority 17 years ago, changed constituency and controlled the parliament using majority, and turned into an autocracy

Now this party is shaping everything up using their majority for their favor (no surprise), ignoring all the agreements agreed upon by all the parties before election, under the interim government.

All those blood, deaths, injuries are wasted.

Some green parties. Their primary goals might seem unrelated, but turns out caring for the environment and climate change is correlated with long-term thinking.

Note I said "some", before rushing to mention all the examples of green parties engaging in misguided policies. Those also exist

In the anglosphere it's more difficult because first-past-the-post voting makes such parties unlikely to succeed or be relevant

I think democracy is perhaps a fundamentally unstable system. It requires constant corrective force, and a lot of it, from a lot of people. When the members of that democracy start to get a little too comfortable it fails.

Humans are designed to operate in smallish clans with benevolent dictators whose right to rule is based on social currency with people they personally know. Anything else is a house of cards on unstable foundation.

I'm not sure how you fix that, but democracy so far has maybe been the least bad patch.

The American founders predicted all these problems, which is why they formed a representative democracy. However over the years we have chipped away at that aspect and ended up with an election systems that encourage populism.

> ... the least bad patch.

That was Churchill's view, as he said during a speech in the House of Commons in 1947:

"Many forms of Gov­ern­ment have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pre­tends that democ­ra­cy is per­fect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democ­ra­cy is the worst form of Gov­ern­ment except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time . . ."

conservatives?

Is that a joke? Seriously. I don't see any conservative remaining, and it's been a while.

It had to be a joke. Conservative policies have made things much worse. It’s hard to believe they have a party that gets 60 million people to vote for them.

Never underestimate the power of the fourth estate

Response to sister comment: conservatism, and the groups that claim to support it, are separate. Same with liberals, and socialists, and the Democrat Party.

So name one. These politicans have names, do they not?

We do have the name of one politician who balanced the New York City budget though. Its probably not going to please a lot of people to hear that guy's name though. But that's what people want, right? Balanced budgets?

But no. That's not what people want and we all know it.

One aspect of that balanced budget that should be noted is that it does rely on a sizable funding increase from the state government.

Now, that state is legally required to have a balanced budget itself, so perhaps this is a small side note rather than a major change in perspective. I just think it’s not spoken about enough when discussing how that budget process went.

NYC had a deficit of $12 Billion before the current mayor.

So what is he? A Democrat, and what else? Parties are groups of people, ideologies are pure ideals. They are distinct, with overlaps in their demographics.

If that were true, the streets would be punctuated by shrill screams in reaction to the past decade of Republican spending.

At least in the US, conservatives have done more to increase the debt than liberals for the last 40 years at least.

Turns out, that was just a lie that some people told fiscally conservative people to get them to vote against their interests, just like other "wedge" issues like abortion or trans people.

Trump, sitting on top of a Republican government, is responsible for 10Trn of the debt, about a quarter.

Conservatives gave up on principles long ago and have settled for simply lying about everything, including what's happening and who's responsible for it.

The words are so overloaded. Republican is just generic right wing. I think the "conservative" the parent is talking about is the neoliberalism like what Milton Friedman would propose. He would have wanted half of the government gone, next to no market intervention (he even argued against seatbelts in one lecture). That would actually be the "conservative" someone you stereotypically imagine like Ron Swanson would adopt, who describes the perfect government as just a person in a tiny white room. The Republicans are a joke, just like the Democrats. They're both there for themselves, and have no actual agenda, manifesto, ideals, or values. They've got all the junk identity politics, religion, abortion, immigration crap mixed in such that you're either picking crap or crap. There's nothing "liberal" about the Democrats and nothing "conservative" about the Republicans. The Republicans were even the ones who freed the slaves! Make of that what you will.

Oh, you want "libertarianism" then. Not the original kind, the Ayn Rand kind

That always works out well. Until the bears come [1]

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...

He didn't say what he "wanted". We're so blinded by partisan stupidity we can't even be bothered to read, understand, and think anymore.

"This is the thing I think of when X"

"Oh, so what you're describing is Y, actually"

"HE NEVER SAID HE WANTED Y! STUPID PARTISANS!"

Okay buddy

Japan is closer to 130% debt-to-gdp. The 200% number is based on gross debt and ignores some other mitigating factors for shock value.

Great.

Rates going higher increases interest expense materially. You either rack new debt or you cut in places that are uncomfortable. The point is: responsible leadership in the developed world has gone mia for decades. There's a price to be paid that's real.

Remains important to base any analysis on the correct numbers.

Or you print lotsa yen, which is probably what will happen here

Japan’s debt is mostly held local unlike some other countries.

The US’s most important export for many years was treasury bonds. As de-dollarization occurs, the United States is bound to face some economic reckoning.

It should be noted that even still almost all US debt is held locally.

12% for Japan vs 30% for USA is a huge difference though.

> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?

These people do not exists. If a politician ran on such a platform, they would never get elected.

The fact is in modern democracies like in the EU or in the US there are simply too many people who rely on the status quo directly or indirectly.

Its almost comical, in France politicians have run, got elected and have swept the debt problem under the rug for the last 40 years, then they leave office and suddenly decide that the debt is a massive problem but that there was nothing they could do about while in office so they never did anything but now they speak about it.

And they all do it. Left, right, center, it's all the same.

> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?

Conservatives:

    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | President Name          | Deficit Increase (+) or Decrease (-)   |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | Donald Trump (2nd term) |                                    N/A |
    | Donald Trump (1st term) |                                 +11.1% |
    | George W. Bush          |                                  +4.3% |
    | George H. W. Bush       |                                  +1.8% |
    | Ronald Reagan           |                                  +0.5% |
    | Gerald Ford             |                                  +0.8% |
    | Richard Nixon           |                                  +0.7% |
    | Dwight D. Eisenhower    |                                  -1.8% |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+

Liberals:

    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | President Name          | Deficit Increase (+) or Decrease (-)   |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+
    | Joe Biden               |                                  -5.7% |
    | Barack Obama            |                                  -6.7% |
    | Bill Clinton            |                                  -6.1% |
    | Jimmy Carter            |                                  -0.1% |
    | Lyndon B. Johnson       |                                  +1.9% |
    +-------------------------+----------------------------------------+

Deficit rate = (federal outlays - federal receipts) / GDP. Change = deficit rate in final fiscal year - deficit rate in first fiscal year. The % symbol below means percentage points of GDP, not relative percent change. The first and last fiscal years whose end dates occurred during each presidency are used. Transition fiscal years can therefore span two administrations. Figures are OMB actuals through FY2025 and are rounded to 0.1%.

This is kind of a fool's errand given that sample sizes are small and there are large exogenous causes. But the pattern is consistent and agrees with theory, so I think the comparison is worth making anyway.

Republican != conservative

:)

Also some of the numbers are very sensitive to start/end dates (remind me, did anything happen in 2020?)

Yeah, in 2020 we let Trump print $4T in a single election year and then he spent the next four years successfully convincing the weak minded that Biden caused the pandemic inflation by printing $2T over the next four years, running the printer at 1/8th the rate.

Could this be a lagging indicator, as in programmes take a while to setup and the budgetary pressure falls into the next term?

You really don't want to accept that our deficit expansion has been overwhelmingly due to Republican largesse, do you?

Democrats aren't fiscal conservatives, but the last time they were able to expand the deficit in pursuit of social spending was LBJ. Deficit expansion during my lifetime has been overwhelmingly driven by regressive tax cuts, regressive bailouts, and wars in the middle east.

We found someone whose ai believes the President controls spending!

Congress controls spending in the United States:

Cumulative Share of Debt (Post-WWII to Present)When analyzing the raw accumulation of publicly held national debt according to which party held majorities in both chambers of Congress, findings from congressional studies (such as the Joint Economic Committee) reveal distinct differences:

(https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2011...)

Democratic Control ~57% to 74% of gross debt

Republican Control ~10% to 25% of gross debt

Split / Divided Control ~22% of public debt

Ah yes, the "Joint" investigation by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX)! Republicans do love to pinch pennies when Democrats are in charge, don't they.

> 2011

Excluding Trump, who I'm sure those fiscally responsible congressional republicans will pull the purse-strings on any second now. Any second!

> Post-WWII

Including FDR (Social Security) and LBJ (Medicare), who were the last Democrats to successfully expand the deficit for social spending.

> spending

Ignoring regressive tax cuts, the primary mechanism of Republican fiscal irresponsibility.

Like a good little partisan: we ignore the bad about the good guys and emphasize the bad about the bad guys ... that way we win!

More likely they are going to "monetize" the debt. Aka print yen to pay it off.

you don't think what they promise is important?

Just seems like one of those weird ambiguities.

japan is an empire, longest one too, you can't vote for that LMAO

Except that the emperor doesn't actually rule Japan - the Diet does, and you can vote for them.

Good luck with that after literally a thousand and more years, they can be most violent if times comes,

Maybe it's time some people to update their understanding of the "Japan 200%+ debt" slogan that is mindlessly repeated.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=68142

Accounting for the asset holding, Japan's net debt is even lower than UK/US.

>The key lies in the Japanese public sector’s operation of a de facto sovereign wealth fund. Unlike countries such as Norway and Saudi Arabia, which fund such vehicles with national savings from natural resources, Japan finances its investments largely through domestic borrowing at very low floating interest rates

.... >In the case of Japan, evaluating fiscal positions solely through the lens of gross government debt can present a highly distorted picture of the overall fiscal health of the country.