One thing I think gets overlooked every election is the budget of the country. Big problem is once the government starts a division or starts some sort of aid it usually never stops or is updated.
Take Social Security, it was never meant as someone's sole source of retirement income, yet many use it as their sole source. Further, when it began, 32 people were paying for every 1 person receiving funds, not its closer to 4:1. Also, people live longer so the payments are longer, so a policy that should have scaled over time now needs a big overhaul that it will probably never receive.
Many example such as above, but I don't know if we can continue spending as we have in the past. As the saying goes, it's not bad being poor, it's bad going from poor to rich back to poor because you know what you are missing. All to say, could we ever elect a President who makes sweeping changes to our spending and cut back on deficit, or is just a pipedream/talking point?
It's hard to see even with Musk talking about going in and cutting waste bla bla bla
Eventually it is the market and not politicians that will put an end to this. You can see it already in the long end of the yield curve in the US in recent weeks, or can look at other cases in history where there's basically nobody on the bid for government backed securities and the borrow cost goes up (argentina, greece, etc)
Not a chance. Everyone wants to reduce government spending but NOBODY wants to slash the parts that affect them. Think about each of the biggest line items in the budget, a sitting government slashing each and the corresponding voting blocks they lose. Think the largest one is Medicare / Medicaid, imagine cutting that.
So you have blocks of voting groups shouting over each other screaming "cut theirs not mine". You have a sea of opposition voices screaming "look what they did to you". Anyone looking to do a common sense budget is going to be a one term government.
Hell the voting public and politics in general are so toxic I would think you wouldn't even be able to significantly reallocate capital between spending programs.
I never knew much about Medicare until my Dad started using it. He had full military healthcare benefits, but Medicare covered almost everything and I was really impressed. I bet the Medicare program overall is a massive cost. I don't know the figures, but can imagine.
Are you serious? Have... have you not listened to any of the proposals from Trump's camp? Ron Paul & Elon have spent the past months talking about a Department of Government Efficiency (RP is literally the most famous Libertarian/Republican figure when it comes to speaking about government spending abuse using debt via the Fed), and Vivek's main issue since he was running has been government spending reductions via mass layoffs akin to Javier Milei's approach in Argentina.
I'll grant that they unfortunately don't tackle the single biggest problem with spending - entitlements like SS/Medicare/Medicaid/Welfare - but that's because nobody can since all the geriatrics and welfare queens that depend on those to survive/perpetuate their lifestyles will blowout any candidate who tries.
The unfortunate fact is we have 20%+ of Americans who either don't care or are too uneducated to understand what this does to the future for their or other people's decedents and instead just want their government gibs in the short term. Welcome to the downside of Democracy - where the have-nots and unproductive members of a society can vote to take money from the productive people and disperse it amongst themselves. It is the ULTIMATE negative feedback loop of allowing anyone that's a citizen (a status that's been cheapened massively over the past century) to participate and have a say in policy despite having no real knowledge of the topics or actual stake in the future consequences of their decisions.
Sad story of why democracies always end in rot in the end. It's been a good run post WW2-GFC though
Well, with how it’s looking right now, seems like our kids/their kids will feel the brunt of it opposed to us. Late in the capital cycle, but not late enough to where we start seeing material degradation in our quality of life.
Nice cope. This is one of the better ones I have seen from the brain rot types like you
Did you need to get a permit to be this stupid or does it come naturally?
And yet you have no rebuttal, how unsurprising.
Doubling down on your stupid is definitely a choice. But then again, the MAGA bot farm isn't paid well enough to actually engage with what's being said
I wrote 2 paragraphs engaging with the topic at hand and all you've done is call it cope and other people stupid. You're literally the NPC meme.
You wrote something stupid. I said what you said is stupid. Now you are crying at me because you are too emotionally immature to handle someone saying you are wrong. That's a you problem. This is you being the problem, not me.
If you were actually trying to engage with what is being discussed, you would respond with what was basically the only way you can actually engage with what I said. You would ask what specifically I was referring to or you would ask me to elaborate. Instead, you are crying at me because you are a poorly paid MAGA bot that is has zero ability to actually engage in discussion. If you don't like to accurately be identified as a bot, stop engaging in bot behavior and engage with what's actually being discussed.
No wonder why MAGA is made up of so many uneducated people like yourself...
so this is what a mental handicap with TDS looks like. Spooky.
The bond market is telling you that stuff likely pales in comparison to what the proposed tax cuts and tariffs will do to inflation and the deficit
Tariffs force competition for cheap Asian manufacturing base and would invigorate economic activity domestically, which Covid should've proved beyond a doubt is necessary when supply chains are threatened. Combine that with proposed removal of income taxes all together and it's highly debatable the price differential would be remotely comparable in magnitude to what's been experienced under Biden.
As far as the Bond market is concerned, effectively all banks worldwide are massively underwater already because of the idiocy of near-0 rates implemented by Democrats (and maintained by Trump during his 1st admin). The market as a whole would unquestionably look more favorably at a 2nd Trump term that would be indifferent to the short-term pain required to try and rectify the core problem vs another idiotic progressive admin that's more concerned about climate hysteria and the impact of a few degree difference in 100 years than actually addressing the ballooning deficit.
Well you can look at Trump's proposals, but it is far easier to look at Donald Trump's record, which included increasing the national debt by over 33%. Big fiscal responsibility guy, that Donald Trump.
Trump's tariff proposal would have terrible impact on the state of Texas. It is probably not a good thing to propose on the days leading up to an election
You mean when Congress voted to spend a huge amount to prop up the banks and broader economy during the Covid fallout so the markets didn't collapse while everyone in the establishment was screaming it was the 2nd coming of the Spanish Flu? No kidding. It was stupid, but the situation called for it and he wasn't going to stop Congress after he just beat a 2nd bs impeachment show trial.
What's Biden's excuse? Why didn't he even attempt to push for a national debt refinancing when rates were still low before supporting policy that put effectively every financial intuition underwater while increasing the spending further + proposing a plan that would've accelerated it? Ah that's right you're just a partisan hack, I almost forgot mb.
MAGA chode speaks negatively about democracy
DEI hire is uneducated - I'm utterly shocked.
I know layoffs looking are tough in HR, but here's a way for you to be less ignorant going forward for just $35:
You do realize that Mr Trump was already President once, and presided over a massive increase in the deficit? I sometimes wonder if you honestly believe this nonsense or you just enjoy being a low-level troll. Of course Mr Trump will expand the deficit... he'll just do it in the most unnecessary fashion possible.
Democrats = tax and spend. Republicans = cut taxes and spend, and blame the deficit on liberals.
Right, and the biggest "welfare queens" are conservative states that cut their own spending so they can mooch of wealthy liberal areas.
If you honestly believed any of this, shouldn't you be a Democrat?
Realistically both spending needs to be reduced alongside increasing taxes but good luck getting that passed. As a side note, I do find it funny that the irony of setting up more government bureaucracy to cut down on government spending is lost on people I.e Elon’s Dept. of Gov Efficiency although I’m sure people will try to argue otherwise with me.
Off the top of my my head, an obvious way to cut costs would be to raise the retirement age as people are living longer anyways but I struggle to think of other areas where we could cut costs
Yea that's part of the problem, most of these services we not meant to "last" as long as they do. Meaning, someting like social security, it was only suppose to be paid out for a couple years, not decades.
Raising retirement age is as politically toxic as it gets. They did this in France from 62-64 and it led to mass riots and the country burning for weeks. That was the start of Macron's political decline to which he has never fully recovered and never will. Even in the UK, the state pension is in a, 'triple lock' and the Conservatives began courting the pensioner vote as their biggest and most loyal voting demographic. But this is why i have a lot of time for Bill Clinton, was the last US President to deliver a budget surplus - in short, other commenters are bang on right why there will never be an electorally successful campaign on reducing the deficit/cutting gov spending because you'll create dissatisfied factions and the electorate are too uninterested/uneducated in understanding the long-term benefits.
I mean Elon Musk is a troll, so his random department shouldn't be taken seriously, nor should any conservative idea at this point - it's a post policy party.
However, we know that spending money on the IRS generates net revenue for the government. So yes, more government can help raise revenue. It's also debatable whether the massive amount of outsourcing the government does actually reduces cost.
Conceptually, reducing government spending is something that is pretty straightforward to do. Literally just modernizing how government contracts get awarded would go a long way.
But the way to reduce government spending without costing votes is simply not something that voters care about. You can't campaign on it. So it can be a part of a much larger platform, but it isn't something you can "run on"
Our spending is Medicare/medicaid, social security and defense. Every other area is basically peanuts. We have an aging population and a more dangerous world. Spending is going up big time.
Don't republicans say they want to reduce spending?
The only campaign that I can remember actually campaigning on spending cuts/austerity was the Conservative 2010 campaign in the UK. Huge context with the backdrop of the GFC and a Labour government who'd ran their shelf life of 13 years. Labour invested and overspent just before the GFC, exacerbating the fiscal situation. David Cameron and George Osborne campaigned on austerity and reducing the deficit, and with the support of the majority of the press leaning Conservative, they won office and began spending cuts and tax rises with little market uproar and nor did it dent their political popularity given they were re-elected 5 years later. Now they didn't succeed in all their aims of reducing the deficit because borrowing increased, but politically, voters knew what they voted for because it was well communicated. Compare that with the current Labour party budget where taxes have gone up, spending largely constrained and voters reacting negatively because this wasn't promised in their manifesto.
Barry Goldwater tried that in the 1964 election and got slaughtered. "You want to know why Libertarians fail to win elections Bud Fox? Why, Gordon? Because they're spending cutters, and cutters get slaughtered."
Love how every liberal in this thread attacks the only people that actually propose ways to reduce the deficit while simultaneously voting for representatives who throw a hissy fit whenever those suggestions are attempted and have made a political strategy out of promising handouts to irresponsible poors and illegal immigrants at the expense of taxpayers. Cognitive dissonance and willful ignorance are a powerful combo lmao
I only see a lot of mediocre single men talking about issues they don’t actually understand while congratulating themselves for how smart them are. Just another circle jerk.
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