I've Solved the Deficit

[Tupac Shakur]

Nearly a $500 billion surplus in 2030, *****es, and it wasn't even hard to get there...

Domestic Programs and Foreign Aid
Eliminate earmarks
Eliminate farm subsidies
Cut pay of civilian federal workers by 5 percent
Reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent
Cut 250,000 government contractors
Other cuts to the federal government
Cut aid to states by 5 percent

Military
Reduce nuclear arsenal and space spending
Reduce military to pre-Iraq War size and further reduce troops in Asia and Europe
Reduce noncombat military compensation and overhead
Reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013

Health Care
Enact medical malpractice reform
Increase the Medicare eligibility age to 70
Reduce the tax break for employer-provided health insurance

Social Security
Raise the Social Security retirement age to 70
Reduce Social Security benefits for those with high incomes
Tighten eligibility for disability
Use an alternate measure of inflation

Existing taxes
Payroll tax: Subject some incomes above $106,000 to tax

New taxes and tax reform
Eliminate loopholes, reduce rates (Bowles-Simpson plan)
Reduce mortgage-interest deduction by converting to credit
National sales tax
Carbon tax

38% Savings from tax increases
62% Savings from spending cuts

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=hz5qh05g

[Kuciwalker]

The "cut pay/reduce workforce" type cuts don't really make sense to me. If the government ought to be doing something then it ought to hire enough people to do it, and pay them enough to do it well; otherwise it shouldn't hire them at all.

[Asher]

The "shouldn't hire them at all" part explains the cuts.

[Kuciwalker]

Without some idea of where you want the cuts to come from, it doesn't strike me as very meaningful.

[Tupac Shakur]

Your comments don't strike me as very meaningful.

[Al B. Sure!]

Tupac for President

at this photoshop job:

[Hauldren Collider]

The "cut pay/reduce workforce" type cuts don't really make sense to me. If the government ought to be doing something then it ought to hire enough people to do it, and pay them enough to do it well; otherwise it shouldn't hire them at all.

Have you considered the possibility that many agencies in the federal bureaucracy are larger than they need to be?

Think about it. It is hard to fire federal workers. It is relatively easy to hire them. You do the math. If what you want is the federal government to have responsible management of human resources, keep dreaming.

[Barnabas]

Couldn't firing people worsen the recession? Are the potential firees skilled enough to get jobs in the private sector?

[Hauldren Collider]

Couldn't firing people worsen the recession? Are the potential firees skilled enough to get jobs in the private sector?

Right now we're paying them to do nothing at all, so I think it's the broken window. In short, no, I think firing them would be good for the economy.

[KrazyHorse]

Given that the recent stimulus has shown us that reasonable fiscal multipliers in today's climate in the US are significantly less than one (it would take a ****ing ****** like Krugman to claim otherwise), it becomes critically important what direct value taxpayers see from the salaries of federal workers whether or not "there's a recession on".

The childish view that a lot of average people (and formerly respected economists) have of an economy which is completely demand-constrained and in which the crowding out of private investment and consumption by government spending is non-existent is utterly ridiculous.

If government workers are wasting taxpayers' money (which is almost certainly the case) whether it be due to overstaffing for the current mission or overextension of the current mission the reductions in their numbers are a Good Thing.

[Hauldren Collider]

(it would take a ****ing ****** like Krugman to claim otherwise)

I am hoping that Krugman's recent series of rants represent the pathetic, terminal whimper of Keynsian economics, at least of the variety we have seen in the last few years.

[KrazyHorse]

You're missing the point that said transactions might not have any value at all from certain perspectives.

If the transactions didn't have value then parties to them wouldn't engage in them. In order to tell a different type of story you really have to stretch.

There are cases where this principle doesn't apply, but they are generally pretty easy to spot.

And if that's the case, whatever you provide for those transactions might not be valuable either, regardless of the compensation you receive.

My services create a transaction cost. The immediate observation is that the transaction must provide so much net benefit to both sides that it is worth bearing this cost.

Additionally, you are compensated as much as you are in part because your employers/customers are capable of compensating you to the degree that they do.

This might make sense as a value judgment if we were talking about provision of consumption goods & services for the rich. The services I provide are, in the end, paid for by a broad range of companies who wish to enter the capital markets in order to more effectively provide their goods and services to their customers (who represent consumers across the world and across income levels)

Other people/companies might be in need of a greater contribution than you give but not have the money to provide greater pay. What this means is that the value of your work is skewed by the wealth of your employers/customers.

Again, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between consumption and investment. An individual who builds luxury yachts may be subject to this criticism. Not somebody who provides services in the capital markets to companies building virtually everything anybody in the First World consumes. As far as my, employer, I have no clue why you think it is so generous

Now, you could make the argument that wealth equals (or is at least very strongly correlated with) value, but that again ignores the point that there are other methods of measuring value outside of money. Money just happens to be the most widespread and successful method we have of doing so.

No, prices are the ONLY reasonable way of measuring the value of goods and services. You CAN criticize the value of price as a measure of value due to the distribution of consumption. In fact, that is the ONLY compelling criticism I've ever heard of it. However, the price of an object must be a starting point for any value comparison. Prices represent what informed actors are willing to sacrifice, at the margin, to obtain the given object. The musings of uninformed individuals (and more precisely, individuals who could NEVER be informed enough to understand the entire array of relative values placed on EVERY OBJECT in EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD'S HEAD) who furthermore have nothing at stake compare rather poorly to a mechanism which does.

Wealth as value, however, doesn't always match up with people's intuitive sense of the way things should be. That's why people get up in arms about sports stars making too much money or why Albert gets up in arms at the prospect of military personnel making less money.

The reason people get up in arms about those things is because they believe that the relative value they place on objects is somehow vastly more important than the relative value that everybody else places on them. On the other hand, prices take into account EVERYBODY'S values. Believing that you know better than the price does is usually a sign of a severe psychological disorder, in my opinion.

We shouldn't blindly follow this intuitive sense, of course, given that in almost all cases it's going to be internally inconsistent, irrational, or just plain non-sense. But it may be useful to think about why this intuitive sense differs from the standard of wealth equating with value, and it may be useful to think of other consistent, rational, and perhaps more productive ways of measuring value.

Already explained. It's very straightforward: the difference between what any given person thinks the relative value of given objects "should" be and what it is is generally due to that person's belief that he knows better than other people what THEY should prefer.

As I said, severe psychological disorder.

[KrazyHorse]

Note: whose money does albie want to spend in order to make sure soldiers are paid more? Mostly his or mostly other people's?

[Elok]

Thanks to KH for reminding me...

Elok, so you think he gets paid too much and should have his pay reduced?

No, I just meant that the army has incentives other than simple pay. I don't know how much he makes, or how typical it is (he's a sergeant, I think).

[Hauldren Collider]

I had a history teacher once who couldn't understand why football players got paid more than history teachers. I mentioned this to my computer science teacher, who said, "I don't see what's so hard about that. What is it, $30 for a hat? $40 for a shirt, something like that? Seems pretty obvious to me."

Sadly, the computer science teacher left to finish his PhD on computational fluid dynamics.We hope he'll come back next year when he's done, but he'll probably start working at a tech firm making a 7 figure salary instead

I don't understand why he would get paid more there than at a high school...after all, children are the future of this country.