There is one economic issue no candidate is touching, and that’s the national debt. Now clocking in at more than $35 trillion, we’re paying more to service the debt than we are on national defense.
Absolutely. AFAIK, the only presidential candidates in modern history to ask people to vote for them to fix the debt were Ross Perot and Paul Tsongas in 1992. Democrats hold MMT-style fantasies that it's not real and "austerity" is the real enemy, and Republicans hold Laffer-curve style fantasies that we can just cut taxes and make revenue go up. (Trump is doing this with his misrepresentation of tariffs -- "Foreign governments will pay us so much money we can solve all the problems.")
It's almost hard to remember that we briefly had a surplus, because of a stock market boom (nothing to do with President Clinton) and some actual progress on waste (because of VP Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiative and Newt's hostile House).
Responding to your footnote, which I realize is but a footnote : maybe St Louis Fed, OECD or World Bank for economic data? Though World Bank won’t have Taiwan. Seriously.
My issue wasn't finding the data, but being able to get the custom view of "ranked by economic growth since 1990" without having to download massive CSV files and build my own pivot tables. This is the one true use case for gen AI, and it'd be cool if those institutions offered that type of conversational front-end.
OMG FRIDAY NIGHT VIDEOS. Will absolutely be watching this.
There is one economic issue no candidate is touching, and that’s the national debt. Now clocking in at more than $35 trillion, we’re paying more to service the debt than we are on national defense.
Absolutely. AFAIK, the only presidential candidates in modern history to ask people to vote for them to fix the debt were Ross Perot and Paul Tsongas in 1992. Democrats hold MMT-style fantasies that it's not real and "austerity" is the real enemy, and Republicans hold Laffer-curve style fantasies that we can just cut taxes and make revenue go up. (Trump is doing this with his misrepresentation of tariffs -- "Foreign governments will pay us so much money we can solve all the problems.")
It's almost hard to remember that we briefly had a surplus, because of a stock market boom (nothing to do with President Clinton) and some actual progress on waste (because of VP Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiative and Newt's hostile House).
Amazing to think that was a bipartisan achievement. The peace dividend that we enjoyed at the end of the Cold War helped too.
Responding to your footnote, which I realize is but a footnote : maybe St Louis Fed, OECD or World Bank for economic data? Though World Bank won’t have Taiwan. Seriously.
My issue wasn't finding the data, but being able to get the custom view of "ranked by economic growth since 1990" without having to download massive CSV files and build my own pivot tables. This is the one true use case for gen AI, and it'd be cool if those institutions offered that type of conversational front-end.
Yes. OECD or STL FED will give you nice unwieldy csv files. Like school in the summer - uncool. Lovely post btw. Sorry to focus on footnotes.
Omg this was stellar! Friday night videos and a critique of kid club sports? Nice!!