How is the state of the United States Economy?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

If you think historical spending is measured in nominal dollars, you lack the requisite intelligence to carry on a conversation.

Oh, so you can't read either. That explains all your ridiculous posts where you pretend to know everything about economics and budgetary matters. Noted.


The top of the graph says "Inflation-adjusted".

I can read the chart. You're supposed to have enough exposure to the US Federal Budget to realize that those are not inflation-adjusted dollars, at least not by any measure economists would recognize.

Federal spending is measured in %GDP and % revenues. In both statistical categories, military spending has been cut in half. Cutting the military budget in half is the main source of power for our inept social bureaucracy, and they know that gullible people are eager to believe that US military spending is perpetually rising, like gun crime or gun ownership rates any other fictitious liberal talking points.

Congrats. You guys fall for it, which would be less annoying, if you'd actually look at the source of the data. Military spending as a % of outlays 1962 = 46.91% by 2015 it's 14.99%. The author doesn't highlight this stat because it doesn't jive with his ideological orientation or the political objective of OMB.



This is what military spending looks like.

[/quote]

Every time that graph shows rising defense spending, the white working class males you love to talk about suffered economically because of deindustrialization. Reagan's military build-up coincided with a net loss in manufacturing jobs compared to the 1979 peak, and the increase in defense spending during the 2000s saw the loss of a whopping 6.1 million manufacturing jobs (3.8 million of which were lost 2001-2007, before the Great Recession). Oh, not to mention massive run-ups in debt.

The military became the only way out of the now welfare-dependent, drug-infested, poverty-stricken industrial wastelands. "Send your kids into the armed forces! They may get killed or injured or suffer horrible mental/emotional problems afterwards from their experiences, but at least they're not on welfare!". What happens to them after they are 40 and no longer of much use to the armed forces? They can't all be generals. I saw you said the job training programs would be beneficial. Well, why not just spend a couple billion on the job training and not the hundreds of billions on war, pay, military toys, and insane medical treatment costs?

You are confusing me with the "liberals" on this site by accusing everyone who disagrees with you of supporting an inept bureaucracy, yet you worship the military which is the most wasteful (see: F-35 program, War on Terror) and has an enormous amount of evils such as sexual abuse, killing civilians, torture, and pretty much everything bad a military does?

So, pray tell, what would you have America's budget look like? Even more spending on the military industrial complex? Because the vibe I'm getting from you is that you want a military-based welfare state. You don't care where the debt comes from then; it just has to be spent on the military.

You sound as out-of-touch as Mitt Romney did when he kept pushing the "defense spending should be no less than 4% of GDP". Who cares about the percentage? If our military is able to provide for the defense of the nation in a cost effective way, why keep throwing money at such a bloated bureaucracy so Boeing can keep making tons of money? Just pulling an arbitrary statistical number out of the air based on history during different geopolitical realities won't save those communities in the Rust Belt that badly need jobs and income there.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

oh no we all fell for the masterful trap

what egg there is on our collective faces

[AggregateDemand]

Every time that graph shows rising defense spending, the white working class males you love to talk about suffered economically because of deindustrialization. Reagan's military build-up coincided with a net loss in manufacturing jobs compared to the 1979 peak, and the increase in defense spending during the 2000s saw the loss of a whopping 6.1 million manufacturing jobs (3.8 million of which were lost 2001-2007, before the Great Recession). Oh, not to mention massive run-ups in debt.

The military became the only way out of the now welfare-dependent, drug-infested, poverty-stricken industrial wastelands. "Send your kids into the armed forces! They may get killed or injured or suffer horrible mental/emotional problems afterwards from their experiences, but at least they're not on welfare!". What happens to them after they are 40 and no longer of much use to the armed forces? They can't all be generals. I saw you said the job training programs would be beneficial. Well, why not just spend a couple billion on the job training and not the hundreds of billions on war, pay, military toys, and insane medical treatment costs?

You are confusing me with the "liberals" on this site by accusing everyone who disagrees with you of supporting an inept bureaucracy, yet you worship the military which is the most wasteful (see: F-35 program, War on Terror) and has an enormous amount of evils such as sexual abuse, killing civilians, torture, and pretty much everything bad a military does?

So, pray tell, what would you have America's budget look like? Even more spending on the military industrial complex? Because the vibe I'm getting from you is that you want a military-based welfare state. You don't care where the debt comes from then; it just has to be spent on the military.

You sound as out-of-touch as Mitt Romney did when he kept pushing the "defense spending should be no less than 4% of GDP". Who cares about the percentage? If our military is able to provide for the defense of the nation in a cost effective way, why keep throwing money at such a bloated bureaucracy so Boeing can keep making tons of money? Just pulling an arbitrary statistical number out of the air based on history during different geopolitical realities won't save those communities in the Rust Belt that badly need jobs and income there.

I'd prefer social programs to militarization, but what social programs have actually worked? Eisenhower transferred military money to Interstate infrastructure, which was mildly successful, but, generally speaking, the civilian bureaucracies don't take their responsibilities seriously. Every new social program is another F-35, yet the public never questions whether or not the thing actually flies because they regard social programs as "good". The end result is predictable, but disturbing--civilian programs don't work. Military has a legacy of success, not the least of which is building the post-war middle class from the fallout of the Great Depression.

The decline in military spending highlights how much money has been transferred out of the middle class to the poor and elderly. It's unsustainable, especially during eras when the US faces such intense manufacturing competition from Japan and China. If you want to use civilian programs, you're going to have to get serious about holding the civilian bureaucracies accountable for 50 years of sedition and failure. Promising to slash military spending only makes them salivate. It's not much of a motivator.

As far as I can tell, I'm the only person on Atlas who actually expects the civilian bureaucracies to function. Other people make excuses for federal failure or they deny it exists.

[pendragon]

The shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a services-based economy is a global one, and a trend as inexorable as the shift from agriculture to manufacturing (which is actually still ongoing - over any given period the US economy has lost a greater percentage of agriculture jobs than manufacturing).

Chinese manufacturing employment actually peaked in 1995 and has declined since then. Global manufacturing employment peaked in the mid-80s.  Pick any given country and the number of people employed in manufacturing peaked sometime between the mid-70s and the mid-90s.  More and more manufacturing can be automated, so fewer people are needed to produce enough manufactured goods to satisfy global demand.

It's just the facts - manual labor can be, in an ever-increasing set of circumstances, better performed by machines, while humans still have a decisive advantage in most fields of mental and/or social labor (although machines are also getting better at replacing humans in those fields too, just not as fast as they are getting better at replacing humans in agriculture or manufacturing).

Trying to work against the inexorable global economic forces at work here is like telling a one-armed grandpa to swim up Niagara Falls.  Manufacturing jobs are every bit as gone as agriculture jobs, and permanently.  They're not going to come back to China, even.  In fact, we wouldn't even want them to come back, because that would imply some sort of Mad Max apocalypse scenario.  So instead of whining about the lost manufacturing jobs, it might be better to consider how to best equip the workforce and increase our national competitiveness in the post-manufacturing services-based economy of the country, and the world. And, of course, there are specific policy changes that can be made to help employment growth in manufacturing sectors that are potential growth areas for employment in the US (most notably oil and natural gas-related).

[AggregateDemand]

The shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a services-based economy is a global one, and a trend as inexorable as the shift from agriculture to manufacturing (which is actually still ongoing - over any given period the US economy has lost a greater percentage of agriculture jobs than manufacturing).

True. As you point out, the problem is something for China and Japan to fret about. The issue in the United States is not so much the quantity of jobs, but the loss of manufacturing investment and manufacturing output. The nation that designed the F-22 Raptor can't even find domestic manufacturing businesses to provide the mil-spec fasteners and other relatively cheap components. It's an embarrassment and a threat to our national security.

Under normal circumstances, I'd agree that fighting structural changes in the manufacturing economy is a huge waste of time, but these are not normal circumstances. China and Japan are both legendary currency manipulators, and the US is the world's foremost authority on hollowing out the lower-middle class (particularly American youth) with taxation, benefit mandates, spending cuts for investment programs, reckless demand subsidies, and misguided social welfare policy.

Japan and China have rolled back their debauched foreign reserve policies, but the US is still not competing on equal terms because people cling to the failed socioeconomic technology of 50-80 years ago, as if nothing has changed since then.

Edit: I forgot to mention that we sabotaged our own manufacturing sector by ignoring the ineptitude of labor unions like the UAW.

[Badger]

oh no we all fell for the masterful trap

what egg there is on our collective faces

of course. You see economist generally don't measure inflation by inflation figures , at least as far as we understand it .

 thank goodness that, as usual, we have agret demand to tell us this

[Slander and/or Libel]

The chart shows defense spending as a percentage of GDP. A fraction, basically. So it can change if the numerator (defense spending) or the denominator (GDP) changes. Between 2000 and 2007, GDP was growing, but defense spending as a percentage of GDP was growing, so defense spending was outpacing the growth of GDP. Between 2007 and 2009, GDP was shrinking, so defense spending needed only stay constant to grow as a percentage of GDP. After 2009, GDP has been growing again, so the fact that defense spending as a percentage of GDP has been shrinking means that growth of GDP has outpaced growth of defense spending.

As far as lamenting the lost jobs from the lower (as a percentage of GDP) defense spending, I was unaware that somebody with your particular biases would lament the loss of a whole bunch of government jobs (which don't really count as real jobs anyway, usually).

[Person Man]

Of course there are alternatives to military spending and social spending. There are things such as civilian science research programs, infrastructure programs  and the list goes on from there. There's a problem when people are complaining about the deficit and yet roads are unsafe and every promising new technology is scrapped because its "not practical" or is always 20 years and 10-100 billion dollars away.

You want social spending that helps the middle class work? Whatever happened to more spending on education. Sure, its spent inefficiently, but if you spent enough, you would have enough money to fully fund public schools AND allow choice without having to ration resources through bizarre standardized testing.

[AggregateDemand]

The chart shows defense spending as a percentage of GDP. A fraction, basically. So it can change if the numerator (defense spending) or the denominator (GDP) changes.

How do you suppose federal deficits work? Perhaps now you understand why we don't measure historical budgets in real dollars, rather % GDP and % spending. Real dollars are applicable in apples-to-apples cost assessments over time, like CPI or the cost of 1 barrel of a certain oil benchmark.

[AggregateDemand]

You want social spending that helps the middle class work? Whatever happened to more spending on education. Sure, its spent inefficiently, but if you spent enough, you would have enough money to fully fund public schools AND allow choice without having to ration resources through bizarre standardized testing.

I wish it were that simple, but the US already floods primary education with excessive funding. We spend more than any other nation on K-12, except the obscure and wealthy micro-republics in Europe, like Luxembourg.

Most states have reduced collegiate funding, relative to tuition costs. The federal government could intervene with investment, but we really want to risk disrupting our elite private institutions? The average American would probably answer with an unequivocal "yes", but the elite politicians who attended those universities?

Furthermore, if we spend money on collegiate education, from where should we get funding? We've already hacked the military budget to pieces, and we have no assurance that higher taxes will be spent on collegiate education. If we need another $100B or $200B, it will have to come from elsewhere.

[Slander and/or Libel]

How do you suppose federal deficits work? Perhaps now you understand why we don't measure historical budgets in real dollars, rather % GDP and % spending. Real dollars are applicable in apples-to-apples cost assessments over time, like CPI or the cost of 1 barrel of a certain oil benchmark.

We're talking about how best to measure the level of defense spending in the economy, not deficits per se. I'm not even necessarily saying that measuring as a percentage of GDP or a percentage of spending is a bad way to look at things, as long as we keep in mind that when we're taking the quotient of two quantities, either of those quantities changing can (and does) change the quotient itself. It's therefore inaccurate and disingenuous to characterize a decline in defense spending as a percentage of GDP as a cut in defense spending. You don't have the context to draw that conclusion directly.

[pendragon]

If I might explain what AggregateDemand is getting at:

How much more valuable is a M1A2 Abrams tank than a 1935 M2A2 tank? (My apologies for the US Army's repetitive armored vehicle naming system).

Most non-economists would think that's a difficult and rather subjective question to answer. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics would say that they can objectively calculate the exact numerical value of how much better an M1A2 is than its 1935 counterpart, down to the decimal places.

How do they do it? Well, they look at the last time the M1A2 and the M1A1 were sold at the same time, and divide the price of the M1A2 by the M1A1's price. If it came out to 1.1, the BLS would say that the M1A2 is exactly 1.1 times better than the M1A1. Then they divide the M1A1's price by the original M1's, and multiply 1.1 by the quotient (let's say 1.2, for a product of 1.3), and then do the same thing with the M1 and the M60A3, and so on and so forth until you get down to the 1935 M2A2.

Perhaps they might determine that, in "constant 1935 dollars," the Abrams is worth 98.3 times more than the M2A2, or 341.7 times more, or 154.4 times more. It doesn't really matter. In any event, we are likely to find that the "1935" price of the Abrams is more than a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier cost in the real 1935.

Now, if we were, today, to build an exact replica of a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier, it would cost far, far more than an Abrams costs. In fact, in "constant 1935 dollars," it would probably cost a whole lot more than it did to build the same ship in 1935.

Of course, on the other hand, in the real 1935, you might ask for a tank with a 1500 HP gas turbine engine, and depleted uranium mesh-reinforced composite armor, and that has a digital thermal targeting system, and is fully drive-by-wire, and can fire guided missiles from its main gun - but you're not going to get it. The good people of 1935 could build you 154 M2A2s, or even a million, but there is simply no way that they could build you an Abrams. From that perspective, the 1935 price of an Abrams is incalculably high.

On the other hand, an M2A2 nowadays would be militarily useless except for low-intensity crowd control, and even in that capacity its rather dismal fuel economy would doom it. It is, therefore, totally useless. A modern tank could just roll over and crush it, monster truck-style. If we generously say an M2A2 contains 11 tons of cast steel at the current scrap price of $460/ton, a $9 million Abrams is worth about the same as the scrap metal value of 1750 M2A2s. Add a zero or two to that number if we factor in transportation and disassembly costs, as we should.

And actually, against its interwar-era counterparts, the extreme capabilities of the Abrams are themselves complete overkill and therefore useless, and the extreme logistical nightmare it represents would make it simply not worth it to field in combat in 1935. If, one day in 1944, the Allies had found all their Shermans and T-34s replaced by Abramses, I suspect that most of us would have a better working understanding of the German language. To the army officer of 1935, the Abrams might as well be scrap metal, because the costs to use it would have vastly outweighed the benefits.

Or there are different ways of looking at things. You could say that an Abrams is worth billions of 1935 dollars in 1935, because the technologies that they could reverse-engineer from it would be worth billions. Or you could look at the 2014 value of the M2A2 based on what museums and private collectors are willing to spend on one as a historical curiosity. Or you could estimate what it might cost per unit to mass-produce an exact replica of the M2A2 today.

Any of these comparisons is as good as the other for determining the "constant dollar" value of those two tanks. And all are decidedly useless.

Instead of looking at "constant dollars," let us instead look at "constant tanks." In 1935, faced with prospective opponents like the Panzer I, T-26, and Ha-Go, the M2A2's military value to an American general was approximately one tank's worth. In 2014, faced with the T-72/90, Patton, and Type 98/99, the Abrams' value to a general is also about one tank.

How much expenditure in terms of materials and labor did an M2A2 represent in 1935? One tank's worth. The Abrams is much larger and involves more exotic materials and more skilled labor, so I'll grant that it's about 10 "constant 1935 tanks" in terms of materials and labor. How many tanks worth of materials and labor does a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier represent? Quite a few - now, in 1935, or at any other point in the past or future.

Now, that doesn't make the most sense in the world, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than declaring that the expenditure to build an Abrams today is greater than the expenditure to build an aircraft carrier in 1935, or that Belgium spends more on its military today than Nazi Germany in 1943 or whatever. Arbitrarily declaring that tanks nowadays are 154.4 times more expensive than tanks 80 years ago is, obviously, going to make the current military budget look enormous compared to 80 years ago. It's more useful to look at how many soldiers, tanks, trucks, fighter and bomber planes, large and small ships, etc. the military is maintaining at any given time, or, failing that, the share of national output/GDP spent on the military is also a reasonable proxy.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' process is known as "matched-model hedonic regression," and is one of the most unfortunate 20th century contributions to the economics profession, because it makes all historical (and therefore current) economic data into meaningless gobbledygook. Frankly, the Soviets were more on the right track with their endless statistics about such-and-such many more thousands of tons of pig iron being produced and an increase of 30,000 in the production of tractors and so on.

...

Quick factual caveat for this post: it's possible/likely that the comparisons between current and past military budgets are calculated using the hedonic regression in the general consumer price index rather than a matched-model hedonic regression for each individual weapons system. I'm just trying to illustrate the concept in a way that's easy to understand. And, of course, using that less rigorous method means that such comparisons tell us even less about relative military spending.

[Panda Express]

If I might explain what AggregateDemand is getting at:

How much more valuable is a M1A2 Abrams tank than a 1935 M2A2 tank? (My apologies for the US Army's repetitive armored vehicle naming system).

Most non-economists would think that's a difficult and rather subjective question to answer. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics would say that they can objectively calculate the exact numerical value of how much better an M1A2 is than its 1935 counterpart, down to the decimal places.

How do they do it? Well, they look at the last time the M1A2 and the M1A1 were sold at the same time, and divide the price of the M1A2 by the M1A1's price. If it came out to 1.1, the BLS would say that the M1A2 is exactly 1.1 times better than the M1A1. Then they divide the M1A1's price by the original M1's, and multiply 1.1 by the quotient (let's say 1.2, for a product of 1.3), and then do the same thing with the M1 and the M60A3, and so on and so forth until you get down to the 1935 M2A2.

Perhaps they might determine that, in "constant 1935 dollars," the Abrams is worth 98.3 times more than the M2A2, or 341.7 times more, or 154.4 times more. It doesn't really matter. In any event, we are likely to find that the "1935" price of the Abrams is more than a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier cost in the real 1935.

Now, if we were, today, to build an exact replica of a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier, it would cost far, far more than an Abrams costs. In fact, in "constant 1935 dollars," it would probably cost a whole lot more than it did to build the same ship in 1935.

Of course, on the other hand, in the real 1935, you might ask for a tank with a 1500 HP gas turbine engine, and depleted uranium mesh-reinforced composite armor, and that has a digital thermal targeting system, and is fully drive-by-wire, and can fire guided missiles from its main gun - but you're not going to get it. The good people of 1935 could build you 154 M2A2s, or even a million, but there is simply no way that they could build you an Abrams. From that perspective, the 1935 price of an Abrams is incalculably high.

On the other hand, an M2A2 nowadays would be militarily useless except for low-intensity crowd control, and even in that capacity its rather dismal fuel economy would doom it. It is, therefore, totally useless. A modern tank could just roll over and crush it, monster truck-style. If we generously say an M2A2 contains 11 tons of cast steel at the current scrap price of $460/ton, a $9 million Abrams is worth about the same as the scrap metal value of 1750 M2A2s. Add a zero or two to that number if we factor in transportation and disassembly costs, as we should.

And actually, against its interwar-era counterparts, the extreme capabilities of the Abrams are themselves complete overkill and therefore useless, and the extreme logistical nightmare it represents would make it simply not worth it to field in combat in 1935. If, one day in 1944, the Allies had found all their Shermans and T-34s replaced by Abramses, I suspect that most of us would have a better working understanding of the German language. To the army officer of 1935, the Abrams might as well be scrap metal, because the costs to use it would have vastly outweighed the benefits.

Or there are different ways of looking at things. You could say that an Abrams is worth billions of 1935 dollars in 1935, because the technologies that they could reverse-engineer from it would be worth billions. Or you could look at the 2014 value of the M2A2 based on what museums and private collectors are willing to spend on one as a historical curiosity. Or you could estimate what it might cost per unit to mass-produce an exact replica of the M2A2 today.

Any of these comparisons is as good as the other for determining the "constant dollar" value of those two tanks. And all are decidedly useless.

Instead of looking at "constant dollars," let us instead look at "constant tanks." In 1935, faced with prospective opponents like the Panzer I, T-26, and Ha-Go, the M2A2's military value to an American general was approximately one tank's worth. In 2014, faced with the T-72/90, Patton, and Type 98/99, the Abrams' value to a general is also about one tank.

How much expenditure in terms of materials and labor did an M2A2 represent in 1935? One tank's worth. The Abrams is much larger and involves more exotic materials and more skilled labor, so I'll grant that it's about 10 "constant 1935 tanks" in terms of materials and labor. How many tanks worth of materials and labor does a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier represent? Quite a few - now, in 1935, or at any other point in the past or future.

Now, that doesn't make the most sense in the world, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than declaring that the expenditure to build an Abrams today is greater than the expenditure to build an aircraft carrier in 1935, or that Belgium spends more on its military today than Nazi Germany in 1943 or whatever. Arbitrarily declaring that tanks nowadays are 154.4 times more expensive than tanks 80 years ago is, obviously, going to make the current military budget look enormous compared to 80 years ago. It's more useful to look at how many soldiers, tanks, trucks, fighter and bomber planes, large and small ships, etc. the military is maintaining at any given time, or, failing that, the share of national output/GDP spent on the military is also a reasonable proxy.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' process is known as "matched-model hedonic regression," and is one of the most unfortunate 20th century contributions to the economics profession, because it makes all historical (and therefore current) economic data into meaningless gobbledygook. Frankly, the Soviets were more on the right track with their endless statistics about such-and-such many more thousands of tons of pig iron being produced and an increase of 30,000 in the production of tractors and so on.

...

Quick factual caveat for this post: it's possible/likely that the comparisons between current and past military budgets are calculated using the hedonic regression in the general consumer price index rather than a matched-model hedonic regression for each individual weapons system. I'm just trying to illustrate the concept in a way that's easy to understand. And, of course, using that less rigorous method means that such comparisons tell us even less about relative military spending.

nope wrong

[Slander and/or Libel]

Yeah, I don't think that's what AD is saying.

[Beet]

How many M2A2's can one M1A2 take out? Your argument implies that the answer is negative. That would be quite surprising, and frankly, doubtful.

The problem with the argument that "a tank is a tank", etc. and that things should be measured in numbers rather than quality is that, just because we upgrade our equipment, it does not automatically lead to our opponents upgrading theirs. By that standard the Iraqis should have done much better in the Persian Gulf War. In absolute numbers of tanks, planes, and troops they were alright. In actual effectiveness they were massacred.

[AggregateDemand]

Yeah, I don't think that's what AD is saying.

He is referencing another relevant concept, but you are correct. I was only referencing the general concept of budgeting.

[Person Man]

You want social spending that helps the middle class work? Whatever happened to more spending on education. Sure, its spent inefficiently, but if you spent enough, you would have enough money to fully fund public schools AND allow choice without having to ration resources through bizarre standardized testing.

I wish it were that simple, but the US already floods primary education with excessive funding. We spend more than any other nation on K-12, except the obscure and wealthy micro-republics in Europe, like Luxembourg.

Most states have reduced collegiate funding, relative to tuition costs. The federal government could intervene with investment, but we really want to risk disrupting our elite private institutions? The average American would probably answer with an unequivocal "yes", but the elite politicians who attended those universities?

Furthermore, if we spend money on collegiate education, from where should we get funding? We've already hacked the military budget to pieces, and we have no assurance that higher taxes will be spent on collegiate education. If we need another $100B or $200B, it will have to come from elsewhere.

It seems like such policies face fixable political problems rather than problems with practicality. At this point, its not about the middle class calling the poor swindlin' peasants, its the very wealthy doing the same to the middle class. In the long run, it could be a very good strategy for populists who have been framed for the last 40 years as only supporting the very poor.

Further, maybe military spending should be revisited but there are other large infrastructures that could produce jobs and novel products.

AD might be right in that there is too much focus on what only the "47%" need but there are things that all of the 99% can benefit from. "Workfare" such as education (something whose waste must be solved but no one has the solution for), healthcare (Obamacare is basically the last resort to fix a system based on employment-based insurance. If Obamacare fails, gets cancelled or made irrelevant, the next step is either a system that mostly relies on subsidized private savings and credit (which is how I pay for the dentist now) instead of insurance, or a government run system, instead of insurance. I've also heard people talking about "free clinics")  and spending on military and civilian projects.

An interesting study would be how much increased investment in social and physical infrastructure would reduce the need for transfer payments. I'm open to the fact that Republican policies such as replacing the healthcare and education system with a subsidized savings and loans system might work, but like all R ideas, if they worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Of course there is the TEA party/Right-Libertarian/paleocon idea that we should just give up because "nothing is working" and all we're accomplishing is  waiving our rights, some legitimate concerns and some of which haven't been recognized as rights in this country for almost a century. Basically, their policy is "don't be poor or you will be sent to prison" though many of them say that in the mythical past, the "Godly poor" were "happy" and lived in the woods and had gardens.

[AggregateDemand]

It seems like such policies face fixable political problems rather than problems with practicality.

Correct, but the political problems have existed since the Great Society. After 50 years, we have only moved farther away from a fix. The situation in the US is turning the electorate irrational reactionaries. Fifty years of ineffective Republican strategy has made libertarians and conservatives fatalistic. Liberals have somehow convinced themselves that unproductive entitlements are actually the result of conspiratorial Republican under-funding, hence the "low-information" moniker for left-wing voters.

Democrats have created an impenetrable political fortress. It consumes everything around it. At one point, Nixon tried to steal the Great Society for Republicans, but he failed. Reagan Republicans changed tactics to full-frontal assault, but they also failed, and they pussed out when Reagan left office. Gingrich tried to renew the offensive, but he ultimately failed. Bush tried to ignore the problem, like his father.

You know how to solve this problem? Good luck.

[King]

God, AD is just the worst.

[AggregateDemand]

God, AD is just the worst.

Read what economists have to say about the US entitlement system. It's not flattering, and the international community are probably the most vocal critics. Organizations like WTO, IMF, World Bank, etc have identified US entitlement spending as an emerging economic threat to global stability.

As I've informed you before, the US uses defined-benefit, pay-as-you-go pension administration for Social Security. Such schemes are illegal in the US private sector, and even the most liberal social democracies steer clear. Couple PAYG defined-benefit with tax-exempt 401k, and historically low tax rates, and you have a formula for disaster. Medicare is not much better.

You've demonstrated consistently that you know virtually nothing about the US entitlement system, which is inexcusable. Ad hominem attacks will not fix the situation.

[Person Man]

God, AD is just the worst.

Read what economists have to say about the US entitlement system. It's not flattering, and the international community are probably the most vocal critics. Organizations like WTO, IMF, World Bank, etc have identified US entitlement spending as an emerging economic threat to global stability.

As I've informed you before, the US uses defined-benefit, pay-as-you-go pension administration for Social Security. Such schemes are illegal in the US private sector, and even the most liberal social democracies steer clear. Couple PAYG defined-benefit with tax-exempt 401k, and historically low tax rates, and you have a formula for disaster. Medicare is not much better.

You've demonstrated consistently that you know virtually nothing about the US entitlement system, which is inexcusable. Ad hominem attacks will not fix the situation.

Do you have intimate knowledge of these other entitlement systems?

[AggregateDemand]

Do you have intimate knowledge of these other entitlement systems?

It's hard not to know about foreign entitlement programs, especially during the current era. Both Sweden and Norway are phasing in their new pension programs. Netherlands overhauled their healthcare and health insurance industries in 2006. Australia's superannuation system (their "company-side" payroll taxes go into private accounts) will probably be reformed again.

Everyday brings news of entitlement reform in other nations. In the US, we just keep increasing spending and benefits.

[Person Man]

Do you have intimate knowledge of these other entitlement systems?

It's hard not to know about foreign entitlement programs, especially during the current era. Both Sweden and Norway are phasing in their new pension programs. Netherlands overhauled their healthcare and health insurance industries in 2006. Australia's superannuation system (their "company-side" payroll taxes go into private accounts) will probably be reformed again.

Everyday brings news of entitlement reform in other nations. In the US, we just keep increasing spending and benefits.

What is new in the Dutch system?