Outliving the US: the comments

[nancylebov]

The other day, I asked whether people expected to outlive the US, and got some very interesting replies.

The most noticeable similarity was that no one expected anything good to come of an end to the US, which probably supports the idea that the US is very stable.

tahkhleet posted a substantial core dump about politics and the state of the culture. I'm feeling rather swamped. This is unfair. Overloading people is *my* job.

Still, I'm going to pick out some bits. However, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Is Obama genuinely that awful? I'm disappointed that he isn't prosecuting those responsible for torture (and NPR did a bit about how he used the word torture before he was elected, but has dropped it since then). Is he letting *everything* important slide?

I'd have thought he's at least smart enough to take a lesson from what Katrina did to Bush's reputation.

Two "do my homework" questions:

Are his foreign policy advisors really all hawks?

How did he handle things when he was a community organizer? Did he get useful work done?
Slightly different angle about the financial elite: One of my friends believes that credentialism is part of the problem. The most likely way to get one of those very well-paid jobs is to be totally focused on the exhausting work of getting the right degrees. Aside from tahkhleet's point that only someone who's got bad values will be willing to do the work, getting the credentials means being totally focused on incentives rather than paying attention to the larger system.

Back to my pov: Having a system which makes room for competence is a very subtle problem. If people are totally shielded from consequences, whoever is good at social climbing will get the rewards, and the quality of work goes to hell. If there is too much effort to make sure the right thing is done, people game the measurement system, and the work goes to heck.

Genocide: I've been wondering for a while whether I'll see a nation commit auto-genocide (over 75% of population killed). It just seems as though people go nuts that way occasionally, and people are much more dependent on infrastructure than they used to be. Still, I don't know that the elites are dreaming of wiping a lot of the rest of us out, though worries about overpopulation can be read that way.

For purposes of this discussion, it isn't necessary that the elites would actually benefit from genocide, just whether enough of them strongly believe they would.

Comments

This is the Point

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

3 and 7 : total smoke and mirrors.

You seem to have fallen for a common fallacy: by looking at the NUMBER of things someone has done, you lose sight of the relative _weights_ of the _value_ of what they are reporting. There are only three items on that whole list that are of any significant value. But they pale in comparison to the two items you drew no special attention to. The budget and the stimulus package.

The budget is an exercise in misdirection and unreality. It assumes that next year, the GDP will grow by 3.2% and this growth plus higher taxes will pay for a significant chunk of the spending. That is grossly unrealistic. This is not chump change. 14.33 trillion GDP. if we contract again another 1/2 percent (that's being generous) that's 3.7 % error in change in GDP. That's about $530 billion in GDP, of which about half goes to taxes. The total tax rate on all activity is roughly 50%.

So that's about 265 billion in lost revenue owing to unwarranted optimism. That's about 1/8th of the budget's revenue gone. This is significant. If the budget held steady and your ran up 12% a year instead of say 2% a year (let's assume no president is going to avoid being a little over optimistic). That means with a realistic president you'd have added an entire year's GDP to the national debt in 36 years...or in SIX years.

The federal debt was about 1 trillion...the deficits from the next two fiscal years will triple that. (Never mind the 2 trillion from the bailout bill and stimulus package). So we will see the federal debt go to about 5 trillion. The 2007 budget had 22% of its funds go to paying the debt on 1 trillion. Do the math. The formal debt of the US gov't is about to swallow the country. He is gambling on HUGE increases in revenue to continue into 2012 and beyond. There is little sign to think this.

Obama cites the "banner" unemployment rate of 8% instead of the "real" unemployment rate of 18% when you include the "discouraged" job searchers. That's the ones who prefer being poor or dependents to trying to find work. This includes a huge number of disabled people who have been excluded from social security because y'all won't recognize your pressure cooker society is making people SICK in record numbers.

And people just let this pass because what can they say? "Ooops, we're doomed"? Everyone assumes things will just work out because they always have in the past. The budget assumptions don't even mention the fact that there is no longer any credit being extended to America by China and the other "net saver" countries in any significant quantity. (Saudi is about to go bankrupt and THAT will sack the only possible late arriving saviour for the American bond market).

You can say "its not fair, how could he avoid this?" Well, if he hadn't exhausted America's credit on worthless endeavors, and he hadn't acted in such a reckless fashion that no one will lend to you...maybe there would be options.

There is no possible outcome of his stimulus that can yield a high enough % growth in the economy to prevent a default. He has utterly failed in his most important task barely a season into his presidency. Was it a fair task? A reasonable task? No. But his deceptions and lack of due diligence have ensured that what damage could have been controlled mostly was not. This failure totally eclipses anything on your list. It's a failure that happened from his corruption. He thought he could shovel a few more truckloads of cash at his cronies among the super rich and then make all of society pay for the loss. He was wrong and everyone will pay for his error.