This shouldn't be a surprise. The US came out of WWII with similarly high debt to GDP. They only corrected that through financial repression, and that's likely to be their only chance of lowering that debt ratio today.
If we don't spend the next few decades skating by while the currency is debased under our noses, I assume its because there's a much more severe and tragic response.
Those profits are fake. It's the government printing money and inflating the numbers, but no consumable wealth was created, so there is nothing to distribute.
The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that, which helped the common people by disincentivizing the post-Reagan short-term-financial-games profit-maximization and wealth-and-income-consolidation.
I feel like the earnings structure is quite different than it was post-war though. Today there's a larger difference between "income rich" and "capital rich" in terms of their options for avoiding tax incidence.
Like in 1947 a factory owner's profits would show up as high income. Today they wouldn't (money is in share prices and complex financial arrangements / borrowing). The high marginal rates hit the chief engineer instead, who actually works for a living.
Exactly the true wealth of America is no longer income or property its all shares. It could be argued the American 40T debt is pretty much because of tax avoidance due to hiding wealth in stocks and related possibilities.
Stock value is not real wealth. The stock value is a guess about future profits along the next 10 years. You can't give to workers guessed future wealth. It doesn't exists today.
No argument there, im simply making the observation that a lot of people are avoiding tax by hiding their wealth as shares and this is hurting the gov ability to tax and pay its debts.
Seems like a good reason to figure out some additional soak-the-rich taxes! (Back in the 30s that was a slogan that Americans could rally behind..! Not so much right in the last several decades.)
But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.
Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...
> The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that
This is a common trope, but it ignores that at the time the tax code had loopholes that could smuggle a freight train full of gold bars. Instead of lower marginal rates, people were taking their real estate and personal vehicles and everything else as tax deductions, and then weren't paying the high marginal rates to begin with. The lowering of marginal rates came with the closing of most of those loopholes, which is why the change had no real effect on federal receipts as a percent of GDP, which has been in the same range since the end of WWII (and was much lower before it):
The thing that actually changed is that markets have consolidated a lot more than they were in the mid 20th century, and we have significantly more regulatory capture where e.g. corporations lobby to make their services required by law or to impede or prohibit new entrants to the market. Then consumers/workers have to pay more for those things while receiving nothing of value in return. Corporations take more money and it comes from labor.
Increasing the tax rate doesn't fix that because you'd still have workers paying the high prices to corporations even if the government subsequently took more of the money.
What happens if you have to buy a product from a monopolist so they currently take your last $100, and then the government comes and says they have to pay 80% of it in tax? Best case the government gives the money directly to you, but then there is still a monopoly, so they just raise the price by the amount it takes to extract all of your money again. Worst case, the money doesn't go to you, it goes to some cronies who will now be using it to lobby to increase the amount you pay, and have just demonstrated that they're more politically connected than the original corporations.
To actually fix it you have to get back to competitive markets, efficiency and low barriers to entry.
It doesn't directly. Financial repression does though, its a "solution" to high federal debt and leaves the average person having to eat the cost.
Its a bit like austerity, but instead of taking a share of everyone's wealth they just make all of our stored wealth worse less. They do that by inflating asset prices much faster than wages can keep up, meaning those large corporations at the top get rich while the average person falls further and further behind.
It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own? The Fed has been keeping rates higher, despite political pressure, without yet having achieved the inflation target.
The economy is a measure of past financial behavior. I'm not sure how the economy could do this on its own, we're doing this to ourselves. I say "we" collectively there, these are all results of human choices not an amorphous concept of an economy.
> I'm not sure how the economy could do this on its own, we're doing this to ourselves.
i dont understand. the economy is the royal we doing things. the economy doesnt experience time if we arent doing thongs to ourselves. this isnt a distinction with a difference
> It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own?
This is what I was replying to. At least to me, saying the economy did something on its own takes the agency and responsibility off of us. My point was that the economy is just backward looking analysis of how money changes hands, it does nothing by itself and when things change its the result of us making decisions.
Don't quote me on that, but people are saying that despite American companies are getting more money, people are getting even less.
Or that's my understanding. Happy to be corrected though
Public debt burden increases interest rates. This benefits holders of government bonds, who are disproportionately wealthy households and financial institutions. It crowds out private investment and inhibits economic growth, which weakens workers' bargaining power. Deficit spending also causes inflation, which disproportionately hurts people on the lower end of the income scale.
That, and there is a looming Social Security crisis due in 2032. Fiscal responsibility hasn't been either party's (or voters') priority for the past two decades, and it's probably going to take another disaster to put it back on the table.
The problem would be much less intractable if one party didn't do 3 pointless multi-trillion dollar tax cuts primarily for the benefit of ultra high earners. Each time promising it would reduce the deficit, with increasing absurdity.
It's depressing to look at the before/after federal deficit estimates over the last two decades without the Bush tax cuts, even before taking out the Trump 1 tax cuts (and future projections from the recent Trump 2 cuts in the BBB). Just a huge unforced error that was completely foreseeable each time.
Contrary to public perception and PR, the "party of fiscal responsibility" has consistently been a disaster for controlling the deficit.
This isn't a "one party is the problem" situation. Both parties have spent over 20 years fighting pointless wars. Both parties spend without balancing a budget. Both now gerrymander and both at least threaten to stack the court. Both pander to voters with short term solutions that actively do harm long term. Both were responsible for the shit show of the pandemic response.
The list goes on and on. They argue over where new debt should be spent, who to bomb, or what new powers the government should claim. What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.
Let's actually compare the size of the wars of both parties for the last 40 years. Let's compare the spend-vs-tax changes for both.
If you can't be honest that some folks out there are, in fact, pushing much worse agendas than others... then how do you hope to convince anyone to evaluate if anyone else is gonna actually do better than either? You can't easily have those critical thinking skills without noticing the differences in the two current parties...
Is your argument that one party overspends worse than the other? That certainly is true, though how many externalities are included would be up for debate. Regardless though, my problem is with the over spending, not with which is party over spends less.
You said it wasn't a "one party is the problem" situation.
But how can you conclude that if you don't have those numbers to give me?
Switching gears to externalities seems like a bit of a dodge unless you are super confident that those externalities are more significant than the bad things you predict happening in the future due to the debt.
Don't you need to look at the numbers to justify that claim? Maybe one party has added 30T and another has added 5T to the debt since Carter. Maybe one has added 20T and the other added 18T. Those numbers would demand VERY different responses.
But saying "it's not one party" seems to assume a particular set of numbers. What are they?
Your argument is absurd. You seem to take issue with my arguments and the examples I gave and demand I owe you numbers and statistics. But you're making your own arguments ad though they are correct without providing your own data.
I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other. You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
You made the initial claim that it wasn't a "one party is the problem," shouldn't that be your own responsibility to substantiate?
"I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other."
I'd rephrase it to out-deficit the other because you could spend more AND bring in more revenue and improve the situation. If we do that, then yes, that's certainly my hunch, but I didn't pull any numbers. Maybe the covid-era timing of Trump-vs-Biden plays out wildly different, maybe some of the Obama-era stuff cost more than I'm recalling. Seems necessary to know to know if it's one party is MUCH better than the other or just one party is a bit better than the other.
>You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
My reason for asking for the data is that the best action to take depends on the magnitudes. If one party is dramatically better than the other then the most practical way of fixing your problem is likely to be do everything you can to get that party more power AND work to shift it into the positive vs try to burn both parties down.
You're still deflecting off my actual argument, latching onto only the first sentence, and demanding stats where none are needed.
I said its not a one party problem and then went on to very clearly explain that both parties overspend our income and run deficits. Are you refuting that? No exact stats are needed there because its common knowledge that we haven't run a balanced budget since Clinton was in office.
You seem to be arguing with a point that I never said. I didn't claim which party had spent more, for that I would have to double check the numbers and adjust for inflation.
I don't think there's much point in quibbling over which party has added more to the national debt. The point is that both parties have been irresponsible in different ways, and neither supports the policies necessary to balance the budget: tax increases and cuts to entitlements.
I didn't post them because I didn't bother looking them up, and wanted the person making the claim to check into it. Thanks for actually sharing!
That presentation does support their claim that both parties need to get back to basics on that matter.
Though now that I'm a bit more invested, looking at deficit delta by year for each of those tells a bit more.
Bush's went up then started to fall until 2008. Obama inherited that mess and he+his Congress spent to get out of it then made it shrink continually until a bump back up in 2016. Trump increased the deficit every single year (and enormously so in 2020, another disaster response incident). It shrank back under Biden in 2021 and 2022 then ticked back up, Trumps' now got it trending back up again after a tiny decrease in 2025.
The thing that changes with that view is that Trump appears to be the big outlier here, who's never really managed to bring it down at all or even try. And there's a fun macro-trend of both of those Democrats only getting elected into shits-on-fire circumstances. Clinton didn't have the problem, maybe that's why he did better.
You didn't post them because you were arguing with a point I didn't make. I didn't say both parties spend just as much, I said both parties overspend and run deficits. The average person shouldn't need to fact check such an obvious statement.
Your attempts here to deflect all spending from the president in office to the party you disagree with is also a bit too obvious. You had no counter argument to my actual point and were instead fishing for me to provide exactly those numbers so you could do exactly this deflection.
Given that you wanted so badly for me to look up numbers, I'd love to hear you justify that running deficits is not a problem of only one party.
One party is distinctively more war hungry then the other. Constantly pushing the overtone window toward more and more wars.
Both now have to gerrymander, because one party decided they gerrymander is way to go. And the other one ended up with no choice. Trying to both side this is particularly hypocritical, because one party just finally woke up and realized there is no way to be represented if they dont take countermeasures against past gerrymandering.
Court is already stacked by one party, the other one dropped the ball on that one. And its voters are paying for it. It must stack it back.
And when it comes to debt, the supposed fiscal responsibility party caused more of it.
> What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.
How have you not seen any of those items discussed? It's all I see.
What I don't see is why my fucking neighbors themselves are more than a vote. Having worked with you all for decades now, I don't find any of you any smarter or fucking competent to be a org leader; what have we done but bitch about what web framework and cloud backend to use and stupid valuations should we run up?
It's all ultimately a huge waste since we can't be sure the meteor doesn't hit Earth after we die; we're all just fucking winging it
My age peers 45-50 are just the next Boomers; overly verbose nitwits jerking off whatever literacy they acquired through education. It's cheesy as fuck stupid primates grasping at straws and throwing emotional poop, arbitrary social fiefdom erecting as a means to engage in gentle math based eugenics of who earned a job on an office gig roster.
Fingers crossed everyone loses. Cause if this is all advanced society is capable of launch the nukes.
I'd be very curious where I could find debates over balancing federal budgets. I know only one or two members of Congress that even talk about balancing a budget beyond getting a cheap sound byte.
Congress hasn't meaningfully acted on the war in Iran. They are the only ones with the power to declare war and emergency powers are clear. They also own the budget and decided to pay for the war after the fact. Yes the Republicans control both houses right now do that doesn't help, but unless I'm wildly mistaken that spending vote was jot a party line vote.
dude, don't try to both-sides this one. just look at the deficits of the administrations going back to Reagan.
The main wars fought in the past 40 years have all been GOP initiated: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran. This have dwarfed the military operations initiated by Dems.
Every administration since Clinton, no matter the party, has run a deficit. It actually is both sides who are the problem. The only argument I've seen to the contrary in this thread is that Democrat administrations have had a smaller deficit, but that is an irrelevant argument. Any amount of deficit is unacceptable, you don't get brownie points because you filled the ship with water slower than the other guy did.
I'm sorry, but this is almost a parody of the enlightened centrism meme.
The Democrats have attempted to pass several anti-gerrymandering bills. One in the Senate in 2024, one in the House in 2021. Both stonewalled by Republicans.
The Republican SCOTUS appointees allowed partisan gerrymandering, the Democratic ones were in the dissent.
California's prop 50 was IN RESPONSE to an unprecedented mid-term gerrymandering effort by Texas at the behest of Trump.
I just picked one example, but I could easily write similar responses that show very stark differences between the parties when it comes to wars, stacking the court, war with Iran, and more.
Newsome proposed a ballot measure to allow the government to draw a more Democrats friendly map. hHochul treated redistricting in New York and supported efforts to do so.
The difference in many case was that legal challenges in blue stated tended to stop the gerrymandering where courts in red states tended not to. The end result is different, the political intent was not.
And Newsome did that is response to what again? Oh right, as a threat of 'if you do it we will do it to' to try and contain unchecked Republican gerrymandering. Kind of a important detail to leave out.
I can't speak to his intent, I just know that he specifically said the state legislation should redraw California lines to favor his party.
I can't include every detail in such a format, but its worth noting that I did clearly call out the Republicans doing it first. Its not like I was saying "democrat gerrymander" out of context there.
No, not really. Two wrongs don't make a right. It doesn't matter who started it (especially since each party claims to be responding to the other, and the only thing they differ on is where to draw the zero point), it is still not acceptable to continue in kind.
It does matter who started it and responding meekly to being wronged just makes you a sucker. And conservative morality being what it is, suckers are going to be bullied for fun.
> Two wrongs don't make a right.
It is ok to respond to gerrymandering by gerrymandering. It is not kindergarten. The court said it is legal, GOP will continue to do it. If the other side does not engage, they will honorably loose all ability to influence politics.
Notice the lack of "tax cuts". GDP goes up, taxes go up by exactly the same amount. The number from the most recent year is basically the same as the number from 50 years prior in 1975. Ratio hasn't changed meaningfully since the end of WWII. But Congress somehow keeps passing "tax cuts", so how does that work?
It's because the tax cuts are fake. They set the tax brackets in dollars rather than percentiles, but the tax rates are in percentages, so that's not a stable ratio. In 1995 the median household income was $34,080, now it's $87,460. If they left the tax brackets the same, it would shove the middle class into the tax brackets meant for the rich. De facto middle class tax hike whenever they do nothing.
Naturally Congress loves this, because every few years they get to pass a bill re-adjusting the numbers to keep the true tax rate the same while calling it a "tax cut", and thereby get to claim credit for something people want while not really changing anything. Which is their absolute favorite thing, and why they never fix it by setting the tax brackets in percentiles.
It's easy to place the blame on political parties or the wealthy but at the end of the day the problems that America faces are the result of a series of choices made by the electorate over decades despite the feedback from each of these decisions as they were made.
At then end of the day the way things are in America is a reflection of what the American people want their country to be.
People like to make the argument that Americans would stand up and sort this problem out, but the country is just so big, and the average American just doesn't have enough money to do something, and people are spread far and wide and that there's just no way for the to come together to decisively end these problems but it's just excuses. People by and large are content with the status quo. This is just what they want.
Precarious state of health care access and incomprehensibly opaque costs? That's a choice.
An ever escalating police state that has reached new peaks of immigration police and pulling random people off the street and a national guard perpetually patrolling cities? That's a choice.
Forever wars with no discernible objective or end point in the Middle East? That's a choice.
consolidation of media and economic control into a smaller and smaller group of people? That's a choice.
All of this is a choice that Americans collectively continue to make. And my prediction is that they'll continue to keep making these (imho) poor choices.
It's not so much choices that Americans collectively make. Almost every major policy decision since 2010 has been unpopular with the American public. The actual elected officials just thumbs up or thumbs down something based which party introduced it, and then if they ignore that they decide on the very poorly organized skim notes an aide might be able to badger them into reading. Many members of our House Of Representatives didn't even read what was in the 2018 fiscal budget bill (P.L. 115-123) or the omnibus bill of 2025 (P.L. 119-21) that destroyed regulatory authority. Mitch McConnell ruined the ability of Congress to actually function by making it a warring states situation instead of organized compromise. Ever since then it's been grab what you can get and get, because you won't get any long term work done.
The American people don't actually want this. They don't vote for any of these policies. They actively vote and protest against them. But there's no true mechanism available to the public for ousting elected or appointed officials outside of scheduled times. Recalls have no enforcement. Impeachments have no enforcement! When you know you've got a protected period to wreak havoc in, you do it without worry. Especially if you're doing that in service of people who have broken the systems so they cannot be pried out of their positions, and who will pay you handsomely for bloodying your hands during that two or six year stint.
The public just has to hope whoever they're voting for isn't lying to them, because if that representative is then there's nothing the public can do to punish them in time.
So if the American people don't actually want this -- What are they collectively going to do about it?
If the answer to that question is simply "the same thing they've done for the past few decades" then the reasonable conclusion to draw is again -- that the American people are collectively fine with the state of their country and the growing inequality and shrinking democratic power that the individual American has.
There are a myriad of responses that the American people could have to this growing problem, that range from legal to illegal, from scrupulous to unscrupulous but the American people collectively choose the path of least resistance, they choose the status quo.
America looked at Jan 6th and collectively decided that doing nothing was the best course of action. No further response was needed. Just clean the riff-raff out of the capitol and get back to business as usual.
If you're an American look around and remember that what you see as good as it gets, and that it's all downhill from here because that's what everyone wants.
Americans have been convinced that doing anything disruptive will get them killed or get the people they care about killed. And for the most vulnerable in our society that's likely true, as the existing safety nets are already extremely brittle and hold far more weight than they're supposed to. The public's too scared of losing what little they have to actually do anything extreme, and so they have that little stripped away slowly instead. Along with their basic humanity. Inculcation and indoctrination from the moment you can understand language can do irreparable harm to someone's psychology. It takes a more extreme harm to create a new worldview, and that new worldview is often unpredictable. The thinktanks that have crafted corporate and government policy since the 1960s know that and take advantage of it. The gradual stable decay is harder to panic about because it's not an immediate threat. It's all been designed this way ever since the 1970s as a backlash against all the societal progress made in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.
Most of the government's positions since the 1960s have been a result of those thinktanks crafting policy designed to make the public feel disconnected from the protests of the past. Schools don't teach about the socialist groundswell of the 1930s, or of things like the Battle Of Blair Mountain or the Little Steel Strike. They teach about the World War II production lines and how Nazi Germany came to be instead. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created to defang the man's own political teachings from the later 1960s in favour of his inoffensive "I have a dream" speech that was made before he learned of how the CIA had been targeting the black power movement. Juneteenth was an absolutely blatant placation attempt following the Black Lives Matter protests, and one that nobody it was supposed to be for accepted. But all of these token gestures create an illusion that progress is being made. It makes people think the government is solely responsible for solving problems, rather than the government being responsible for codifying the solutions that people themselves come up with. Many people born after 1980 have been trained to think this way their entire lives by small groups that require a stable environment for capital rather than a healthy environment for the public. To realize it is wrong and destroy one of the foundations of your understanding of the world is a difficult thing to do. And more importantly it's an expensive thing to do. Americans are convinced that everything has to have monetary value and that the destruction of monetary value is the destruction of public good. It's another one of those foundations.
I tell people all the time to actually do things. I do things in front of them. Their immediate response is always "You'll get arrested! What about your family?!" They don't understand the reasoning behind choosing minor immediate risk over guaranteed eventual harm. And with the rampant surveillance systems and government overreach happening, they're being convinced that the minor immediate risk is a major immediate guarantee of harm. The only other response is "What's the point?" They've been so beaten down by automated systems destroying their sense of agency that they feel nothing they do matters. You can't argue with voice mailbox. It has nothing to do with them wanting it or disregarding it, and it has everything to do with the psychology of fear. Fear of loss, fear of harm, fear of authority. None of it's rational. None of it's true personal choice. All of it is systemic. When you're convinced only you have agency you find it too monumental a task to create a system of your own to fight back.
Voters aren't given meaningful choices. It's just subjective "lesser of two evils" in a race to the bottom (except for elites, who win no matter which fake party is in power).
I wouldn't say democracy I'd illusory. I'd say it has to be fought for repeatedly to keep it, and we've done a poor job of fighting for it at least in my lifetime.
I don't think you can seriously say that there are no meaningful differences between the two major parties. Just compare Biden and Trump 2. You might not like either choice, but their policy platforms are in fact very different, and both are popular among large segments of the population. That's democracy in action.
In my opinion, we don't have a democracy problem, we have an education problem. Too many voters support policies that sound nice on paper but are disastrous when put into practice.
The two parties, including the most recent presidents, have disagreed on specific policy but not on direction. Both partied want more federal powers and authority. Both want to spend more than they make. Both believe in authoritarian type rule with "experts" at the top deciding what is best for all of us.
> Both believe in authoritarian type rule with "experts" at the top deciding what is best for all of us.
Nobody wants "experts" at any level of government.
The question that reveals your actual politics: where do want experts? I want them on staff or retainer, quickly accessible to representatives at every level of government.
Both parties absolutely want experts in charge and for the public to generally fall in line and not ask questions.
Did you not see how the entire pandemic response played out? There are still YouTube videos of a huge swath of politicians and media outlets telling people not to do their own research and to just listen to those in charge of the relevant federal agencies.
I agree that both parties like executive power, but that's because voters like it when it benefits "their side". If classical liberal ideas like fiscal responsibility and limited government were popular enough, the parties would scramble to nominate candidates who supported those policies. They care about winning elections.
It'd a bit of a vicious circle. Voters don't tend to pay much attention or understand, they hear sound bites that land well for them and their cheer for "their team."
I don't think many people even know what liberalism means today. It gets treated like a synonym for progressivism, which itself is poorly defined and used as a synonym for a DNC voter.
We also have a liars problem. Too many politicians feel free to tell blatant lies about what they have done, and what they intend to do. The voters don't punish politicians enough for lies.
There's nothing an actively-aiming-to-harm-others-for-their-own-gain person loves more than someone else deciding to stop trying because it's 'rigged.' The assholes are internally motivated to continue to being assholes. That takes continual active resistance.
Health access, for instance, improved as a result of one set of votes. Lifetime maxes are gone. There is improved access to non-employee plans.
It didn't stop inflation of health plan costs or medical treatment in general. One might think that means its worth voting for people pledging to make further large-scale changes to address those things.
And meanwhile, the assholes have been campaigning on the opposite for more than a decade: try to make the access worse again by trying rhetorical tricks to say that the one caused vs failed to fix the other. That'll let some rich people get even richer.
That's a real difference for many millions of people.
Neither party is perfect. Welcome to adulthood. Shitty compromises are generally all you get.
By all means, work on structural things to encourage more parties to exist and flourish.
The 'both sides are the same' actually is though. They never encourage 'take this behavior, vote this person' just 'both sides are the same' 'it's pointless' 'voting doesn't matter' 'voters have no impact'.
Claiming that both parties have more in common than they're given credit for is very different from throwing ones hands in the air and giving up on voting.
I personally see our two parties today and fighting for the same principles while landing on different specific policies. That doesn't mean I don't vote.
Clinton left office with a budget surplus. He deserves some credit for that, though it was also partly due to the end of the Cold War and the Republican majority Congress under Gingrich. Deficit spending increased dramatically under George W. Bush after 9/11 and every subsequent administration has continued this.
A lot of these trends go back to Reagan so "25 years ago" isn't too long ago to have shaped those trends.
But Clinton was a bit of a correction—not perfect by any means—to Reagan, who lit a bunch of gasoline on the "don't tax and DO spend" fire. Too bad even Reagan would look like some sort of TDS cuck RINO to the current conservatives...
So if one guy figures out some rhetorical tricks to convince an entire generation that ACTUALLY tax cuts will INCREASE revenue and HELP the deficit... while meanwhile massively increasing it under his administration... that guy still has responsibility for it decades later. (Throw in the hollywood greed-is-good-everyone-screw-over-your-neighbor-and-do-cocaine enthusiastic adoption of the era for good measure.)
I prefer to assign responsibility to the voters of the previous 25 years, just like I would to any other decision maker of any other organization trying to blame someone from 25 years ago.
All the Social Security taxes you pay get paid out to recipients this same year.
When Social Security was created in the 40's, the ratio of workers paying taxes to beneficiaries was like 40:1. So, each worker originally paid a very share amount.
Today, owing to demographic factors, that number is 3:1. Soon it will be 2:1. So by 203X, that number will drop below 1:1, meaning the program will be paying out more money than it takes in. It's at that point that the program will be considered "broke", because it can't meet its obligations.
So there's any number of solutions, which mostly boil down to some combination of the following: Raise SS taxes, cut benefits, or delay benefits (ie later retirement age)
> how many cuts to education or defense spending save social security?
You can't save it by cutting education or defense spending. By 2036 the combined social security and medicare shortfall is projected to reach $2.7 trillion. If defense spending stays at around 3.1% of GDP--it has been decreasing as a share of GDP since the 1990s--then the shortfall in medicare and social security will be about $1 trillion more than the entire defense budget.
Social Security has been running a cash flow deficit since around 2010, currently at around $270B per year and expected to keep increasing. Congress will need to pass some combination of an increase in payroll taxes, raising the retirement age, or reducing benefits.
Social security is a legal ponzi scheme. I don't say that to be outlandish, its a good description of how SS is funded - take money from people paying in today and give it to this who laid in previously.
It isn't fully funded though and people have been raising the alarm for decades now that it will run out of money.
The problem isn't simply that governments are stealing from the social security pot, the program isn't designed in a sustainable way and there are no direct links between money taken in and benefits paid out. The assumption at the time was that growth would always keep up, that fails eventually.
It's the Baby Boomers. They will transition to collecting ssi.
This was the "Locked Box" that Al Gore got mocked for on SNL 26 years ago. So people saw it coming and were trying to fix it then. And it was the Democrats trying to fix, it is not a "both sides" case. There is one party trying to destroy Social Security, and one party trying to fix it. I encourage anyone to not take my word for it, and conduct some basic research of their own.
Anyway, the crisis is that there is less income than distribution. So we collect debt (unlikely, given appetite for US debt after the last 20 months or so) or reduce payments.
Since many social security recipients are wealthy and not at risk of poverty, what will happen is likely some sort of reduction after means testing. It is not ideal, but entirely because fiscal choices of America's collective fault.
To be fair, Clinton pulled off a surplus through clever accounting though it would have been comparatively close either way.
I'm not sure how you could possibly narrow the issue down to two presidents' tax cuts alone. What about all the war spending? Or money printing? Or a partially implemented half step towards socialized health care?
Both parties are responsible for the debt we hold today, they have just argued about what to spend it on along the way.
I'm not sure of your point here or what you may have thought I was arguing for.
Where exactly we can find causes of our massive debt is an interesting question, and almost certainly wouldn't fall solely on tax cuts from two presidents.
Whether you agree with the current president or the insane things he sometimes says (I don't) is entirely separate.
>Rising spending relative to GDP explains about two-thirds of the growth in annual budget deficits since 2001, while declining revenue explains one-third.
>Most debt (77% of GDP) can be attributed to bipartisan legislation.
See also the "Debt Under Various Counterfactuals" projection, where the debt would have been roughly the same under two scenarios, "Without Major Tax Cuts" and "Without Major Spending Increases".
You can implement policies that tax more than just income. So no not regardless of policy but yes where policies don't exist to reshape a system where capital (i.e. investment in automated production) inherently takes more of the wealth than labour it will inherently lead to an agglomeration of capital.
Today, if sanitation workers go on strike, they rapidly end up with a negotiated settlement. If we had self driving garbage trucks that didn't need them, what political leverage would they have? The same too goes for other industries.
If police have advanced surveillance technology and drones, even violent protest becomes very hard.
What pressure is there to cater to people who are powerless dead weight on the economy?
Voting is still a thing. You still have to convince people that just voting for what they want is less important than carefully considering the affect their votes will have on billionaires.
How long will it remain a thing when the voters have no leverage? King Louis didn't set up the French Republic out of the goodness of his heart. He set it up by reducing the amount of weight carried by his neck.
Voting happens because economic power implies political power. People must be kept satisfied for things to keep running.
If that deal gets upended, I don't think the economic dead weight will be treated well.
I wished, unfortunately the companies are going to complain that doing so will stop them to have enough money to innovate compared to other countries, or that they are too small to compete. (At least it's the current speech of the lobbies in EU for example).
But instead, ever since the brief federal surplus at the end of the 90s, we've done multiple multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the highest earners. Bush tax cuts + 2x Trump tax cuts (most recently in the BBB). In each case after fudging the projections beforehand to claim it will reduce the deficit somehow, then the deficit grows by a massive amount.
We've been reshaping the system to redistribute trillions to capital owners via government IOUs that will eventually come due. Inevitably, this will be "solved" by cutting benefits to workers while insisting no other solution could possibly exist.
Like, you know, undoing these relatively recent handouts to the ultra rich and restructuring policy to the benefit of workers.
True. In capitalism, the rule is that more capital you have, more capital you will get next year.
On one side it's interesting, because it means that if you buy a machine, next years you can buy more, and more and more things get automated.
The bad side, is that we doesn't have a way for labor to reap the benefits of it as well, except from lower purchasing costs... which is counter-balanced by the need of the system to push for more and more consumption every year, to keep it working. (E.g price of electronics/performance decreasing, but need every few years to buy new phones with more performance to keep up with the more and more hungry apps)
If you have a short term increase in productivity then the first movers will accumulate a short term gain but after the technology has established itself and become widely available, there is no long term advantage anymore.
So the unfairness happens entirely during the transition. The fact that the unfair advantage can be retained over time has nothing to do with automation though.
Depends. Can I bribe the machines with an all expenses paid luxury holiday getaway, an RV, private school tuition, and real estate like I can with Supreme Court Justices? Or do I have to pollute the AI's training data somehow and hope for the best. Seems far more efficient to me if the rich just buy politicians the regular way.
Capital is non-consumable, so it is nonsensical to speak of workers taking "a share of capital." Perhaps we should speak of GDP, not capital.
The reasons why workers are taking a smaller share of GDP are:
1. GDP is fake. The government lies about GDP using tricks such as hedonic adjustments.
2. Increasing public spending means the government is taking a larger share of GDP. Of course, the more the government spends, the less workers can take.
3. Nobody is valuing "free" stuff like Google, YouTube or free ai. You like "free" stuff, but nothing is free. You always pay it one way or another. There is your "share of GDP"
Machine intelligence could drive as much transfer from labor to capital in the next decade as the previous wage-to-financial economy produced in forty years.
This will push wealth concentration in leading OECD economies beyond the inequality seen in Brazil and Mexico.
Also productivity costs more in tooling than ever before per worker, so it's not a surprise that a smaller amount of capital goes to humans when the gains are majority from capital outlays, not labor improvements.
So here's what I don't get: The United States is the world's largest consumer market. From what I can find, personal consumption expenditures (PCE) account for about two-thirds to 70% of total US economic output. We live and die on consumer spending and confidence.
So next we automate the bejeebus out of this economy with AI robots and Elon believes it grows 3x in under five years. Splendid. But if a consumer-driven economy has no payrolls, it eventually has no buyers. It just seems to me that ultimately, billionaires and investors cannot decouple themselves from the masses... but maybe it's a game of get mine before the system collapses?
Today, around 50% of US consumer spending is by the top 10% of wealthiest households. (per Moody's)
The end state of this looks like how humanity looked before the industrial revolution: A single-digit percent of the population has the vast majority of the wealth and virtually all real estate and luxury goods. Between 90% and 95% of the population has just enough to live on, and never enough to build generational wealth or have any class mobility.
I think those in poverty have an awful lot less ways to supplement bought food these days, they are largely legislated out of foraging in any meaningful way. So I think actually a large percentage will starve to death or be in prison.
People will take food without paying for it before dying. You don’t have to forage when you can loot grocery stores. At a point when a large percentage are going to die and the food is there, it will be bedlam and the police won’t be stopping it because their families will be part of the riot.
The notion that people will simply roll over and literally die for profit margins is absurd. The system will break and be rebuilt in that situation.
It wouldn't actually cost that much money to feed everyone in the world. Global hunger could be wiped out today. More likely everyone will get just enough food, but luxury foods like meat (especially beef) and premium items will be uncommon. Like pre-industrial diets.
> People will take food without paying for it before dying.
Yeah, I don't know why people seem to not understand this.
There are so many guns in America.
If the shit really hits the fan economically and a significant amount of people can't legally afford to buy their next 3 meals, there is likely to be a lot of excess deaths, but many of them will not be from starvation.
Food banks. Church pantries. Welfare programs. Meals with family and friends. Eat way less meat. Get hardcore into meal prep. https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook. People will find ways to eat as long as there isn't an active warzone.
I'm much more worried about what housing looks like in the future.
Food banks depend on the largesse of the people that can afford to buy food though, which, well... if the only people remaining in that group are the ones gleefully saying how they're going to create a permanent underclass...
I've done social-work–adjacent stuff and I know a lot of NGOs in my country are quite strained (of course, probably housing more than food, so I don't disagree that might be more of a concern). I imagine it wouldn't be too different in America.
No, there are laws against distributing food without a permit because (1) there are people who give poisoned food to homeless people and (2) there are rules about food safety.
If billionaires have all the money then there's nothing stopping them from buying all the stuff the economy can produce and leaving the rest of the population to barely get by or starve. Certainly, higher income people might currently spend less than their share of total income (at least between 2017 and 2021, see BLS paper, Garner et al., 2024, Gini of 0.3ish vs what I believe is 0.4ish for post-tax income) because poor people need to spend more of their income on things like food or rent, but there's no reason why the share of spendin by the top x% can't increase. In fact, as I understand it, it already has, according to [2] who themselves cite Moody, the top 20% accounted for 59% of spending in Q3 2025, which was a marked increase from the 40% in the BLS paper.
Now, the top 20% certainly aren't billionaires, but we also have to remember that the Luddites also benefited significantly from the automation of spinning before they themselves were replaced by automated weaving and subsequently suppressed by the state. There is no reason to think our current crop of labour aristocracy immune from the whims of capital when the time comes.
if a really powerful mafia got installed into your city, a very small violent group of people demanding people to pay to stay safe... how long before you start organizing? how long before they notice and do something about it?
Well, Elon thinks we'll all get a Universal High Income. Holding aside the irony of him thinking the future is socialism, that money has to come from somewhere. If all companies in the future depend on a handful of AI and Robotics companies, I guess that the money has to come from Elon. Seeing as the layoffs have started, what is he waiting for?
When they have enough robots, they won't need the rest of the system. I think Musk must have meant something like that when he said money won't matter.
One would expect that retirees are mostly living off capital rather than labor. Wouldn't an increased elderly population result in a lower labor share?
Or maybe something else. This paper suggests that as workers get older, they switch jobs less and get fewer raises:
"We find that a 60-year-old worker receives half the marginal product relative to when they were 20. Together with recent demographic trends, this can account for 59% of the recent decline in labor’s share of earnings in the United States."
I forsee this getting fixed by inflation, capital gains tax to stop people avoiding an inflation haircut, and an unrealised gains tax to stop people deferring paying.
How does this tie in with the opposing view’s narrative that gdp per capita has been increasing since the industrial revolution? I mean, this is an issue I’d actually like to take a side with—I do in fact dislike it whenever the latter statistic comes up because the actual and lived experience of cost of living and capital accrual in the present day is actually incredibly difficult, that even the prospect of home ownership looks bleak for many people.
We can easily multiply these together. The labor share of real GDP per capita is up by ~300%. Notice that this is less than the ~370% real GDP per capita is up overall, which is the one side's objection, but still significantly more than 0% and definitely not a negative number, which is the other side's retort.
The real question is, how do you reduce the amount of rent seeking? Because that's the thing that makes the first number go down instead of up, and you want them both to go up.
I’m not sure about that math, but the sentiment is correct, I think. They are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie.
A perhaps deeper question is what should we give more weight to: absolute wealth, or relative? Past a fairly low threshold people seem to mostly care about relative.
> Past a fairly low threshold people seem to mostly care about relative.
It's more like, people have squishy "fairness" wetware.
Suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 in value and doesn't cost you anything whatsoever. You'd have to be a real bastard not to press the button, right?
Now suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 and causes you to get $10,000. This one is even more obvious, but it's also the sort of thing where you wouldn't be surprised to discover people starting a campaign to say that the button is unfair and we need to ban anyone from doing that.
And it's basically because humans evolved under conditions of inherent scarcity. If you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you still get a house and a car and free time for your family/projects etc., and they get a mansion and a Ferrari and can pay someone to do things for them so they have even more free time, is that actually a problem? Whereas if you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you can't even feed your family while they're getting fat, you're going to go to war over that.
In a high scarcity environment, things look like the second one, and that's where the human fairness wetware got its intuitions. But modern stuff mostly looks like the first one, and to the extent it looks like the second one it's usually artificial scarcity. It's not that we lack the resources to produce enough housing, it's that building more of it in a particular place is prohibited by law. And then it's not that they get a bigger house than you, it's that you don't get one at all, and the objection goes back to being reasonable. But the better way to solve that is to build more housing -- eliminate artificial scarcity -- rather than trying to fight over a limited quantity of something that doesn't actually have to be so limited.
A disaster. Economy is a flow of capital, it cycles up. USA needs the general public to have money for necessities as well as a little more for saving and then extras.
Top earnings come from the support of 1000s of participants with lesser earnings. This is an unhealthy economic trend. It's more than a stagnation risk.
Issues like these are created in a short term but take comparatively longer to correct.
Lower wages, job losses or eliminations, structural unemployment and forced entrepreneurship were all concepts that emerged during the Great Depression [1].
The world is a very different place than it was in the early 20th century, but at the same time, "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
I say this not to be a "doomer". I say this because those forces I mentioned above were very real and we have to keep our eyes wide open.
Alice has nothing, Elon has $1T and we give them each a UBI of, lets say, $50k.
Your "instant inflation" means now their effective buying power is diluted by some fixed factor X. You claim this somehow leaves both Alice and Elon in "the same place they started from"
100000005 X == 100000000 but 5 X = 0, if you've done high school math you can probably see that there is no value of X for which this works.
> UBI will cause instant inflation and everyone will be in the same place they started from.
Well, no, even if it causes inflation, everyone won't be in the same place they started from, because (even if you assume no additional progressive tax or other revenue stream is established alongside it) a flat per-capita additional personal income stream doesn't result in the same distribution of income as existed without it. It would narrow the (relative) range of income distribution, making the poor better off and the rich worse off (assuming no overall change in purchasing power.)
Not if we control the prices, the idea of UBI isn't to give money but to give resources, if everyone gets a house, clothes, food and education for free that's UBI as well. Even if it didn't involve a direct benefit transfer.
And that's the only solution to UBI, when resources are abundant enough that UBI isn't needed or with UBI we increase resource enough that there isn't inflation risks.
All UBI experiments till now have proven it's not bad for the people, if we just manage the economy part it will all work out somehow.
Or, 90% of us (that aren't zoo-worthy) will need to be exterminated. 2/3rds+ of us American't were "paycheck to paycheck" – a statistic which pre-dates Covid!
Yeah that point no longer really applies because bad food is cheap. And also fast, people that work a lot don't have the time to spend an hour cooking.
Sadly the people behind ycombinator think helping this administration crush woke youth, and spying on us with flock cameras, is more important that preventing fascism or corporotocracy.
Yeah, my thought exactly. Capital is the firm. Labor is the workforce. Wages are the return to labor and profit is the return to capital. Labor and capital are in eternal struggle for their piece of the pie.
Capital historically meant 'that part of production set aside for future production'. Machines, land improvements, infrastructure, intellectual property. Now it tends to include all assets used to generate wealth - including things like land which were once in their own category.
Wages are just money and may or may not become capital according to the discretion and opportunities of the employee.
Anyone care to explain the downvotes? I am simply pointing out a glaring misuse of a word in the title, which made me curious about the author's background.
Your comment is too ambiguous. To you it might have a passive origin / intent, but readers assume you think the entire article is poorly written which in turn means your comment is just noise.
If you wanted to use this as an educational opportunity to say "income share of labor" and "income share of capital" you might have had a point, but I'm the one who has to tell you that.
Although I'm non-downvoter, I doubt anyone thinks you're wrong. It's probably just that they feel that the comment is distracting or of uncertain relevance or something like that.
This shouldn't be a surprise. The US came out of WWII with similarly high debt to GDP. They only corrected that through financial repression, and that's likely to be their only chance of lowering that debt ratio today.
If we don't spend the next few decades skating by while the currency is debased under our noses, I assume its because there's a much more severe and tragic response.
In a completely unrelated note, corporate profits are at a historical high. Up 22.8% from the same period last year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/222127/quarterly-corpora...
Those profits are fake. It's the government printing money and inflating the numbers, but no consumable wealth was created, so there is nothing to distribute.
How much of it is new private and public debt?
The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that, which helped the common people by disincentivizing the post-Reagan short-term-financial-games profit-maximization and wealth-and-income-consolidation.
Higher marginal tax rates are meaningless and are continually parroted without either understanding effective tax rates or willfully ignoring them.
I have half-jokingly wish a president would introduce a 95% tax bracket at some ridiculous number so this statistic will die.
I feel like the earnings structure is quite different than it was post-war though. Today there's a larger difference between "income rich" and "capital rich" in terms of their options for avoiding tax incidence.
Like in 1947 a factory owner's profits would show up as high income. Today they wouldn't (money is in share prices and complex financial arrangements / borrowing). The high marginal rates hit the chief engineer instead, who actually works for a living.
Exactly the true wealth of America is no longer income or property its all shares. It could be argued the American 40T debt is pretty much because of tax avoidance due to hiding wealth in stocks and related possibilities.
Stock value is not real wealth. The stock value is a guess about future profits along the next 10 years. You can't give to workers guessed future wealth. It doesn't exists today.
No argument there, im simply making the observation that a lot of people are avoiding tax by hiding their wealth as shares and this is hurting the gov ability to tax and pay its debts.
Seems like a good reason to figure out some additional soak-the-rich taxes! (Back in the 30s that was a slogan that Americans could rally behind..! Not so much right in the last several decades.)
But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.
Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...
> The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that
This is a common trope, but it ignores that at the time the tax code had loopholes that could smuggle a freight train full of gold bars. Instead of lower marginal rates, people were taking their real estate and personal vehicles and everything else as tax deductions, and then weren't paying the high marginal rates to begin with. The lowering of marginal rates came with the closing of most of those loopholes, which is why the change had no real effect on federal receipts as a percent of GDP, which has been in the same range since the end of WWII (and was much lower before it):
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The thing that actually changed is that markets have consolidated a lot more than they were in the mid 20th century, and we have significantly more regulatory capture where e.g. corporations lobby to make their services required by law or to impede or prohibit new entrants to the market. Then consumers/workers have to pay more for those things while receiving nothing of value in return. Corporations take more money and it comes from labor.
Increasing the tax rate doesn't fix that because you'd still have workers paying the high prices to corporations even if the government subsequently took more of the money.
What happens if you have to buy a product from a monopolist so they currently take your last $100, and then the government comes and says they have to pay 80% of it in tax? Best case the government gives the money directly to you, but then there is still a monopoly, so they just raise the price by the amount it takes to extract all of your money again. Worst case, the money doesn't go to you, it goes to some cronies who will now be using it to lobby to increase the amount you pay, and have just demonstrated that they're more politically connected than the original corporations.
To actually fix it you have to get back to competitive markets, efficiency and low barriers to entry.
What does debt to gdp have to do with the labor share of income?
It doesn't directly. Financial repression does though, its a "solution" to high federal debt and leaves the average person having to eat the cost.
Its a bit like austerity, but instead of taking a share of everyone's wealth they just make all of our stored wealth worse less. They do that by inflating asset prices much faster than wages can keep up, meaning those large corporations at the top get rich while the average person falls further and further behind.
It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own? The Fed has been keeping rates higher, despite political pressure, without yet having achieved the inflation target.
The economy is a measure of past financial behavior. I'm not sure how the economy could do this on its own, we're doing this to ourselves. I say "we" collectively there, these are all results of human choices not an amorphous concept of an economy.
> I'm not sure how the economy could do this on its own, we're doing this to ourselves.
i dont understand. the economy is the royal we doing things. the economy doesnt experience time if we arent doing thongs to ourselves. this isnt a distinction with a difference
> It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own?
This is what I was replying to. At least to me, saying the economy did something on its own takes the agency and responsibility off of us. My point was that the economy is just backward looking analysis of how money changes hands, it does nothing by itself and when things change its the result of us making decisions.
Don't quote me on that, but people are saying that despite American companies are getting more money, people are getting even less. Or that's my understanding. Happy to be corrected though
Well, because one of the strategies of earning more money is paying workers lesser.
Public debt burden increases interest rates. This benefits holders of government bonds, who are disproportionately wealthy households and financial institutions. It crowds out private investment and inhibits economic growth, which weakens workers' bargaining power. Deficit spending also causes inflation, which disproportionately hurts people on the lower end of the income scale.
That, and there is a looming Social Security crisis due in 2032. Fiscal responsibility hasn't been either party's (or voters') priority for the past two decades, and it's probably going to take another disaster to put it back on the table.
The problem would be much less intractable if one party didn't do 3 pointless multi-trillion dollar tax cuts primarily for the benefit of ultra high earners. Each time promising it would reduce the deficit, with increasing absurdity.
It's depressing to look at the before/after federal deficit estimates over the last two decades without the Bush tax cuts, even before taking out the Trump 1 tax cuts (and future projections from the recent Trump 2 cuts in the BBB). Just a huge unforced error that was completely foreseeable each time.
Contrary to public perception and PR, the "party of fiscal responsibility" has consistently been a disaster for controlling the deficit.
This isn't a "one party is the problem" situation. Both parties have spent over 20 years fighting pointless wars. Both parties spend without balancing a budget. Both now gerrymander and both at least threaten to stack the court. Both pander to voters with short term solutions that actively do harm long term. Both were responsible for the shit show of the pandemic response.
The list goes on and on. They argue over where new debt should be spent, who to bomb, or what new powers the government should claim. What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.
Let's actually compare the size of the wars of both parties for the last 40 years. Let's compare the spend-vs-tax changes for both.
If you can't be honest that some folks out there are, in fact, pushing much worse agendas than others... then how do you hope to convince anyone to evaluate if anyone else is gonna actually do better than either? You can't easily have those critical thinking skills without noticing the differences in the two current parties...
Is your argument that one party overspends worse than the other? That certainly is true, though how many externalities are included would be up for debate. Regardless though, my problem is with the over spending, not with which is party over spends less.
You said it wasn't a "one party is the problem" situation.
But how can you conclude that if you don't have those numbers to give me?
Switching gears to externalities seems like a bit of a dodge unless you are super confident that those externalities are more significant than the bad things you predict happening in the future due to the debt.
Don't you need to look at the numbers to justify that claim? Maybe one party has added 30T and another has added 5T to the debt since Carter. Maybe one has added 20T and the other added 18T. Those numbers would demand VERY different responses.
But saying "it's not one party" seems to assume a particular set of numbers. What are they?
Your argument is absurd. You seem to take issue with my arguments and the examples I gave and demand I owe you numbers and statistics. But you're making your own arguments ad though they are correct without providing your own data.
I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other. You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
You made the initial claim that it wasn't a "one party is the problem," shouldn't that be your own responsibility to substantiate?
"I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other."
I'd rephrase it to out-deficit the other because you could spend more AND bring in more revenue and improve the situation. If we do that, then yes, that's certainly my hunch, but I didn't pull any numbers. Maybe the covid-era timing of Trump-vs-Biden plays out wildly different, maybe some of the Obama-era stuff cost more than I'm recalling. Seems necessary to know to know if it's one party is MUCH better than the other or just one party is a bit better than the other.
>You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
My reason for asking for the data is that the best action to take depends on the magnitudes. If one party is dramatically better than the other then the most practical way of fixing your problem is likely to be do everything you can to get that party more power AND work to shift it into the positive vs try to burn both parties down.
You're still deflecting off my actual argument, latching onto only the first sentence, and demanding stats where none are needed.
I said its not a one party problem and then went on to very clearly explain that both parties overspend our income and run deficits. Are you refuting that? No exact stats are needed there because its common knowledge that we haven't run a balanced budget since Clinton was in office.
You seem to be arguing with a point that I never said. I didn't claim which party had spent more, for that I would have to double check the numbers and adjust for inflation.
Public debt is a ratchet because the private holders on the other side decide how much of it there is.
Why don't you post the numbers, then? Here they are for the past 25 years:
Bush: +$4.9T Obama: +$9.3T Trump 1: +$7.8T Biden: +$8.5T Trump 2: +$4.4T
I don't think there's much point in quibbling over which party has added more to the national debt. The point is that both parties have been irresponsible in different ways, and neither supports the policies necessary to balance the budget: tax increases and cuts to entitlements.
I didn't post them because I didn't bother looking them up, and wanted the person making the claim to check into it. Thanks for actually sharing!
That presentation does support their claim that both parties need to get back to basics on that matter.
Though now that I'm a bit more invested, looking at deficit delta by year for each of those tells a bit more.
Bush's went up then started to fall until 2008. Obama inherited that mess and he+his Congress spent to get out of it then made it shrink continually until a bump back up in 2016. Trump increased the deficit every single year (and enormously so in 2020, another disaster response incident). It shrank back under Biden in 2021 and 2022 then ticked back up, Trumps' now got it trending back up again after a tiny decrease in 2025.
The thing that changes with that view is that Trump appears to be the big outlier here, who's never really managed to bring it down at all or even try. And there's a fun macro-trend of both of those Democrats only getting elected into shits-on-fire circumstances. Clinton didn't have the problem, maybe that's why he did better.
You didn't post them because you were arguing with a point I didn't make. I didn't say both parties spend just as much, I said both parties overspend and run deficits. The average person shouldn't need to fact check such an obvious statement.
Your attempts here to deflect all spending from the president in office to the party you disagree with is also a bit too obvious. You had no counter argument to my actual point and were instead fishing for me to provide exactly those numbers so you could do exactly this deflection.
Given that you wanted so badly for me to look up numbers, I'd love to hear you justify that running deficits is not a problem of only one party.
One party is distinctively more war hungry then the other. Constantly pushing the overtone window toward more and more wars.
Both now have to gerrymander, because one party decided they gerrymander is way to go. And the other one ended up with no choice. Trying to both side this is particularly hypocritical, because one party just finally woke up and realized there is no way to be represented if they dont take countermeasures against past gerrymandering.
Court is already stacked by one party, the other one dropped the ball on that one. And its voters are paying for it. It must stack it back.
And when it comes to debt, the supposed fiscal responsibility party caused more of it.
> What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.
How have you not seen any of those items discussed? It's all I see.
What I don't see is why my fucking neighbors themselves are more than a vote. Having worked with you all for decades now, I don't find any of you any smarter or fucking competent to be a org leader; what have we done but bitch about what web framework and cloud backend to use and stupid valuations should we run up?
It's all ultimately a huge waste since we can't be sure the meteor doesn't hit Earth after we die; we're all just fucking winging it
My age peers 45-50 are just the next Boomers; overly verbose nitwits jerking off whatever literacy they acquired through education. It's cheesy as fuck stupid primates grasping at straws and throwing emotional poop, arbitrary social fiefdom erecting as a means to engage in gentle math based eugenics of who earned a job on an office gig roster.
Fingers crossed everyone loses. Cause if this is all advanced society is capable of launch the nukes.
I'd be very curious where I could find debates over balancing federal budgets. I know only one or two members of Congress that even talk about balancing a budget beyond getting a cheap sound byte.
Congress hasn't meaningfully acted on the war in Iran. They are the only ones with the power to declare war and emergency powers are clear. They also own the budget and decided to pay for the war after the fact. Yes the Republicans control both houses right now do that doesn't help, but unless I'm wildly mistaken that spending vote was jot a party line vote.
dude, don't try to both-sides this one. just look at the deficits of the administrations going back to Reagan.
The main wars fought in the past 40 years have all been GOP initiated: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran. This have dwarfed the military operations initiated by Dems.
Every administration since Clinton, no matter the party, has run a deficit. It actually is both sides who are the problem. The only argument I've seen to the contrary in this thread is that Democrat administrations have had a smaller deficit, but that is an irrelevant argument. Any amount of deficit is unacceptable, you don't get brownie points because you filled the ship with water slower than the other guy did.
I'm sorry, but this is almost a parody of the enlightened centrism meme.
The Democrats have attempted to pass several anti-gerrymandering bills. One in the Senate in 2024, one in the House in 2021. Both stonewalled by Republicans.
The Republican SCOTUS appointees allowed partisan gerrymandering, the Democratic ones were in the dissent.
California's prop 50 was IN RESPONSE to an unprecedented mid-term gerrymandering effort by Texas at the behest of Trump.
I just picked one example, but I could easily write similar responses that show very stark differences between the parties when it comes to wars, stacking the court, war with Iran, and more.
Newsome proposed a ballot measure to allow the government to draw a more Democrats friendly map. hHochul treated redistricting in New York and supported efforts to do so.
The difference in many case was that legal challenges in blue stated tended to stop the gerrymandering where courts in red states tended not to. The end result is different, the political intent was not.
And Newsome did that is response to what again? Oh right, as a threat of 'if you do it we will do it to' to try and contain unchecked Republican gerrymandering. Kind of a important detail to leave out.
I can't speak to his intent, I just know that he specifically said the state legislation should redraw California lines to favor his party.
I can't include every detail in such a format, but its worth noting that I did clearly call out the Republicans doing it first. Its not like I was saying "democrat gerrymander" out of context there.
No, not really. Two wrongs don't make a right. It doesn't matter who started it (especially since each party claims to be responding to the other, and the only thing they differ on is where to draw the zero point), it is still not acceptable to continue in kind.
It does matter who started it and responding meekly to being wronged just makes you a sucker. And conservative morality being what it is, suckers are going to be bullied for fun.
> Two wrongs don't make a right.
It is ok to respond to gerrymandering by gerrymandering. It is not kindergarten. The court said it is legal, GOP will continue to do it. If the other side does not engage, they will honorably loose all ability to influence politics.
> 3 pointless multi-trillion dollar tax cuts
This is a misunderstanding of how "tax cuts" work under the US income tax. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Notice the lack of "tax cuts". GDP goes up, taxes go up by exactly the same amount. The number from the most recent year is basically the same as the number from 50 years prior in 1975. Ratio hasn't changed meaningfully since the end of WWII. But Congress somehow keeps passing "tax cuts", so how does that work?
It's because the tax cuts are fake. They set the tax brackets in dollars rather than percentiles, but the tax rates are in percentages, so that's not a stable ratio. In 1995 the median household income was $34,080, now it's $87,460. If they left the tax brackets the same, it would shove the middle class into the tax brackets meant for the rich. De facto middle class tax hike whenever they do nothing.
Naturally Congress loves this, because every few years they get to pass a bill re-adjusting the numbers to keep the true tax rate the same while calling it a "tax cut", and thereby get to claim credit for something people want while not really changing anything. Which is their absolute favorite thing, and why they never fix it by setting the tax brackets in percentiles.
It's easy to place the blame on political parties or the wealthy but at the end of the day the problems that America faces are the result of a series of choices made by the electorate over decades despite the feedback from each of these decisions as they were made.
At then end of the day the way things are in America is a reflection of what the American people want their country to be.
People like to make the argument that Americans would stand up and sort this problem out, but the country is just so big, and the average American just doesn't have enough money to do something, and people are spread far and wide and that there's just no way for the to come together to decisively end these problems but it's just excuses. People by and large are content with the status quo. This is just what they want.
Precarious state of health care access and incomprehensibly opaque costs? That's a choice.
An ever escalating police state that has reached new peaks of immigration police and pulling random people off the street and a national guard perpetually patrolling cities? That's a choice.
Forever wars with no discernible objective or end point in the Middle East? That's a choice.
consolidation of media and economic control into a smaller and smaller group of people? That's a choice.
All of this is a choice that Americans collectively continue to make. And my prediction is that they'll continue to keep making these (imho) poor choices.
It's not so much choices that Americans collectively make. Almost every major policy decision since 2010 has been unpopular with the American public. The actual elected officials just thumbs up or thumbs down something based which party introduced it, and then if they ignore that they decide on the very poorly organized skim notes an aide might be able to badger them into reading. Many members of our House Of Representatives didn't even read what was in the 2018 fiscal budget bill (P.L. 115-123) or the omnibus bill of 2025 (P.L. 119-21) that destroyed regulatory authority. Mitch McConnell ruined the ability of Congress to actually function by making it a warring states situation instead of organized compromise. Ever since then it's been grab what you can get and get, because you won't get any long term work done.
The American people don't actually want this. They don't vote for any of these policies. They actively vote and protest against them. But there's no true mechanism available to the public for ousting elected or appointed officials outside of scheduled times. Recalls have no enforcement. Impeachments have no enforcement! When you know you've got a protected period to wreak havoc in, you do it without worry. Especially if you're doing that in service of people who have broken the systems so they cannot be pried out of their positions, and who will pay you handsomely for bloodying your hands during that two or six year stint.
The public just has to hope whoever they're voting for isn't lying to them, because if that representative is then there's nothing the public can do to punish them in time.
So if the American people don't actually want this -- What are they collectively going to do about it?
If the answer to that question is simply "the same thing they've done for the past few decades" then the reasonable conclusion to draw is again -- that the American people are collectively fine with the state of their country and the growing inequality and shrinking democratic power that the individual American has.
There are a myriad of responses that the American people could have to this growing problem, that range from legal to illegal, from scrupulous to unscrupulous but the American people collectively choose the path of least resistance, they choose the status quo.
America looked at Jan 6th and collectively decided that doing nothing was the best course of action. No further response was needed. Just clean the riff-raff out of the capitol and get back to business as usual.
If you're an American look around and remember that what you see as good as it gets, and that it's all downhill from here because that's what everyone wants.
Americans have been convinced that doing anything disruptive will get them killed or get the people they care about killed. And for the most vulnerable in our society that's likely true, as the existing safety nets are already extremely brittle and hold far more weight than they're supposed to. The public's too scared of losing what little they have to actually do anything extreme, and so they have that little stripped away slowly instead. Along with their basic humanity. Inculcation and indoctrination from the moment you can understand language can do irreparable harm to someone's psychology. It takes a more extreme harm to create a new worldview, and that new worldview is often unpredictable. The thinktanks that have crafted corporate and government policy since the 1960s know that and take advantage of it. The gradual stable decay is harder to panic about because it's not an immediate threat. It's all been designed this way ever since the 1970s as a backlash against all the societal progress made in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.
Most of the government's positions since the 1960s have been a result of those thinktanks crafting policy designed to make the public feel disconnected from the protests of the past. Schools don't teach about the socialist groundswell of the 1930s, or of things like the Battle Of Blair Mountain or the Little Steel Strike. They teach about the World War II production lines and how Nazi Germany came to be instead. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created to defang the man's own political teachings from the later 1960s in favour of his inoffensive "I have a dream" speech that was made before he learned of how the CIA had been targeting the black power movement. Juneteenth was an absolutely blatant placation attempt following the Black Lives Matter protests, and one that nobody it was supposed to be for accepted. But all of these token gestures create an illusion that progress is being made. It makes people think the government is solely responsible for solving problems, rather than the government being responsible for codifying the solutions that people themselves come up with. Many people born after 1980 have been trained to think this way their entire lives by small groups that require a stable environment for capital rather than a healthy environment for the public. To realize it is wrong and destroy one of the foundations of your understanding of the world is a difficult thing to do. And more importantly it's an expensive thing to do. Americans are convinced that everything has to have monetary value and that the destruction of monetary value is the destruction of public good. It's another one of those foundations.
I tell people all the time to actually do things. I do things in front of them. Their immediate response is always "You'll get arrested! What about your family?!" They don't understand the reasoning behind choosing minor immediate risk over guaranteed eventual harm. And with the rampant surveillance systems and government overreach happening, they're being convinced that the minor immediate risk is a major immediate guarantee of harm. The only other response is "What's the point?" They've been so beaten down by automated systems destroying their sense of agency that they feel nothing they do matters. You can't argue with voice mailbox. It has nothing to do with them wanting it or disregarding it, and it has everything to do with the psychology of fear. Fear of loss, fear of harm, fear of authority. None of it's rational. None of it's true personal choice. All of it is systemic. When you're convinced only you have agency you find it too monumental a task to create a system of your own to fight back.
It sucks. I hate it here.
Voters aren't given meaningful choices. It's just subjective "lesser of two evils" in a race to the bottom (except for elites, who win no matter which fake party is in power).
Democracy is illusory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
I wouldn't say democracy I'd illusory. I'd say it has to be fought for repeatedly to keep it, and we've done a poor job of fighting for it at least in my lifetime.
I don't think you can seriously say that there are no meaningful differences between the two major parties. Just compare Biden and Trump 2. You might not like either choice, but their policy platforms are in fact very different, and both are popular among large segments of the population. That's democracy in action.
In my opinion, we don't have a democracy problem, we have an education problem. Too many voters support policies that sound nice on paper but are disastrous when put into practice.
The two parties, including the most recent presidents, have disagreed on specific policy but not on direction. Both partied want more federal powers and authority. Both want to spend more than they make. Both believe in authoritarian type rule with "experts" at the top deciding what is best for all of us.
> Both believe in authoritarian type rule with "experts" at the top deciding what is best for all of us.
Nobody wants "experts" at any level of government.
The question that reveals your actual politics: where do want experts? I want them on staff or retainer, quickly accessible to representatives at every level of government.
Both parties absolutely want experts in charge and for the public to generally fall in line and not ask questions.
Did you not see how the entire pandemic response played out? There are still YouTube videos of a huge swath of politicians and media outlets telling people not to do their own research and to just listen to those in charge of the relevant federal agencies.
I agree that both parties like executive power, but that's because voters like it when it benefits "their side". If classical liberal ideas like fiscal responsibility and limited government were popular enough, the parties would scramble to nominate candidates who supported those policies. They care about winning elections.
It'd a bit of a vicious circle. Voters don't tend to pay much attention or understand, they hear sound bites that land well for them and their cheer for "their team."
I don't think many people even know what liberalism means today. It gets treated like a synonym for progressivism, which itself is poorly defined and used as a synonym for a DNC voter.
We also have a liars problem. Too many politicians feel free to tell blatant lies about what they have done, and what they intend to do. The voters don't punish politicians enough for lies.
There's nothing an actively-aiming-to-harm-others-for-their-own-gain person loves more than someone else deciding to stop trying because it's 'rigged.' The assholes are internally motivated to continue to being assholes. That takes continual active resistance.
Health access, for instance, improved as a result of one set of votes. Lifetime maxes are gone. There is improved access to non-employee plans.
It didn't stop inflation of health plan costs or medical treatment in general. One might think that means its worth voting for people pledging to make further large-scale changes to address those things.
And meanwhile, the assholes have been campaigning on the opposite for more than a decade: try to make the access worse again by trying rhetorical tricks to say that the one caused vs failed to fix the other. That'll let some rich people get even richer.
That's a real difference for many millions of people.
Neither party is perfect. Welcome to adulthood. Shitty compromises are generally all you get.
By all means, work on structural things to encourage more parties to exist and flourish.
Just also pay attention to the active battles.
> someone else deciding to stop trying because it's 'rigged.'
Nobody here is suggesting this.
The 'both sides are the same' actually is though. They never encourage 'take this behavior, vote this person' just 'both sides are the same' 'it's pointless' 'voting doesn't matter' 'voters have no impact'.
Claiming that both parties have more in common than they're given credit for is very different from throwing ones hands in the air and giving up on voting.
I personally see our two parties today and fighting for the same principles while landing on different specific policies. That doesn't mean I don't vote.
Wahh republicans isn't a reasonable answer. It was Clinton and his ilk that got the US into this.
Clinton left office with a budget surplus. He deserves some credit for that, though it was also partly due to the end of the Cold War and the Republican majority Congress under Gingrich. Deficit spending increased dramatically under George W. Bush after 9/11 and every subsequent administration has continued this.
Clinton isn't a reasonable answer, he left office 25 years ago.
A lot of these trends go back to Reagan so "25 years ago" isn't too long ago to have shaped those trends.
But Clinton was a bit of a correction—not perfect by any means—to Reagan, who lit a bunch of gasoline on the "don't tax and DO spend" fire. Too bad even Reagan would look like some sort of TDS cuck RINO to the current conservatives...
The whole point of democracy is to be able to correct course by being able to amend leaders and hence amend legislation.
Sure, but it doesn't guarantee it?
So if one guy figures out some rhetorical tricks to convince an entire generation that ACTUALLY tax cuts will INCREASE revenue and HELP the deficit... while meanwhile massively increasing it under his administration... that guy still has responsibility for it decades later. (Throw in the hollywood greed-is-good-everyone-screw-over-your-neighbor-and-do-cocaine enthusiastic adoption of the era for good measure.)
I prefer to assign responsibility to the voters of the previous 25 years, just like I would to any other decision maker of any other organization trying to blame someone from 25 years ago.
doesnt social security fund itself?
why is fiscal responsibility an issue for social security, beyond governments stealing from it?
how many cuts to education or defense spending save social security?
All the Social Security taxes you pay get paid out to recipients this same year.
When Social Security was created in the 40's, the ratio of workers paying taxes to beneficiaries was like 40:1. So, each worker originally paid a very share amount.
Today, owing to demographic factors, that number is 3:1. Soon it will be 2:1. So by 203X, that number will drop below 1:1, meaning the program will be paying out more money than it takes in. It's at that point that the program will be considered "broke", because it can't meet its obligations.
So there's any number of solutions, which mostly boil down to some combination of the following: Raise SS taxes, cut benefits, or delay benefits (ie later retirement age)
> how many cuts to education or defense spending save social security?
You can't save it by cutting education or defense spending. By 2036 the combined social security and medicare shortfall is projected to reach $2.7 trillion. If defense spending stays at around 3.1% of GDP--it has been decreasing as a share of GDP since the 1990s--then the shortfall in medicare and social security will be about $1 trillion more than the entire defense budget.
Social Security has been running a cash flow deficit since around 2010, currently at around $270B per year and expected to keep increasing. Congress will need to pass some combination of an increase in payroll taxes, raising the retirement age, or reducing benefits.
Social security is a legal ponzi scheme. I don't say that to be outlandish, its a good description of how SS is funded - take money from people paying in today and give it to this who laid in previously.
It isn't fully funded though and people have been raising the alarm for decades now that it will run out of money.
The problem isn't simply that governments are stealing from the social security pot, the program isn't designed in a sustainable way and there are no direct links between money taken in and benefits paid out. The assumption at the time was that growth would always keep up, that fails eventually.
It's the Baby Boomers. They will transition to collecting ssi.
This was the "Locked Box" that Al Gore got mocked for on SNL 26 years ago. So people saw it coming and were trying to fix it then. And it was the Democrats trying to fix, it is not a "both sides" case. There is one party trying to destroy Social Security, and one party trying to fix it. I encourage anyone to not take my word for it, and conduct some basic research of their own.
Anyway, the crisis is that there is less income than distribution. So we collect debt (unlikely, given appetite for US debt after the last 20 months or so) or reduce payments.
Since many social security recipients are wealthy and not at risk of poverty, what will happen is likely some sort of reduction after means testing. It is not ideal, but entirely because fiscal choices of America's collective fault.
Never knew this about him. Interesting as this is how the average person thinks SS works rather than a pyramid scheme.
The US had a fiscal surplus under Clinton and would have one today if it weren’t for the Bush and Trump tax cuts.
Figure 1: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/why-the-national-de...
To be fair, Clinton pulled off a surplus through clever accounting though it would have been comparatively close either way.
I'm not sure how you could possibly narrow the issue down to two presidents' tax cuts alone. What about all the war spending? Or money printing? Or a partially implemented half step towards socialized health care?
Both parties are responsible for the debt we hold today, they have just argued about what to spend it on along the way.
The solution is clearly to increase Pentagon spending 50%. Besides, the President said we are in the Golden Age, don't worry.
I'm not sure of your point here or what you may have thought I was arguing for.
Where exactly we can find causes of our massive debt is an interesting question, and almost certainly wouldn't fall solely on tax cuts from two presidents.
Whether you agree with the current president or the insane things he sometimes says (I don't) is entirely separate.
You need to take discretionary spending into account:
https://www.crfb.org/papers/riches-rags-causes-fiscal-deteri...
>Rising spending relative to GDP explains about two-thirds of the growth in annual budget deficits since 2001, while declining revenue explains one-third.
>Most debt (77% of GDP) can be attributed to bipartisan legislation.
See also the "Debt Under Various Counterfactuals" projection, where the debt would have been roughly the same under two scenarios, "Without Major Tax Cuts" and "Without Major Spending Increases".
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-debt-got-100-gdp-riches-rags-...
huh? how does the US get to a surplus with deficit spending?
the big spend since 2001 was going to war
Sounds like the policies that were put in place are doing what they were designed to do, and directing money to where they were intended to.
The work on technology to take the place of policy is proceeding, thought slower than the leadership would prefer.
Regardless of policy, wouldn't automation inherently lead to agglomeration of capital?
You can implement policies that tax more than just income. So no not regardless of policy but yes where policies don't exist to reshape a system where capital (i.e. investment in automated production) inherently takes more of the wealth than labour it will inherently lead to an agglomeration of capital.
Today, if sanitation workers go on strike, they rapidly end up with a negotiated settlement. If we had self driving garbage trucks that didn't need them, what political leverage would they have? The same too goes for other industries.
If police have advanced surveillance technology and drones, even violent protest becomes very hard.
What pressure is there to cater to people who are powerless dead weight on the economy?
Is there an economy in absence of those people’s wellbeing?
Voting is still a thing. You still have to convince people that just voting for what they want is less important than carefully considering the affect their votes will have on billionaires.
How long will it remain a thing when the voters have no leverage? King Louis didn't set up the French Republic out of the goodness of his heart. He set it up by reducing the amount of weight carried by his neck.
Voting happens because economic power implies political power. People must be kept satisfied for things to keep running.
If that deal gets upended, I don't think the economic dead weight will be treated well.
I wished, unfortunately the companies are going to complain that doing so will stop them to have enough money to innovate compared to other countries, or that they are too small to compete. (At least it's the current speech of the lobbies in EU for example).
But instead, ever since the brief federal surplus at the end of the 90s, we've done multiple multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the highest earners. Bush tax cuts + 2x Trump tax cuts (most recently in the BBB). In each case after fudging the projections beforehand to claim it will reduce the deficit somehow, then the deficit grows by a massive amount.
We've been reshaping the system to redistribute trillions to capital owners via government IOUs that will eventually come due. Inevitably, this will be "solved" by cutting benefits to workers while insisting no other solution could possibly exist.
Like, you know, undoing these relatively recent handouts to the ultra rich and restructuring policy to the benefit of workers.
True. In capitalism, the rule is that more capital you have, more capital you will get next year.
On one side it's interesting, because it means that if you buy a machine, next years you can buy more, and more and more things get automated.
The bad side, is that we doesn't have a way for labor to reap the benefits of it as well, except from lower purchasing costs... which is counter-balanced by the need of the system to push for more and more consumption every year, to keep it working. (E.g price of electronics/performance decreasing, but need every few years to buy new phones with more performance to keep up with the more and more hungry apps)
If you have a short term increase in productivity then the first movers will accumulate a short term gain but after the technology has established itself and become widely available, there is no long term advantage anymore.
So the unfairness happens entirely during the transition. The fact that the unfair advantage can be retained over time has nothing to do with automation though.
they dont have to.
for example, government ownership of automation would increase the government's spending power
> The work on technology to take the place of policy is proceeding
You prefer machines to make decisions?
You misunderstood. If machines can replace enough labor, you no longer need policy to direct wealth away from laborers.
You can just lay them off.
Depends. Can I bribe the machines with an all expenses paid luxury holiday getaway, an RV, private school tuition, and real estate like I can with Supreme Court Justices? Or do I have to pollute the AI's training data somehow and hope for the best. Seems far more efficient to me if the rich just buy politicians the regular way.
I'd take machines over whatever the fuck we get with district lines for voting.
Capital is non-consumable, so it is nonsensical to speak of workers taking "a share of capital." Perhaps we should speak of GDP, not capital.
The reasons why workers are taking a smaller share of GDP are:
1. GDP is fake. The government lies about GDP using tricks such as hedonic adjustments.
2. Increasing public spending means the government is taking a larger share of GDP. Of course, the more the government spends, the less workers can take.
3. Nobody is valuing "free" stuff like Google, YouTube or free ai. You like "free" stuff, but nothing is free. You always pay it one way or another. There is your "share of GDP"
Machine intelligence could drive as much transfer from labor to capital in the next decade as the previous wage-to-financial economy produced in forty years.
This will push wealth concentration in leading OECD economies beyond the inequality seen in Brazil and Mexico.
https://commanding-heights.com/#fig-23
Also productivity costs more in tooling than ever before per worker, so it's not a surprise that a smaller amount of capital goes to humans when the gains are majority from capital outlays, not labor improvements.
Here's BLS data for total cost to employ for the last 25 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECIALLCIV
Note how much it has increased over simply wages, as it costs more and more to employee a person due to laws, benefits, and tooling.
So then profits are down majorly for businesses due to these hugely larger capital, benefits, an legal compliance costs?
Corporate Profits versus Labor Income https://fred.stlouisfed.org/blog/2018/08/corporate-profits-v...
So here's what I don't get: The United States is the world's largest consumer market. From what I can find, personal consumption expenditures (PCE) account for about two-thirds to 70% of total US economic output. We live and die on consumer spending and confidence.
So next we automate the bejeebus out of this economy with AI robots and Elon believes it grows 3x in under five years. Splendid. But if a consumer-driven economy has no payrolls, it eventually has no buyers. It just seems to me that ultimately, billionaires and investors cannot decouple themselves from the masses... but maybe it's a game of get mine before the system collapses?
Today, around 50% of US consumer spending is by the top 10% of wealthiest households. (per Moody's)
The end state of this looks like how humanity looked before the industrial revolution: A single-digit percent of the population has the vast majority of the wealth and virtually all real estate and luxury goods. Between 90% and 95% of the population has just enough to live on, and never enough to build generational wealth or have any class mobility.
Pre-industrial societies were built on agriculture so whatever happens will be different. Recommended reading:
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411
I think those in poverty have an awful lot less ways to supplement bought food these days, they are largely legislated out of foraging in any meaningful way. So I think actually a large percentage will starve to death or be in prison.
People will take food without paying for it before dying. You don’t have to forage when you can loot grocery stores. At a point when a large percentage are going to die and the food is there, it will be bedlam and the police won’t be stopping it because their families will be part of the riot.
The notion that people will simply roll over and literally die for profit margins is absurd. The system will break and be rebuilt in that situation.
It wouldn't actually cost that much money to feed everyone in the world. Global hunger could be wiped out today. More likely everyone will get just enough food, but luxury foods like meat (especially beef) and premium items will be uncommon. Like pre-industrial diets.
there will be no grocery stores
> People will take food without paying for it before dying.
Yeah, I don't know why people seem to not understand this.
There are so many guns in America.
If the shit really hits the fan economically and a significant amount of people can't legally afford to buy their next 3 meals, there is likely to be a lot of excess deaths, but many of them will not be from starvation.
there will be even more drones
the guns will be user to kill each other, not the elite
in a way, doing the elite work, no need to kill the underclass, they will take care of pruning itself
Food banks. Church pantries. Welfare programs. Meals with family and friends. Eat way less meat. Get hardcore into meal prep. https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook. People will find ways to eat as long as there isn't an active warzone.
I'm much more worried about what housing looks like in the future.
Food banks depend on the largesse of the people that can afford to buy food though, which, well... if the only people remaining in that group are the ones gleefully saying how they're going to create a permanent underclass...
I've done social-work–adjacent stuff and I know a lot of NGOs in my country are quite strained (of course, probably housing more than food, so I don't disagree that might be more of a concern). I imagine it wouldn't be too different in America.
in America they are literally creating laws that it's illegal to feed the homeless
No, there are laws against distributing food without a permit because (1) there are people who give poisoned food to homeless people and (2) there are rules about food safety.
If billionaires have all the money then there's nothing stopping them from buying all the stuff the economy can produce and leaving the rest of the population to barely get by or starve. Certainly, higher income people might currently spend less than their share of total income (at least between 2017 and 2021, see BLS paper, Garner et al., 2024, Gini of 0.3ish vs what I believe is 0.4ish for post-tax income) because poor people need to spend more of their income on things like food or rent, but there's no reason why the share of spendin by the top x% can't increase. In fact, as I understand it, it already has, according to [2] who themselves cite Moody, the top 20% accounted for 59% of spending in Q3 2025, which was a marked increase from the 40% in the BLS paper.
Now, the top 20% certainly aren't billionaires, but we also have to remember that the Luddites also benefited significantly from the automation of spinning before they themselves were replaced by automated weaving and subsequently suppressed by the state. There is no reason to think our current crop of labour aristocracy immune from the whims of capital when the time comes.
[BLS 2024]: https://www.bls.gov/cex/a-distributional-approach-to-us-pers... [2]: https://www.empower.com/the-currency/money/life/k-shaped-eco...
THIS, so much this... but let's use an analogy
if a really powerful mafia got installed into your city, a very small violent group of people demanding people to pay to stay safe... how long before you start organizing? how long before they notice and do something about it?
There’s only like 400M folks in US. The rest of the world would consume if prices came down even more without labor
Well, Elon thinks we'll all get a Universal High Income. Holding aside the irony of him thinking the future is socialism, that money has to come from somewhere. If all companies in the future depend on a handful of AI and Robotics companies, I guess that the money has to come from Elon. Seeing as the layoffs have started, what is he waiting for?
When they have enough robots, they won't need the rest of the system. I think Musk must have meant something like that when he said money won't matter.
as Elon says, soon money will be worthless. what will matter is how much compute and how many robots you have
so yeah, billionaires without compute or robots will join the permanent underclass
Instead of looking at share you could look at each trend separately. They're both going up, but corporate profits are going up more:
Corporate profits versus labor income https://fred.stlouisfed.org/blog/2018/08/corporate-profits-v...
Why is labor going up? In part due to more hours worked:
Nonfarm Business Sector: Hours Worked for All Workers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOANBS
If you divide labor income by hours worked, you should get hourly compensation:
Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
Working-age population is leveling off, though: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSQ647S
One would expect that retirees are mostly living off capital rather than labor. Wouldn't an increased elderly population result in a lower labor share?
Or maybe something else. This paper suggests that as workers get older, they switch jobs less and get fewer raises:
"We find that a 60-year-old worker receives half the marginal product relative to when they were 20. Together with recent demographic trends, this can account for 59% of the recent decline in labor’s share of earnings in the United States."
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/04/staff-working-paper-2023...
And no matter how you slice it, this is all working with national averages, which tell us little about anyone's personal situation.
I forsee this getting fixed by inflation, capital gains tax to stop people avoiding an inflation haircut, and an unrealised gains tax to stop people deferring paying.
How does this tie in with the opposing view’s narrative that gdp per capita has been increasing since the industrial revolution? I mean, this is an issue I’d actually like to take a side with—I do in fact dislike it whenever the latter statistic comes up because the actual and lived experience of cost of living and capital accrual in the present day is actually incredibly difficult, that even the prospect of home ownership looks bleak for many people.
Both of them are true at the same time because one is measuring a percentage of the other.
From the article, the labor share of output is down from ~66% in 1947 to ~53% now. Over the same period, real GDP per capita is up ~370%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/a939rx0q048sbea
We can easily multiply these together. The labor share of real GDP per capita is up by ~300%. Notice that this is less than the ~370% real GDP per capita is up overall, which is the one side's objection, but still significantly more than 0% and definitely not a negative number, which is the other side's retort.
The real question is, how do you reduce the amount of rent seeking? Because that's the thing that makes the first number go down instead of up, and you want them both to go up.
I’m not sure about that math, but the sentiment is correct, I think. They are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie.
A perhaps deeper question is what should we give more weight to: absolute wealth, or relative? Past a fairly low threshold people seem to mostly care about relative.
> Past a fairly low threshold people seem to mostly care about relative.
It's more like, people have squishy "fairness" wetware.
Suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 in value and doesn't cost you anything whatsoever. You'd have to be a real bastard not to press the button, right?
Now suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 and causes you to get $10,000. This one is even more obvious, but it's also the sort of thing where you wouldn't be surprised to discover people starting a campaign to say that the button is unfair and we need to ban anyone from doing that.
And it's basically because humans evolved under conditions of inherent scarcity. If you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you still get a house and a car and free time for your family/projects etc., and they get a mansion and a Ferrari and can pay someone to do things for them so they have even more free time, is that actually a problem? Whereas if you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you can't even feed your family while they're getting fat, you're going to go to war over that.
In a high scarcity environment, things look like the second one, and that's where the human fairness wetware got its intuitions. But modern stuff mostly looks like the first one, and to the extent it looks like the second one it's usually artificial scarcity. It's not that we lack the resources to produce enough housing, it's that building more of it in a particular place is prohibited by law. And then it's not that they get a bigger house than you, it's that you don't get one at all, and the objection goes back to being reasonable. But the better way to solve that is to build more housing -- eliminate artificial scarcity -- rather than trying to fight over a limited quantity of something that doesn't actually have to be so limited.
More AI will surely solve this problem.
A disaster. Economy is a flow of capital, it cycles up. USA needs the general public to have money for necessities as well as a little more for saving and then extras.
Top earnings come from the support of 1000s of participants with lesser earnings. This is an unhealthy economic trend. It's more than a stagnation risk.
Issues like these are created in a short term but take comparatively longer to correct.
Lower wages, job losses or eliminations, structural unemployment and forced entrepreneurship were all concepts that emerged during the Great Depression [1].
The world is a very different place than it was in the early 20th century, but at the same time, "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
I say this not to be a "doomer". I say this because those forces I mentioned above were very real and we have to keep our eyes wide open.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
>A disaster.
Pay peanuts, expect a circus.
At this point, we'll either have universal UBI -=or=- ongoing war.
Unfortunately, the latter is more profitable, so... the future is by design, probably.
UBI will cause instant inflation and everyone will be in the same place they started from.
Try a worked example.
Alice has nothing, Elon has $1T and we give them each a UBI of, lets say, $50k.
Your "instant inflation" means now their effective buying power is diluted by some fixed factor X. You claim this somehow leaves both Alice and Elon in "the same place they started from"
100000005 X == 100000000 but 5 X = 0, if you've done high school math you can probably see that there is no value of X for which this works.
> UBI will cause instant inflation and everyone will be in the same place they started from.
Well, no, even if it causes inflation, everyone won't be in the same place they started from, because (even if you assume no additional progressive tax or other revenue stream is established alongside it) a flat per-capita additional personal income stream doesn't result in the same distribution of income as existed without it. It would narrow the (relative) range of income distribution, making the poor better off and the rich worse off (assuming no overall change in purchasing power.)
Not if we control the prices, the idea of UBI isn't to give money but to give resources, if everyone gets a house, clothes, food and education for free that's UBI as well. Even if it didn't involve a direct benefit transfer.
And that's the only solution to UBI, when resources are abundant enough that UBI isn't needed or with UBI we increase resource enough that there isn't inflation risks.
All UBI experiments till now have proven it's not bad for the people, if we just manage the economy part it will all work out somehow.
Controlled wages and fixed prices--that's sounding suspiciously like a command economy there. Well played, comrade.
(And I say controlled wages because the natural solution people bring up to paying for UBI is to carpet-tax the assets of the wealthy).
This is inevitable, comrade.
Or, 90% of us (that aren't zoo-worthy) will need to be exterminated. 2/3rds+ of us American't were "paycheck to paycheck" – a statistic which pre-dates Covid!
Eternal War is Peace™
No because you tax it back. Or only give it out if it wouldn't be taxed back (aka negative income tax)
There's nothing 'universal' about that. It's just welfare by another name.
Ah yes, the ouroboros economy. It will just run itself like a perpetual motion machine. Marx was so close to the correct solution.
You will own nothing and you better like it
"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us"
6 days ago:
US Wages Share of GDI at 75 Year Low
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238884
It’s ok, soon the greedy will take home their smallest share of heads
as someone said, if your workers are overweight, you are doing Capitalism wrong
Poor people eat more cheap carbs, hence fat. high fructose corn syrup and the way we make our bread also makes people fat
We do still have a real obesity problem in the USA and it affects the poorest in the country quite badly.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3198075/
In fact according to government data:
>U.S. counties with poverty rates exceeding 35% have age-adjusted obesity rates substantially higher than wealthy counties.
Being fat is actually a disease of the poor.
Yeah that point no longer really applies because bad food is cheap. And also fast, people that work a lot don't have the time to spend an hour cooking.
Counterpoint: Mark Benioff is worth about $9 B and has struggled with obesity for most of his career.
Mark Benioff is also struggling with fake AI-generated videos- https://x.com/Benioff/status/2116658212640604297?a=SNDwXOvrG...
There's always exceptions to any rule.
We lost WW3
To whom?
BRIICS
Surely there is a ycombinator startup around the corner that will fix this problem.
Marxism-as-a-service?
Sadly the people behind ycombinator think helping this administration crush woke youth, and spying on us with flock cameras, is more important that preventing fascism or corporotocracy.
"Share"? What does that mean? Is Fortune confused about the difference between employees and owners?
Capital != money. Confirmed that author does not have finance, economics or business background.
Yeah, my thought exactly. Capital is the firm. Labor is the workforce. Wages are the return to labor and profit is the return to capital. Labor and capital are in eternal struggle for their piece of the pie.
Capital historically meant 'that part of production set aside for future production'. Machines, land improvements, infrastructure, intellectual property. Now it tends to include all assets used to generate wealth - including things like land which were once in their own category.
Wages are just money and may or may not become capital according to the discretion and opportunities of the employee.
The balance is clearly out of whack in favor of capital.
Anyone care to explain the downvotes? I am simply pointing out a glaring misuse of a word in the title, which made me curious about the author's background.
Your comment is too ambiguous. To you it might have a passive origin / intent, but readers assume you think the entire article is poorly written which in turn means your comment is just noise.
If you wanted to use this as an educational opportunity to say "income share of labor" and "income share of capital" you might have had a point, but I'm the one who has to tell you that.
Although I'm non-downvoter, I doubt anyone thinks you're wrong. It's probably just that they feel that the comment is distracting or of uncertain relevance or something like that.