The US would never cause hyper-inflation to repay their debts... doing so would destroy their economy overnight.
Hmm, that thought applies equally well to every other country in the world. Including Zimbabwe, which recently underwent a classic case of hyperinflation.
And are you old enough to remember when Russia said they'd run the printing presses day and night, if that's what it took to keep the economy afloat?
Realistically, though, the USA wouldn't need hyperinflation to solve the debt problem. Increase the inflation rate to ~10% per year (less than it was during Carter's tenure, as I recall) and we'd pay down our debt in a couple of decades. Of course, 20 years of 10% inflation would reduce the value of the dollar by about 85%....
Term limits aren't quite the panacea you're thinking they are.
The big potential problem with term limits is that you'll have a government where the only people who know what they're doing is the bureaucracy. Which moves the power from guys we can kick out of office to unelected (and largely unaccountable) bureaucrats...
The current debt bill cuts $350 to 450 billion per year in defense spending.
Actually, like everything else, Defense spending under the current bill is not being CUT, it's being "increased more slowly".
On the plus side, maybe we can get back to the pre-WW2 level of a strong Navy coupled with an Army which is barely more than a cadre. That'll help keep us out of these little bush league wars, if it takes us a couple-three years to build up the Army to the point we can fight them...
The major credit agencies should have cut when major factions of the Republican party started openly advocating a default. In violation of the 14th amendment, Section 4.
Have you read that section? If not, read it:
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Note the keywords in the first sentence "authorized by law". Note that the Debt Ceiling thing is a LAW which defines how much debt is "authorized by law".
Remember, borrowing beyond the legal debt limit is, itself, illegal.
If the amount that's coming in increases and the amount you're sending out decreases, that's a cut in your deficit.
Which isn't the way Congress did this. What they did was "We spend X trillion on this now. In ten years we expect to spend 5X trillion on this. If we instead decide to spend only 4X trillion in ten years, we've saved X trillion."
Roughly comparable to me saying "I can't afford my house note (this is theoretical, since I paid my house off ten years ago). I was planning on buying a vacation home in the Hamptons. Instead, I will buy a vacation home in Canada's cottage country. I have therefore saved money."
Only on the internet, where racism has taken a meaning of pointing out problems within a certain community, would it be considered racism.
Well, no.
Actually, in many parts of the country this would be considered racist. It's not just an internet thing.
Though the tendency to see this sort of comment as intrinsically racist has gone down since Jesse Jackson made the comment about seeing a young mand approaching him at night, and being relieved when he realized the young man was white....
I fail to understand your comment about LH2/LOX versus JP7/LOX. What is the point you're trying to make.
You can put much more JP7/LOX into a given size tank than you can H2/LOX.
Enough more that it's easier to make a rocket capable of going to orbit using JP7/LOX than H2/LOX.
Remember that smaller fuel tanks means lighter fuel tanks means more payload, all things being equal. And they're not so unequal as to give H2 an advantage for a rocket starting on the ground....
If you are stinking rich and want the large property, go ahead
Or, maybe, you know, buy land out in the country, where you can get six acres for 1/10th the price you'd pay for half an acre in a subdivision. (based on what I know the parents paid for their land, and what I see advertised in the new subdivision I drive by on the way to work)
Note that my parents bought rather more than six acres for less than the value of the 1/6th acre my house sits on in town, based on the latest appraisal (which conveniently broke down the value by separating out the house and the lot it sat on).
eighty percent of the public supports your position that there should be revenue increases
What you leave out of your statement is the qualifier "paid by someone else". 80% of the public supports your position that there should be revenue increases paid by someone else....
If the Dems had proposed an across-the-board tax increase sufficient to reduce the deficit to near zero, they would have had basically NO popular support.
But suggesting that "that other guy over there isn't paying his fair share" will always get you some support....
Except that there have been only two times since 1970 that the budget did not result in a deficit. Both occured under Democrats.
Oddly, there have been NO times since 1970 when the National Debt didn't increase relative to the year before.
Which strongly suggests that those two incidents of a "balanced budget" you speak of were likely just accounting tricks....
Note, from the Treasury's own website, that the last time National Debt increased was before *I* was born - and I am old enough to have watched Armstrong take his "small step for a man" and remember it...
Even if the US completely shut down the military, it will take multiple generations to pay this back now.
Considering that the military budget is less than half the size of the current deficit (even if you include the cost of fighting those wars), eliminating the military would not allow paying down the debt.
Shame we can't get a balanced budget amendment (with an exception for DECLARED wars) passed. Probably wouldn't work, but it looks like it's the only real option that has a chance.
Essentially what triggered this is the Tea Party's ability to completely gum up the works by insisting on no new taxes.
Were we reading the same press release?
While the taxes issue was certainly mentioned in passing, far more attention was paid to the fact that the 2.4 trillion in "cuts" (should be read as "reductions in future growth", since none of the proposed cuts actually reduce the amount of spending in any way) was insufficient to prevent medium/long term problems.
Plus there's the part where they realize (knew all along, no doubt, but given the number of people who think the $2.4T "cuts" are cuts, maybe not) that none of what was done has any meaning whatsoever. A law contradicting a previous law automatically supersedes it - so if Congress's next budget ignores the spending "cuts" agreed to last week, then the "cuts" vanish as if they never were...
Why has it become so commonplace to think about government debt in a macroeconomic way? US citizens and companies hold 68% of the US debt.
Or to use the modern way of thinking about this issue: if you have $10, but you owe Billy $3 and owe yourself $7, how much money do you have?
Your analogy assumes that the US Citizens are identical with the US Government.
Hint: We're not the same as the US Government, nor are we property of the US Government. What the Government owes us is still owed to us (yes, I own some T-Bills - no, I don't consider the money I invested in them free gifts to the government).
If it becomes even reasonably clear that the Government is going to inflate its debt problem out of existence, I'm going to unload all those T-Bills as quickly as possible, and I hope that everyone else in the world does the same, quite frankly....
You are like General Custer hating Gandhi because he was an Indian.
It should be noted that General Custer did NOT hate Indians. He rather admired them, actually. Alas, his job didn't care whether he liked them or not, he still had to protect the "settlers" (yes, even when the settlers were doing illegal things).
Of course, this was the period of the "noble savage" concept, which automagically made Indians kind of cool to people who had never encountered them.
Or, it's just possible that we've known about this all along, and security concerns prevent us from discussing it openly.
In this case, the security concerns might be preventing the Chinese (or whomever) from knowing just how much we know. Think of Coventry in cyberspace....
The robots have accomplished more than humans did in the same time. You don't have to watch them drive. You can do something else, and return in a few year's time to see the results.
The results are meaningless unless humans are planning on going there.
And the robots have accomplished almost as much in the years they've been trundling about as a human could have in a day of work up there.
I'm not a PhD candidate, and I enjoy reading about the stuff they've discovered. Many other people do the same thing. It costs less than football, and it's more fun to watch.
Congratulations! The taxpayers are providing you with your "bread and circuses" then.
Though I disagree that it's more fun to watch than football. More fun than baseball, perhaps. Certainly more fun than golf. But not necessarily more fun than football....
You could ask the same thing about manned travel to Mars.
Yep. But a permanent human presence on Mars at least does something worthwhile for the species in the long run - one more basket to put our eggs in.
A few robots on Mars provides us nothing of value other than a few dissertations.
Note, by the by, that science that improves our understanding of the way things work where we live is important. Unfortunately, study of Mars doesn't provide much of that until and unless, well, we live there.
The point of space travel is that it is interesting.
Frankly, watching toy robots driving around Mars veeeery slowly isn't really all that interesting.
Ditto any other unmanned mission. Some of them are useful, occasionally you get a neat picture to put on your desktop, mostly they're just too boring to even bother keeping up with.
As far as actual boots on Mars, I think that's a pretty pointless endeavor. It's just an empty rock, orders of magnitude harsher than the most desolate place on earth. Why the hell would you want to be there ?
If noone is ever going to go there, why the hell waste time sending rovers there? There's nothing to learn there that matters to much of anyone on Earth, aside from a few PhD candidates.
As they used to say back in the day (and I guess will be doing again soon) "How will it help us feed children in Somalia?"
It's to restrict who gets the lower price. When demand drops, you offer the low price to 100 homes. Then, if the demand stays low, you broadcast it to another 100, and so on.
So, how long do you think it'll be before, say, the local politicians are the first 100 people to get the low price?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, that thought applies equally well to every other country in the world. Including Zimbabwe, which recently underwent a classic case of hyperinflation.
And are you old enough to remember when Russia said they'd run the printing presses day and night, if that's what it took to keep the economy afloat?
Realistically, though, the USA wouldn't need hyperinflation to solve the debt problem. Increase the inflation rate to ~10% per year (less than it was during Carter's tenure, as I recall) and we'd pay down our debt in a couple of decades. Of course, 20 years of 10% inflation would reduce the value of the dollar by about 85%....
The big potential problem with term limits is that you'll have a government where the only people who know what they're doing is the bureaucracy. Which moves the power from guys we can kick out of office to unelected (and largely unaccountable) bureaucrats...
Actually, like everything else, Defense spending under the current bill is not being CUT, it's being "increased more slowly".
On the plus side, maybe we can get back to the pre-WW2 level of a strong Navy coupled with an Army which is barely more than a cadre. That'll help keep us out of these little bush league wars, if it takes us a couple-three years to build up the Army to the point we can fight them...
Have you read that section? If not, read it:
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Note the keywords in the first sentence "authorized by law". Note that the Debt Ceiling thing is a LAW which defines how much debt is "authorized by law".
Remember, borrowing beyond the legal debt limit is, itself, illegal.
Which isn't the way Congress did this. What they did was "We spend X trillion on this now. In ten years we expect to spend 5X trillion on this. If we instead decide to spend only 4X trillion in ten years, we've saved X trillion."
Roughly comparable to me saying "I can't afford my house note (this is theoretical, since I paid my house off ten years ago). I was planning on buying a vacation home in the Hamptons. Instead, I will buy a vacation home in Canada's cottage country. I have therefore saved money."
Umm, no.
The reason we don't use nukes everywhere is that there aren't really very many targets that require a 10 kt explosion to destroy.
Too true. If we'd stop electing people who ignored our civil liberties, we'd have fewer criminals in office stripping our rights away.
Well, no.
Actually, in many parts of the country this would be considered racist. It's not just an internet thing.
Though the tendency to see this sort of comment as intrinsically racist has gone down since Jesse Jackson made the comment about seeing a young mand approaching him at night, and being relieved when he realized the young man was white....
You can put much more JP7/LOX into a given size tank than you can H2/LOX.
Enough more that it's easier to make a rocket capable of going to orbit using JP7/LOX than H2/LOX.
Remember that smaller fuel tanks means lighter fuel tanks means more payload, all things being equal. And they're not so unequal as to give H2 an advantage for a rocket starting on the ground....
Which would, presumably, explain why the Democrat government of Philadelphia decided to impose a curfew and then to enforce it?
Or, maybe, you know, buy land out in the country, where you can get six acres for 1/10th the price you'd pay for half an acre in a subdivision. (based on what I know the parents paid for their land, and what I see advertised in the new subdivision I drive by on the way to work)
Note that my parents bought rather more than six acres for less than the value of the 1/6th acre my house sits on in town, based on the latest appraisal (which conveniently broke down the value by separating out the house and the lot it sat on).
well, in my parents' case, it's room for a garden (they grow basically all their veggies), plus room for the wild turkeys and deer that live there.
What you leave out of your statement is the qualifier "paid by someone else". 80% of the public supports your position that there should be revenue increases paid by someone else....
If the Dems had proposed an across-the-board tax increase sufficient to reduce the deficit to near zero, they would have had basically NO popular support.
But suggesting that "that other guy over there isn't paying his fair share" will always get you some support....
About half, as I recall. It's been a while since I checked.
Oddly, there have been NO times since 1970 when the National Debt didn't increase relative to the year before.
Which strongly suggests that those two incidents of a "balanced budget" you speak of were likely just accounting tricks....
Note, from the Treasury's own website, that the last time National Debt increased was before *I* was born - and I am old enough to have watched Armstrong take his "small step for a man" and remember it...
Considering that the military budget is less than half the size of the current deficit (even if you include the cost of fighting those wars), eliminating the military would not allow paying down the debt.
Shame we can't get a balanced budget amendment (with an exception for DECLARED wars) passed. Probably wouldn't work, but it looks like it's the only real option that has a chance.
Were we reading the same press release?
While the taxes issue was certainly mentioned in passing, far more attention was paid to the fact that the 2.4 trillion in "cuts" (should be read as "reductions in future growth", since none of the proposed cuts actually reduce the amount of spending in any way) was insufficient to prevent medium/long term problems.
Plus there's the part where they realize (knew all along, no doubt, but given the number of people who think the $2.4T "cuts" are cuts, maybe not) that none of what was done has any meaning whatsoever. A law contradicting a previous law automatically supersedes it - so if Congress's next budget ignores the spending "cuts" agreed to last week, then the "cuts" vanish as if they never were...
Your analogy assumes that the US Citizens are identical with the US Government.
Hint: We're not the same as the US Government, nor are we property of the US Government. What the Government owes us is still owed to us (yes, I own some T-Bills - no, I don't consider the money I invested in them free gifts to the government).
If it becomes even reasonably clear that the Government is going to inflate its debt problem out of existence, I'm going to unload all those T-Bills as quickly as possible, and I hope that everyone else in the world does the same, quite frankly....
It should be noted that General Custer did NOT hate Indians. He rather admired them, actually. Alas, his job didn't care whether he liked them or not, he still had to protect the "settlers" (yes, even when the settlers were doing illegal things).
Of course, this was the period of the "noble savage" concept, which automagically made Indians kind of cool to people who had never encountered them.
Or, it's just possible that we've known about this all along, and security concerns prevent us from discussing it openly.
In this case, the security concerns might be preventing the Chinese (or whomever) from knowing just how much we know. Think of Coventry in cyberspace....
What Second Amendment cases has the ACLU intervened in? I'm curious.
Read the Constitution carefully. "Right" applies to individuals, "Power" applies to governments.
The results are meaningless unless humans are planning on going there.
And the robots have accomplished almost as much in the years they've been trundling about as a human could have in a day of work up there.
Congratulations! The taxpayers are providing you with your "bread and circuses" then.
Though I disagree that it's more fun to watch than football. More fun than baseball, perhaps. Certainly more fun than golf. But not necessarily more fun than football....
Yep. But a permanent human presence on Mars at least does something worthwhile for the species in the long run - one more basket to put our eggs in.
A few robots on Mars provides us nothing of value other than a few dissertations.
Note, by the by, that science that improves our understanding of the way things work where we live is important. Unfortunately, study of Mars doesn't provide much of that until and unless, well, we live there.
Frankly, watching toy robots driving around Mars veeeery slowly isn't really all that interesting.
Ditto any other unmanned mission. Some of them are useful, occasionally you get a neat picture to put on your desktop, mostly they're just too boring to even bother keeping up with.
If noone is ever going to go there, why the hell waste time sending rovers there? There's nothing to learn there that matters to much of anyone on Earth, aside from a few PhD candidates.
As they used to say back in the day (and I guess will be doing again soon) "How will it help us feed children in Somalia?"
I wouldn't think express couturiers would be all that much problem. Not like the sewing machines use all that much electricity.
Or perhaps you were thinking of couriers, not dressmakers?
So, how long do you think it'll be before, say, the local politicians are the first 100 people to get the low price?
Or the local rich guys?