US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4442

I can understand your perspective that saving money - instead of spending it - "when times are good" makes sense, because that is when it's most convenient and feasible to save. Saving money during a crisis is surely not as feasible!

I can also understand the perspective that spending money "when times are good" is precisely when we can make real progress and meaningful change in some areas, since spending during a crisis is often times done to merely stay afloat and undo the negatives, not produce more positives. If someone is content with returning to the status quo, then this isn't really a concern for them; if someone believes that we should strive to do better and be better, then taking advantage of the good times may provide an opportunity to create the great times.

I also think there's a potential loop or wave to consider, in your premise: How did the good times happen in the first place? Surely some (most? all?) of it was a result of spending? Or was there some other non-financial mechanism that created the good times? If the good times are caused by spending money in certain areas, and then we pull back on spending money because the times are good, then the times will worsen, and then we'll need to spend money to bring the times up from bad to good again, until we decide to stop spending and allow the times to worsen again, and so on. (I'm thinking of a sine function that keeps oscillating up and down and up and down... we don't want to drop down to the same minimum every time, and only reach the same maximum every time... we want both the peaks and valleys to gradually move upwards, so that the next cycle is - overall - a little bit higher and better than the previous cycle.)



Thank you for the source, and thank you for pasting the article so that I can read it outside of the paywall It appears you're referring to the American Rescue Plan Act, and that $86 billion of the $1.9 trillion was used to cover the pensions of millions of active and retired workers. Based on the parts of the article that you've bolded, here's my interpretation of what is - and isn't - your issue with this: I don't think you have an issue with workers generally receiving payment or pensions or retirement accounts, as long as the employers who are promising them can provide them by budgeting accordingly. I do think you have an issue with companies overpromising, underdelivering, and needing the government to bail them out with blank checks. Is that a reasonably accurate interpretation of how you feel about this? (I promise I'm not trying to strawman you.)

Assuming the above interpretation is reasonably accurate, I pretty much agree with you. At the very least, there should be a huge amount of oversight and documentation about what the heck happened and how it got so bad. There should be some accountability and changes to make sure it doesn't happen again. For example, some pension systems that are becoming underfunded will transparently update their new retirement policies with fewer benefits every decade or so, to let prospective employees know exactly what they'd be signing up for (while current/older employees are grandfathered into the original system they signed up for). It's not pretty, but at least the newest employees wouldn't be expecting a ton of additional coverage when they only signed up for a smaller amount.



I don't think all of those proposals you listed would pay for themselves; I did note that the green/environmental ideas were probably more focused on spending a little now compared to a lot later, by proactively and preemptively preparing and mitigating the worse/worst scenarios that would eventually happen. But as to the proposals that I did say would likely break even, I think there are a variety of answers to your question of "how come it hasn't happened yet":
Some Congresspeople might not believe the numbers.
Some Congresspeople might think the short-term losses aren't worth the long-term gains.
Some Congresspeople might be sincerely happy with the current system.
Some Congresspeople might not care.
Some Congresspeople might worry that their constituents would be angry.
Some Congresspeople might be more loyal to lobbies and companies that benefit from those improvements not happening.
Some Congresspeople might be uneasy about making such a large policy change, in case it fails (the devil you know vs. the devil you don't).

I'm also generally uneasy about a question like "If X is such a good thing to do, then why aren't we already doing it". Putting aside the fact that Congress is very bad at working together and legislating anything these days, it's also important to note that just about every good thing that we currently do was, at some point, something that we used to not do. Then we figured it out. Sometimes it takes a while for us to realize that we're not doing something well, or that we're currently doing something stupid. You and I would agree that ending slavery was good, but I could imagine a pre- Civil War slaveowner posing the question "If ending slavery was such a good idea, then why hasn't it already happened?" The answer, of course, is because enough people didn't know or didn't care or didn't value the lives of slaves or enjoyed benefitting from slavery or had a million other reasons, and then society gradually progressed, and then the country was at the point where it became "better late than never" to end slavery. There are countless other examples; we eventually figured out that women should be allowed to vote, despite them not being eligible in the 1800s, so we updated the law. We might eventually figure out that Medicare For All (or some other proposed healthcare system) is ideal for our country, despite it currently not being used. Change can be scary, but arguing that change shouldn't happen because it hasn't happened yet might not be the best approach. Instead, I think we should be open-minded and weigh the pros and cons of the current situation against the pros and cons of the alternatives.



Thank you for answering my question with specific examples. The word "cannot" in your part B is interesting to me; is there a distinction between "cannot be done by the states" and "cannot be done well by the states"? I feel like we could theorize asking a state to take on an absurd burden that only affects that one state anyway, and argue that they could kind of do it, just not nearly as efficiently as the federal government. I'm wondering what kind of wiggle room there is for your part B, in terms of letting the federal government also take care of the things that they can demonstrably do better than individual states. You did say, for example, that large scale disaster relief ought to be a combined effort between the states and the federal government. I agree with that, but I also worry that it's hard to figure out how big of a hurricane needs to hit Florida before the federal government ought to help out, from your perspective, and how do we hold Florida responsible and accountable for not budgeting enough money for their own disaster relief when it comes to smaller tropical storms.

I also agree with you that states piloting progressive policies should show receipts of beneficial effects, if we're to implement them at a national level. That's probably the best way to get other Democrats on board. That may not be enough to make Republicans interested, as it'll cost extra money, it'll be expanding the role of the federal government, etc.