US Budget Simulator

[MadImmortalMan]

Where are these growth rates going to come from? We can't do better than 2% a year in the modern safety net countries anymore. It might not be possible at all.

It's not the safety net.

I think you're right. It's the debt. Public and private.

[Ideologue]

Debt overhang (predominately private) is a huge, huge issue.

I still think the bigger reason is wage stagnation, which is part of the reason debt overhang became such a huge issue.  Although reasonable minds evidently can differ, I blame it on automation (as well as simple rationalizing/efficiency gains), which keeps reducing the need for human employment without adding to aggregate demand or even adding significantly to wealth.  No one's "figured out" the aggregate demand problem yet (many people have figured it out).

But I'll tell you (by which I mainly mean Joan) what, if a proper Keynesian stimulus were to lift us back into full employment and raised growth rates, I'd admit I was wrong.

[Admiral Yi]

People have made tons of money off of automation.

[Ideologue]

The question is whether the economic growth automation/rationalization undeniably creates provides enough jobs (or value) to offset the costs in terms of employment and aggregate demand.  I feel that that question has not been answered, though I think the evidence suggests it being answered in the negative.

If not automation, whence stagnant wages for the past 30 years?  The value of labor has declined, but why?  Retrenchment of capital; women (re)entering the workforce after the Golden Age of the Middle Class, as social order lagged behind, spelling the end of single-income households; immigrants; effective immigrants in the form of global industrialization--are those factors sufficient to explain it?  Perhaps.

[Admiral Yi]

You also said automation has not increased wealth.

[Ideologue]

I didn't say that.  It obviously has.  (With tremendous gains from the late 19th century up through 1980 or so, to boot.)

[Admiral Yi]

I blame it on automation (as well as simple rationalizing/efficiency gains), which keeps reducing the need for human employment without adding to aggregate demand or even adding significantly to wealth.

[Ideologue]

Which is not the same thing as stating it failed to create wealth whatsoever, though I should've clarified that statement by limiting it to the period of late-late-late-stage capitalism, ~1980 onward.

I'm sure there's an actual economic modeling function that seeks to depict mathematically what I mean: that through a combination of sophistication and ubiquity, the marginal product of labor input is reduced (and hence demand for that labor, since it's primarily wages that drive demand for mass consumption of goods and services, and so on in a messy vicious cycle).

Since displaced workers do not create wealth--and lower-paid workers generate less aggregate demand, the driver of the growth of wealth--I reckon it is very likely to be as significant factor in low growth rates in advanced countries as direct labor competition, although I on reflection debt overhang is probably the most serious present cause.

I think as the years go by technological unemployment will--although some do not--so seriously cripple growth that we may even enter a stage of permanent negative growth (we will absolutely enter a stage of collapsing wages, if we have not already).  This will be driven even further by sub-replacement population growth, which will be compounded by prospective parents having even fewer children than now and pouring every possible resource into their educational development in order to enter the remaining labor market.

[Admiral Yi]

Now get from anything you wrote to "no significant increase in wealth."

[jimmy olsen]

Nobody else has posted a budget!

[Ideologue]

Fine, you baby.  I also got to 60%

I raised all income taxes, gutted benefits for olds, killed Obamacare (at least the individual mandate part), and went to an all-nuke military.

I could've gotten the government running on a for-profit basis if "end student loans" was an option but it wasn't.  So I killed Pell grants because poor people have no business using taxpayer money for signalling purposes.  Instead, I gave them more welfare and half a trillion dollars worth of jobs.

I created a moon colony just for you, buddy.

[Ideologue]

P.S. I'm kidding about Pell grants, but it did get me to 60% and it was the only higher ed-related expense I was allowed to touch by the machine.

[Siege]

Nobody else has posted a budget!

Here is my budget:

20% flat tax for everybody, reduce the government employment by 70%, eliminate corporate welfare, anti-monopoly laws defining monopoly as controlling over 25% of any market.

Fuck, this is not a budget.

[Eddie Teach]

You keep your hands off my Pell grants. 

[Admiral Yi]

reduce the government employment by 70%

Including the military?

eliminate corporate welfare

What do you mean by this?