Not seeing a weak economy here. Fed raised rates to combat inflation and the economy is still growing, employment is still high.
Of course, we could go back on the gold standard and bounce between panics and depressions.
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Of course, we could go back on the gold standard and bounce between panics and depressions.
| Federal Budget 1999 | |
| Total expenditures | $1.73 trillion (requested)[5] $1.7 trillion (actual)[6] 17.9% of GDP (actual)[4] |
|---|---|
| Surplus | $126 billion (actual)[6] 1.3% of GDP (actual)[4] |
| Debt | $5.606 trillion (at fiscal end) 58.9% of GDP[7] |
| GDP | $9.51 trillion[4] |
| Website | Office of Management and Budget |
Other than cowardice what reason does Congress have to not do what they did 25 years ago?
GDP is about three times greater today.
If Congress had kept doing that we’d have a national wealth fund today and no public debt.
But just to leave the conversation on a lighter note, AI is coming for most of your jobs.
Which means that there will be a lot more competition for the remaining jobs, and your economic value will drop like a pigeon turd.
Which means that there will be a lot more competition for the remaining jobs, and your economic value will drop like a pigeon turd.
I think the odd thing that has everyone scratching their heads are everyone keeps saying the economy is strong, everything is awesome, but the reality is people don’t feel that’s the case in the day to day life.
So you have one side saying everything is the best it’s ever been, but many who are supposedly living in the best economy in decades are wondering……..say what now? The given numbers don’t match the every day life of many people. There’s definitely a disconnect that isn’t being touched on.
But just to leave the conversation on a lighter note, AI is coming for most of your jobs.
Which means that there will be a lot more competition for the remaining jobs, and your economic value will drop like a pigeon turd.
AI might be the same productivity booster the internet was during the five years in the late nineties and early oughts.
It’s a little late to put it back.
But right now, on this day, the economy is growing 3% (inflation adjusted) per year, or 6% actual.
The budget is only about 6% of GDP out of balance.
We tax 16% and spend about 22%.
Congress could balance the budget today exactly the same way they did 30 years ago.
"Was" is the operative word...
Raise your hand if you want our kids to pay for our living.
Everybody says deficits are bad.
Nobody demands it get fixed.
We're deciding whether we should light our pipes with Washingtons or Jacksons
Whichever one we're not currently using as toilet paper.
I agree. There's a huge disconnect across the board. Part of it, I think, is the relentless fear mongering in media of all types, mountain ranges of disinformation and misinformation that are spread like manure by true believers and tricksters alike, and stubbornly held onto delusionally self defeating tribalism. Combine that with high living costs, monetization of everything, belief in nothing, except perhaps, money, and embrace of extremism that's leading to paralysis. There's plenty going on to offset any warm cuddly available, if you decide to allow it.
Well both have no real value. That was another thread not too long ago.
The exact, same people have whined, bitched, moaned, groaned, complained and bellyached every one of the sixty five years I’ve been alive about the deficit.
Even during that brief, short time 25 years ago we had a few balanced budgets, they invented arguments the budget was not balanced.
The total debt today is 34 trillion.
GDP is 28 trillion and increasing 3% a year, adjusted for inflation.
Of all the problems we do have deficit spending is the one we could fix, and bitch about something else.
Having gone through the transition from traditional media to digital media I can tell you that there is both a quantitative and qualitative difference this time around.AI might be the same productivity booster the internet was during the five years in the late nineties and early oughts.
It’s a little late to put it back.
But right now, on this day, the economy is growing 3% (inflation adjusted) per year, or 6% actual.
The budget is only about 6% of GDP out of balance.
We tax 16% and spend about 22%.
Congress could balance the budget today exactly the same way they did 30 years ago.
Digital still required considerable human interaction to get results. AI replaces a lot of that need. When I made the leap from traditional matte painting to digital, I exchanged my paint brush, paints, board, or glass for a workstation, a stylus, and Photoshop. But I still painted the image. With emerging AI technology, I’m not needed to do that and become a redundancy.
Currently, concept artists are largely getting removed from the process, sometimes doing a bit of cleanup on the AI produced image. Art directors are still needed, but AI chops will be necessary.
The current prediction for the VFX and animation industries is for a loss of 220,000 jobs in the next few years.
This is already happening in other industries. It will be a huge productivity booster, just not in human productivity. There will certainly be significant cost savings since crew size and salaries will amount to perhaps 20% of what they currently are. Very profitable for C suite and investors, at least short term, since unemployed workers are unlikely to spend on movies or other consumer goods.
I’m looking forward to the development of AI executives, which will really cut costs.
Could this transition be managed in a less destabilizing way? Sure, but humans don’t tend to elevate socially intelligent leaders.
To quote All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”
Exactly, been thinking about this for a while. The talk is all about productivity, that “humans will just do the smart bits of the work, the finishing.”.
Not sure I am buying, good knowledge workers are very expensive, we have the benefit of forging relationships with others like us, clients, colleagues, competitors, but what’s to stop so many rungs below being cut, if the AI’s result is “ehhh good enough”? And as you said, you cut too much then there’s less disposable income going around, hence slowing of the economy. Interestingly in cases where a country forces a high rate of saving and investing (like China) faced and faces the issue of the economy slowing because all this saving and investing has nowhere to go.
I read a paper the other day that language models did a 99% accurate slog through laws and legal documents in hours, which would have taken a team of junior lawyers days to do. Clearly a bot can’t be a judge, or barrister but where does that leave all the junior LLMs?
We’ve had robots in science for decades, engineering even longer than that. Now we have robots doing surgery faster, more accurate, cleaner, smaller cuts, faster recovery.
Seems anything not related to emotions, social connection and heavy nuance is at risk.
We would need a shift in almost everything the government does in order to pay down $39,000,000,000,000… a balanced budget is no one’s foreseeable future. 
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We would need a shift in almost everything the government does in order to pay down $39,000,000,000,000… a balanced budget is no one’s foreseeable future.
The number today is 34 trillion, and the alternative to a balanced budget is waiting until it’s 39 trillion.
The debt is owned about two thirds to Americans and one third to foreigners.
The interest this year is nearly 900 billion, or about 3.5 % of GDP.
600 billion represents a transfer payment of taxes to American debt holders, and 300 billion goes to foreign debt holders.
Fifty years ago all the politicians made a big howl about government spending and the deficit, when they kissed babies at the county fairs.
And year by year they’ve spent more every year, and the only time they’ve ever raised taxes meaningfully was thirty years ago, which they’ve steadily cut ever since.
If they’d restrain spending increases to just the inflation rate, and stop handing out tax cuts and raise rates just a little, instead of spending 22% of GDP and taxing 16% in few years we’d return to 19% of GDP taxed and 19% spent.
There is an argument to never reduce the debt amount. Paying down debt would paradoxically be inflationary.
Let’s say a rich guy owns a million dollars in Treasury bills, which is part of the debt. It sits there drawing about 3% interest at most.
If you call his bond and pay the guy a million that’s now more cash in circulation.
It wasn’t a problem in the late 90s when that happened. He’s likely to reinvest it in something productive.
All I’m saying is I’ve been watching this thing tick up & up & up…. For the last 30 plus years and no one is doing anything about it. Eventually this credit bubble is gonna
. Also, how do we ask folks to balance their own budgets when our own government can’t balance theirs? Amazing as it is, “Governing” is a business where you can operate at a loss consistently & still retain your job. Makes no sense…but we do live in the land where frogs wear funny 
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I can tell a bubble is about to burst when clowns with more money than sense are happy to pay $400 for gaudy, vomit inducing gold coloured high-top sneakers.
This appears be a good time for a budding 'entrepreneur' to profit by piggy packing off an economic boom.
I imagine in an alternative universe, some people that are promoting such economic negativity, would be waxing lyrical over how 'bigly' the economy was doing.
This appears be a good time for a budding 'entrepreneur' to profit by piggy packing off an economic boom.
I imagine in an alternative universe, some people that are promoting such economic negativity, would be waxing lyrical over how 'bigly' the economy was doing.
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