Fiscal responsibility: suppose the govt "doesn't spend money it doesn't have."

[NAOS]

You sure you are not Jesus

unintended compliment.

 

[franklin]

Honestly I think it is a mixture of both.

The Left is too uneducated and focused on government as the answer to everything to make good change.

In short we are hosed.

Please spread that fear as wide and deep as you can for me. I can't wait to buy up more stock at depressed prices on a 2% HELOC. I'm being fully serious too.

 

[Stoked]

Please spread that fear as wide and deep as you can for me. I can't wait to buy up more stock at depressed prices on a 2% HELOC. I'm being fully serious too.

Why do you think I am spreading it...?

Do you have faith not in the system but the people running that system? I don't. I base this of the crap they are doing.

Congressional hearing on steroidss in baseball? Refusing to allow a vote on the budget? Give me a damn break! Boneheads the lot of them.

 

[Dr. Jones]

Both sides are overly wed to (a) trust in the naturalness of the market, (a) trust that private interests can and should deliver what the State "certainly can't", and (c) the individual's responsibility for his/her station in life.

I guess I might call this lack of education since there are plenty of long-standing social theories that illustrate how inadequate these platforms are.

EDIT TO ADD: The republican tendencies I mentioned above just really really get under my skin. I can't see how it is good for public discourse. Democrats can be too idealistically egalitarian and relativistic, but I find this easier to work with. Does this answer your question?

Thanks for the sincere answer. I find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe that any of these candidates are not more versed in historical economics than any of us here. So, assuming that's correct, for a moment, why don't they see things the same way? Is it because they're smarter and know more than us .. Or because they have each succumbed to the pressures of their party, lobbyists, campaign contributors, etc?

 

[northeast]

Some politicians are very smart and conscientious, but they are a minority that don't have a lot of power.
Those that are smart and do have power mostly do not have the best interests of society at heart.
They are beholden to special interests and political donors, and their own biases, which often is indeed support for an elite group, or at least a subsection of the population.
The bulk of politicians are too busy fundraising and forming alliances and trying to get re-elected and building their own assets than to spend much time thinking about the issues in this thread. They have lobbyists and pollsters and donors doing their thinking for them.
The good ones mostly burn out or get pushed out or marginalized. A few are killed if they prove too resilient.

 

[margodydek]

Thanks for the sincere answer. I find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe that any of these candidates are not more versed in historical economics than any of us here. So, assuming that's correct, for a moment, why don't they see things the same way? Is it because they're smarter and know more than us .. Or because they have each succumbed to the pressures of their party, lobbyists, campaign contributors, etc?

This is one of the reasons I hate politics. I equate it to the Cowboys. They could have the smartest coach in the world, but if Jerry doesn't take a back seat and let the smart people do their thing, they'll never win. Does that make any sense?

 

[NAOS]

Thanks for the sincere answer. I find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe that any of these candidates are not more versed in historical economics than any of us here.

I do think it's fair to question how well-versed a lot of congressmen and women are about social theories. You say "historical economics"... sure, there are a quite a few that know a lot about that, but it is dangerous to tell history from the point of view of economics if you are harboring presuppositions about competition, growth, modes of creating value, etc. My point was that both sides are overly constrained by these presuppositions and have a poor sense for what society is (most famously uttered by their godmother Thatcher who claimed that "society doesn't exist"). If you tell history like it is a bunch of egoistic, rationally-maximizing individuals coming together to form society (which can be reduced to the structure of their interactions), then you do have an uneducated view.

... but, I'll play along...

So, assuming that's correct, for a moment, why don't they see things the same way? Is it because they're smarter and know more than us .. Or because they have each succumbed to the pressures of their party, lobbyists, campaign contributors, etc?

My view is that they largely DO SEE THINGS THE SAME WAY, and that the average american over-exaggerates the difference between the two (the media helps with this, of course). If the fight is about making sure the State program behaves like a profit-driven corporate body or whether it should be a private venture, then I don't consider that to be much of a fight... The same logic/code undergirds both.

Pressures to obey this code don't come only from lobbyists. They come from Joe the Voting Plumber who thinks he knows what "money" is and how simply our problems would be solved if they "just stopped spending money they didn't have"... and he is ready to cast his vote on this issue.

 

[franklin]

Do you have faith not in the system but the people running that system? I don't. I base this of the crap they are doing.

Here's my general approach rambled together: Governments have always been corrupt and people have always fought vehemently over policy. This era is no different. People have worried that the world would soon come to an end since the beginning of recorded history yet it never has. Worrying incessantly about impending doom dampens our investing outlook and hurts our prospects. It also is self feeding and self defeating. Most people are well intentioned and want the world to be better tomorrow than it is today regardless of which side of the fence they live on. The US has the most deep, dynamic, & adaptable market the world has ever seen. We're becoming more civil & extending equal freedoms to new groups. The undeveloped world has watched the developed & is following suit. Mass economic liberations are happening in China, India, Brazil, Russia, & even Africa. Economies are becoming stronger & more dynamic on a world wide scale. Hundreds of millions are being lifted from poverty. We've been through the Great Depression, Civil War, a revolution, two world wars, & Jimmy Carter (j/k). All of these dwarf the problems of today that are petty in comparison. We defeated Hitler and Imperial Japan but we can't handle our trade gap or healthcare that's keeping us alive & healthy for longer than we're used to paying for? Please.

These powers will be harnessed by the optimistic, who will have the best chance of profiting from them. Successful business people have proven this to be true many times over. When people are screaming that California is going bankrupt I am looking for nice yielding municipal bonds. When people are screaming that China will dump our debt I am searching for products they will buy with all those dollars. When people are screaming about a collapse in Europe I'll be grabbing a travel magazine for deals in Rome & Paris.

So yeah, the world allegedly sucks & I don't give a damn. Carpe Diem...lemonade.

 

[One Brow]

True, then change what can be bought like they do with WIC and start there... reevaluate after.

Too much frozen pizza gets bought, so disallow all frozen pizza? The motivation is to get people to spend more? I don't disagree with the idea, but the politics ...

 

[northeast]

The question:... suppose the government "doesn't spend money it doesn't have" ,... what would you suppose would be the 3 major consequences to society ? ... to employment numbers?...

Obviously this thread addresses the right-leaning crowd, so I'd appreciate it if the rest of everybody else would give them the space to answer.

Obviously if the gov never spent money it didn't have, there's a definite possibility the budget could once again be balanced....

What this thread is not addressing is the over-spending and/or needless spending. I am not opposed to taxes, duh, but I am opposed to discussing how much needs to be charged void of addressing the spending problem.

I am not for the stoppage of helping those in need, I am for a better system that assures we're spending tax dollars wisely.

Maybe I take the OP in the wrong context, but I feel it's too cute to say, "what if we just fold our arms and don't pay for things?" The issue, for me, is more about taking a much better business-like approach to taxation/spending.

This is where the thread derailed....PKM, you turned the world upside down.
Obviously, the point of telling the government not to spend money it does not have, would to be force it to reduce wasteful spending, exactly what you are looking for. I am at a loss as to why you do not make this connection.

No one could just try to answer the damn question. Oh someone is asking a question, it must be a trick, so I'd better start calling names, or changing the discussion to something else.

Can't anyone see that limiting debt financed government spending would force the government to make choices about spending and try to reduce waste?

 

[Stoked]

This is where the thread derailed....PKM, you turned the world upside down.
Obviously, the point of telling the government not to spend money is does not have would seem to be to curtail wasteful spending, exactly waht you are looking for. I am at a loss as to why you could not make this connection.

No one could just try to answer the damn question. Oh someone is asking a question, it must be a trick, so I'd better start calling names, or changing the discussion to something else.

Don't you think that limiting debt financed government spending would force the government to make choices about spending, and try to reduce waste, instead of just buying everything anybody wants and financing the purchase. Are things really so great that we shouldn't think about whether improvements can be made?

That's right mofos. Back up and stop line stepping on Northeast's territory.

 

[Scat]

True, then change what can be bought like they do with WIC and start there... reevaluate after.

Too much frozen pizza gets bought, so disallow all frozen pizza? The motivation is to get people to spend more? I don't disagree with the idea, but the politics ...

Are you familiar with the WIC program? It lays out very specifically what can and can't be purchased using funds through the WIC program. I guarantee you that frozen pizza is not allowable. It is so specific that you can buy frozen orange juice but you cannot buy frozen orange/mango juice. You can buy Cheerios but not apple cinnamon Cheerios. You can buy whole milk but you cannot buy 1%. With food stamps you can pretty much buy whatever you want.

 

[Stoked]

Are you familiar with the WIC program? It lays out very specifically what can and can't be purchased using funds through the WIC program. I guarantee you that frozen pizza is not allowable. It is so specific that you can buy frozen orange juice but you cannot buy frozen orange/mango juice. You can buy Cheerios but not apple cinnamon Cheerios. You can buy whole milk but you cannot buy 1%. With food stamps you can pretty much buy whatever you want.

https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/benefitsandservices/foodpkgregs.HTM

Very specific and the stores have to match them exactly. They usually have a manager come over and double check it because they do not get paid unless the food item is an exact match to the food voucher being used to get that item.

 

[NAOS]

Here's my general approach rambled together: Governments have always been corrupt and people have always fought vehemently over policy. This era is no different. People have worried that the world would soon come to an end since the beginning of recorded history yet it never has. Worrying incessantly about impending doom dampens our investing outlook and hurts our prospects. It also is self feeding and self defeating. Most people are well intentioned and want the world to be better tomorrow than it is today regardless of which side of the fence they live on. The US has the most deep, dynamic, & adaptable market the world has ever seen. We're becoming more civil & extending equal freedoms to new groups. The undeveloped world has watched the developed & is following suit. Mass economic liberations are happening in China, India, Brazil, Russia, & even Africa. Economies are becoming stronger & more dynamic on a world wide scale. Hundreds of millions are being lifted from poverty. We've been through the Great Depression, Civil War, a revolution, two world wars, & Jimmy Carter (j/k). All of these dwarf the problems of today that are petty in comparison. We defeated Hitler and Imperial Japan but we can't handle our trade gap or healthcare that's keeping us alive & healthy for longer than we're used to paying for? Please.

These powers will be harnessed by the optimistic, who will have the best chance of profiting from them. Successful business people have proven this to be true many times over. When people are screaming that California is going bankrupt I am looking for nice yielding municipal bonds. When people are screaming that China will dump our debt I am searching for products they will buy with all those dollars. When people are screaming about a collapse in Europe I'll be grabbing a travel magazine for deals in Rome & Paris.

So yeah, the world allegedly sucks & I don't give a damn. Carpe Diem...lemonade.

I'll address the bolded part first. This is where Franklin and I disagree.

One of the oldest criticisms of Marx focuses on his teleology (in short, that capitalism is a [necessary] stage in a progression that leads to communism). Here, human agency and contingency in general is radically reduced to the progression of a machinic interlocking of forces of which we are never more than a mere function, and this progression has a destiny of sorts. Scholars were right to critique this (even though, as I argue in some of my writing, these critiques have gone way too far). With Franklin, we have a sort of inverted Marxism, where instead of the collapse of capitalism, we finally get the promises that it has promised all along. There is a laundry list of examples that demonstrate that this so-called increasing civility and reduction of poverty on a global scale is, in a word, wrong; and, wherever this might apply, it is not civility and development in some transcendentally good sense, but always "civility" and "development" with respect to the laws and processes which bring people and places into the global market -- an articulation which ALWAYS causes displacement, environmental transformation (which is sometimes catastrophic), loss of diverse ways of understanding the world, new zones of poverty, etc. (off the top of my head, look at Northern Australia, Papua New Guinea, lots of Africa, parts of India, etc.).

Next, the blue text:

While this might be loosely true across history, it has been particularly true in the States and governments of monotheistic and apocalyptic people. As soon as Christianity and Islam are adapted into the ideology of expansive empires, this dialectical way of seeing the world goes into hyperdrive. This is a long discussion, but, trust me, this apocalyptic thinking is at the very foundation of theories of life and rights, despite the fact that many know this to be contrary to evolutionary theories of life and a more kind ethics. This is the beginning of the discussion as to why I try to scrub Christian moralizing from my ethics. Paradoxically, I regard it as unethical or "immoral" (if I have to use that term for the sake of conversation). Contrary to what Spazz thinks, I'm deeply indebted to ethics and spirituality, but just on different terms. (If I appear to be a dick around here, it's only because this place allows me to be rough and sharp with my language, where most of the time I have to be overly-explanatory and pedagogical... that gets tiring).

This is already too long, so I won't launch into my own positive political program.
Thanks again to Franklin for sharing.

 

[northeast]

Mankind's dominance is a only a tiny speck on the earth's timeline.
We have not proven our long term viability yet.
So far, crocodiles and cockroaches have shown a million times more success at maintaining a sustainable lifestyle.

 

[One Brow]

Are you familiar with the WIC program? It lays out very specifically what can and can't be purchased using funds through the WIC program. I guarantee you that frozen pizza is not allowable. It is so specific that you can buy frozen orange juice but you cannot buy frozen orange/mango juice. You can buy Cheerios but not apple cinnamon Cheerios. You can buy whole milk but you cannot buy 1%. With food stamps you can pretty much buy whatever you want.

1) WIC is a program geared to meeting the specific nutritional guidelines. It is not intended to be the totality of a diet. For example, you can't buy ground turkey on WIC. Is that because ground turkey is bad?
2) The food you can buy with WIC is not more expensive that the alternatives. In terms of dollars-for-calorie, sugarless applesauce costs more than applesauce with added surgars. Saying that former has to be bought is demanding that people spend more money on foodstamps.

My point was that I agreed with the nutritional value, but that the political baggage would be difficult to overcome. Do you think we should require people to spend more on foodstamps? Do you think that's going to be easy to accomplish, politically?

This is twice in two threads you've jumped in with to disagree, in a way that's below your typical level of rhetoric. Is it "Disagree with One Brow Day"?

 

[NAOS]

1) WIC is a program geared to meeting the specific nutritional guidelines. It is not intended to be the totality of a diet. For example, you can't buy ground turkey on WIC. Is that because ground turkey is bad?
2) The food you can buy with WIC is not more expensive that the alternatives. In terms of dollars-for-calorie, sugarless applesauce costs more than applesauce with added surgars. Saying that former has to be bought is demanding that people spend more money on foodstamps.

My point was that I agreed with the nutritional value, but that the political baggage would be difficult to overcome. Do you think we should require people to spend more on foodstamps? Do you think that's going to be easy to accomplish, politically?

This is twice in two threads you've jumped in with to disagree, in a way that's below your typical level of rhetoric. Is it "Disagree with One Brow Day"?

 

[PearlWatson]

Are you kidding me? Democrats do not have a plan in place to deal with the escalating debt and bad economy. Most Republicans don't either. The most comprehensive bipartisan plan was from the Simpson-Bowles commission and Obama trashcanned that as soon as it was finished. He didn't even give it lip service. I have met John McCain on several occasions and spoke to him about this issue. He wouldn't have spent as much as Obama, but he didn't have a clue as to what is needed to fix the problem.

The only politician currently serious about fixing this problem is Paul Ryan. He has a plan, a really detailed one. And I will guarantee that all of the people who are going to badmouth Paul Ryan have not read the plan. It's hard medicine, and it isn't enough, but its a start. It does address some of the original posters concerns while actually tackling the problems we face. There will always be reasons to not reform. But we are actually running out of time. Medicare goes bust in less than 8 years. Social Security has less than 20, and those are the conservative CBO estimates.

If Romney nominates Ryan for the veep slot, I'll believe he is serious about the issue. Until Democrats can actually get around to passing a budget in the Senate, I will treat their "economic policies" as the bad jokes they continue to be.

I guess he is serious.

 

[trigg3r]

I posted this question in the Mitt Romney taxes thread and the fiscally responsible crowd went silent. Since this isn't exactly about Mitt and his taxes, I thought it deserved it own thread.

The question is basic: suppose the government "doesn't spend money it doesn't have" (which is what many have been calling for in their parsimonious fix-all solutions), what would you suppose would be the 3 major consequences to society if this were true? (Robust answers may want to include a theory about what "money" is.... but I leave that to you).

EDIT TO ADD: Since "unemployment" is also a big topic these days, perhaps you can focus your answer on what this would do to employment numbers?

Obviously this thread addresses the right-leaning crowd, so I'd appreciate it if the rest of everybody else would give them the space to answer.

I will just give a really quick answer. It is going to hurt in the short term as far as employment goes. No way around this. Look at how many people the government employs. In the long run, it will ultimately be the only way to go. The question is, would you rather the government go bankrupt, or take our medicine for now and going forward?

 

[northeast]

So how does massive unemployment and the resulting decimation of tax revenues , not to mention increased unemployment payments and other transfer payments from government to unemployed, REDUCE the risk of USA bankruptcy?