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Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Debt to tax revenue would make more sense as a metric.
Just imagine if the us empire and its institutions, war machine parted ways with the country and its population. It would not be as hard as one imagines, but would reveal a country that has benefitted in parts by snuggling up to the imperial maxhine, while other paets where abandoned. It would also reveal how deeply the empire structure seeped into the privat social landscape.
I suspect we may not have to imagine this for long. The DOGEing of the federal government pulled a lot of the benefits of the union away from the people, and the recent political maneuvering around voting districts and other inter-state power contests suggest that the notion of the US as one nation and one people with a shared set of values is increasingly at odds with the facts on the ground. We have the most powerful military in the world (probably?), but in terms of the domestic situation, the federalized model is under incredible stress and the bargains that held it together seem to be failing or being intentionally broken. Your description of the empire leaving the country behind - or vice versa - feels less far-fetched than it would have a generation ago.
whining about deficits is something every opposition party has done for the last 30 years, but once in power they conveniently forget about it. the only folks who actually care are pencil-necked technocrats, not the virile dynamic political leaders who are currently popular.
Several trillion dollars of the debt comes just from Trump reducing taxes for rich people and companies.
It also doesn’t appear on the ALL CAPS list of campaign priorities: https://rncplatform.donaldjtrump.com/. The word “debt” doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. And the word “deficit” appears just once in the context of the trade deficit.
Trump was the first candidate to release a list of itemized priorities in small words and ALL CAPS so the average dumbass could understand. There are many, many things you can say about this list. But it’s very hard to inject ambiguity into what he was running on.
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
That leaves everyone dealing in fictions: the fiction that you can reduce debt by cutting taxes, the fiction you can reduce debt by increasing spending, and fictions about how much you really balance the books by targeting only “billionaires” instead of taxing the middle class.
Having sufficient capacity for violence is indispensable for the existence of a state. You need a military so you can kill people in other countries, and you need police so you can maintain an internal monopoly on violence. You can't have state-funded preschool if you don't have a state. The Ukrainians unfortunately are learning this the hard way right now.
I suspect that imports would become enormously more expensive, which would reveal the catastrophic erosion in worker rights and pay due to neoliberalism. People would be suddenly aware of how much less they are making and how much more the wealthy are taking than was the case 40 years ago. This in turn might result in political instability. But who knows.
One thing would be that GDP per Capita would fall to something like Germany (and I'm been kind there assuming it would only drop that much) there isn't inherently anything about the US that says it's GDP per capita has to be ~50% higher than Germany.
Why? What is the mechanism that links being the reserve currency and (real?) GDP per capita? I can see why being the reserve currency is an advantage for the finical sector, maybe international trade. But I don't understand how if the world stopped trading in dollars and switched to gold or Bitcoin or some basket of currencies, GDP per capita would be majorly impacted.
Of course taking a huge pay cut is not something most people are willing to do, so you'd probably actually see mass unemployment and salaries being inflated away.
In response the fed will do the only thing it knows, which is to rev up the money printer even more. But thats going to make all these problems worse, leading to a vicious cycle.
And in the midst of economic chaos, people's danger switches get activated and they will turn to an authoritarian strongman who will make them feel safe.
And generally speaking, once such a person is in power, they can only think of one way to solve their problems, which is to plunder their neighbors by going to war. Thats basically the imperial cycle.
It sucks to be able to see all this coming and yet be powerless to stop it..