Two things. I am having a hard time having perspective around the hopeful numbers without data on how this typically shows after a change in president over the past 30 years. So republicans increased about 9 points and Democrats decreased about 5, a spread of 14 points. How does this compare over time. Honestly I thought the numbers might have been worse based on what you read in media
Secondly I think it is going to be a very difficult job on aligning a position/ laws on AI when we don’t have a national vision or strategy on the key areas it would fit under. When many of our so called strategies have constraints as objectives vs needs this makes working in the impact of new technology such as AI extremely difficult so that almost certainly it will become dysfunctional.
Trump has a vision and strategy. Whether right or wrong right now, it gives a starting point.
Part deus. I’m tired of polls. They are good for about 30 mins and the left couldn’t care less. Are they shaping the leaders of the left that could make the next election worthwhile? Produced any sane policies? Nope. And do we really want policies made for hundreds of different identity groups?
I agree with you when you look at any poll as a point in time. Looking at the same worded poll over a sign point of time can have value if you account for noise in that poll and look for the significant signals outside of the noise. But even then you do have a point that even with this we don’t have the leaders who pay attention to them
I can see that Trump does have his vision strategic moments, more so then many who came before him. However he creates such chaos around him because he acts on an emotional immature set of grudges, insults, and other immature behavior that those do not have the space to develop and align systems to deliver any long term capability. Because of the latter Thus as far as I am concerned he may have some but they are not operationalized
Here is one thing we find interesting. The survey didn't assess reactions to the National Debt being out of control and climbing constantly, and what that means for the futures of our grandchildren. It is an issue that politicians don't talk about, people proposing "solutions" (like free child care, government run medical care, etc.) don't talk about, and pundits rarely (if ever) talk about it. there are no solutions (strong statement, we know) offered to America's problems that don't involve the government printing money......money that our grandchildren will have to earn.
That's our #1 concern for the future. (p.s. we are in the "graying America" category, so this makes sense given that we have 14 & 1/2 grandchildren).
But it is our worry.
p.s. also interesting that public safety wasn't part of the survey apparently. Safety is, according to Maslow's hierarchy a fundamental need, next to physiological needs (food, shelter, etc.). So, policing, the military, etc., should, according to his hierarchy, be on peoples' minds.
I share your concern on debt, most people don't though and other polling of opinion lists debt way down the bottom if at all. Half of people have $6K of credit card debt, so the federal debt doesn't even register. Another problem is that paying off the debt would require hurt from most everyone intelligent enough to figure out what their income is.
Figure it out for your own circumstances. How much of your income could you afford to pay towards the debt if every other person in your bracket had to pay the same, then figure out how many in your bracket, and multiply. Then figure out what sort of income could afford a higher percent. Obviously someone who makes 10X your income could pay a little more as a percentage, I mean they have the basics covered. I've done the math. At 124 million households it only gets difficult at the top end where it's hard to estimate incomes in the tens and hundreds of millions but there aren't that many of them. Plus income and wealth are not the same thing. And you don't want to be taxing people who just happen to live in a house that skyrocketed in value.
Discussion often boils down to envy or what about ism, or make that other guy who is really rich pay. That's how you hear rich people screaming inequality and pointing at billionaires. We are a very wealthy country. Many things are possible.
Luckily you don't need to pay off the (public) debt, though--you just need to keep the state's debt-to-income ratio at a sustainable level. As long as you do that, other countries won't lose confidence in the government's currency, the exchange rate will stay at a reasonable level, and hence said countries won't demand high premiums (interest rates) to buy securities the government issues.
So all we need to do, really, is consistently grow the economy faster than we grow the rate of government borrowing. (something you can accomplish by slowly decreasing the latter while increasing the former) Do that, and the country's debt-to-income ratio will naturally stabilize at a sustainable level.
But unfortunately, we're not doing that.
Private debt, though--that's a whole other beast. In fact, I would argue excessive private debt is the biggest drag on economic growth there is, and our failure to provide the same debt relief to debtors as we did to creditors after the '08 crisis is part of why we're in such an economic funk.
I'm interested in money and numbers, and a couple of times I played around with the math. How many families earn over $250K, how many over $500K, Not many actually earn over a million per year. Then how to tax wealth, which has a lot more problems. I see no fault with wishing to leave a lot to grand kids etc. At what level does intergenerational wealth become irrelevant.
Also our corporate tax. Would taxing corporations reduce my dividends? Our country used to tax corporations heavily, and not income as much, now things are reversed. Wouldn't corporate tax be a better route? How many years would it take to pay off our debt? My goal was to pay off the entire thing in a year, it would probably take more. Most of my income is "unrealized" I wonder if there is a fair way to tax it, currently I pay nothing on it. Trump's tariffs are likely to produce a few hundred billion, sounds good to me.
Inflation can't be cured. All it can be is stopped. Prices never return to prior levels, except for rents, which are down nationwide, and fail to cause a blip on surveys, but if rents continue to head downwards, especially in the not nice apartments, people will notice. Rent is one of the biggest costs for the working class, many times as much as food.
What can happen is incomes can go up, and if incomes rise and rents sink things could change.
What worries me are the images of ICE tackling Hispanic folks night after night. Journalists are much much more left than the population, and they often feel guilty coming from well to do parents, so they wear their allyship on their sleeves running stories of widows with kids working for 16 hour days for 200 years while kids all serve in military etc. Immigration enforcement has a long way to go, and it needs some permanent legislative help that doesn't make the nightly news and is a lot more deliberative.
In a way, the 'problem' of AI people worry about actually encapsulates the economic roots of the public discontent, and exposes the wider economic problem we've been facing globally for going on 40 years.
To grossly oversimplify, since the advent of the computer, we have been moving away from an economy defined by industrial machines to an economy defined by digital machines. Industrial machines create and monetize physical products, and to make industrial capitalism sustainable, we created a wage system to go along with them--which boils down to roughly, "we're going to recycle a fraction of the proceeds from selling the products that come off the assembly line back to the people working the machines, so they can buy those products and we can have markets and an economy and a society".
Digital machines don't monetize physical products; they monetize information. *Useful* information. (i.e. data) Useful data is produced by people in cooperation with digital machines, same as products on an assembly line are produced by line-workers and machines--it is a form of labor. But we haven't created a wage system to pay people for this new form of labor. So very little of the vast proceeds of the digital economy have been recycled back to people who aren't part of the class that owns the world's vast data empires. And this lack of a system of *formal* benefits throws everybody into an economy where they must compete for *informal* benefits, by acquiring attention through behavior that maximizes 'engagement'. This, of course, incentivizes the perpetuation of mass paranoia and anger--the most powerful attention-getters, supercharged by social media and the smartphone. We need to invent a wage system, and quick--people need copyrights to the information they produce, and they need to be compensated when that information is monetized. Do that and there's no need to fear AI--because, behind the scenes, what we call 'AI' is really just a lot of computers running algorithms on reeeeeally big collections of data. It's a super-sized version of what we already have. Pay people to contribute to those collections and you can have a sustainable form of post-industrial capitalism, shorn of this rising tide of paranoia and anger we face--fail to do so, and you'll just accelerate the rush to inequality and conflict we're seeing all over the world now.
In Trump’s first 9 months he has not eliminated the 2020-2024 inflation. It would be interesting to know what the democrats” consensus is as to the cause of the 2020-2024 inflation and how they would address inflation. The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ has clearly failed.
I suspect they would disagree with Noble Laureate economist Milton Friedman who believed “excess government spending which leads to government printing more only to cover the shortfall, is the fundamental cause of inflation.“
We know that government spending under Biden and the democrats’ controlled Congress resulted in the national debt increasing from $27.72 trillion the end of 2020 to $38.44 trillion the end of 2024. President Trump is addressing inflation by a whole of government effort to increase federal government productivity to reduce its cost.
Trump is an abomination in respect of Ukraine and tariffs.
But does the American left have any capacity to find policies that will only worsen economic conditions via abusive taxation , regulation and destruction of educational standards?
Two things. I am having a hard time having perspective around the hopeful numbers without data on how this typically shows after a change in president over the past 30 years. So republicans increased about 9 points and Democrats decreased about 5, a spread of 14 points. How does this compare over time. Honestly I thought the numbers might have been worse based on what you read in media
Secondly I think it is going to be a very difficult job on aligning a position/ laws on AI when we don’t have a national vision or strategy on the key areas it would fit under. When many of our so called strategies have constraints as objectives vs needs this makes working in the impact of new technology such as AI extremely difficult so that almost certainly it will become dysfunctional.
Trump has a vision and strategy. Whether right or wrong right now, it gives a starting point.
Part deus. I’m tired of polls. They are good for about 30 mins and the left couldn’t care less. Are they shaping the leaders of the left that could make the next election worthwhile? Produced any sane policies? Nope. And do we really want policies made for hundreds of different identity groups?
I agree with you when you look at any poll as a point in time. Looking at the same worded poll over a sign point of time can have value if you account for noise in that poll and look for the significant signals outside of the noise. But even then you do have a point that even with this we don’t have the leaders who pay attention to them
I can see that Trump does have his vision strategic moments, more so then many who came before him. However he creates such chaos around him because he acts on an emotional immature set of grudges, insults, and other immature behavior that those do not have the space to develop and align systems to deliver any long term capability. Because of the latter Thus as far as I am concerned he may have some but they are not operationalized
Very good article (once again).
Here is one thing we find interesting. The survey didn't assess reactions to the National Debt being out of control and climbing constantly, and what that means for the futures of our grandchildren. It is an issue that politicians don't talk about, people proposing "solutions" (like free child care, government run medical care, etc.) don't talk about, and pundits rarely (if ever) talk about it. there are no solutions (strong statement, we know) offered to America's problems that don't involve the government printing money......money that our grandchildren will have to earn.
That's our #1 concern for the future. (p.s. we are in the "graying America" category, so this makes sense given that we have 14 & 1/2 grandchildren).
But it is our worry.
p.s. also interesting that public safety wasn't part of the survey apparently. Safety is, according to Maslow's hierarchy a fundamental need, next to physiological needs (food, shelter, etc.). So, policing, the military, etc., should, according to his hierarchy, be on peoples' minds.
I share your concern on debt, most people don't though and other polling of opinion lists debt way down the bottom if at all. Half of people have $6K of credit card debt, so the federal debt doesn't even register. Another problem is that paying off the debt would require hurt from most everyone intelligent enough to figure out what their income is.
Figure it out for your own circumstances. How much of your income could you afford to pay towards the debt if every other person in your bracket had to pay the same, then figure out how many in your bracket, and multiply. Then figure out what sort of income could afford a higher percent. Obviously someone who makes 10X your income could pay a little more as a percentage, I mean they have the basics covered. I've done the math. At 124 million households it only gets difficult at the top end where it's hard to estimate incomes in the tens and hundreds of millions but there aren't that many of them. Plus income and wealth are not the same thing. And you don't want to be taxing people who just happen to live in a house that skyrocketed in value.
Discussion often boils down to envy or what about ism, or make that other guy who is really rich pay. That's how you hear rich people screaming inequality and pointing at billionaires. We are a very wealthy country. Many things are possible.
Luckily you don't need to pay off the (public) debt, though--you just need to keep the state's debt-to-income ratio at a sustainable level. As long as you do that, other countries won't lose confidence in the government's currency, the exchange rate will stay at a reasonable level, and hence said countries won't demand high premiums (interest rates) to buy securities the government issues.
So all we need to do, really, is consistently grow the economy faster than we grow the rate of government borrowing. (something you can accomplish by slowly decreasing the latter while increasing the former) Do that, and the country's debt-to-income ratio will naturally stabilize at a sustainable level.
But unfortunately, we're not doing that.
Private debt, though--that's a whole other beast. In fact, I would argue excessive private debt is the biggest drag on economic growth there is, and our failure to provide the same debt relief to debtors as we did to creditors after the '08 crisis is part of why we're in such an economic funk.
Yours is the first substantive analysis of the debt that I have seen. thanks.
I'm interested in money and numbers, and a couple of times I played around with the math. How many families earn over $250K, how many over $500K, Not many actually earn over a million per year. Then how to tax wealth, which has a lot more problems. I see no fault with wishing to leave a lot to grand kids etc. At what level does intergenerational wealth become irrelevant.
Also our corporate tax. Would taxing corporations reduce my dividends? Our country used to tax corporations heavily, and not income as much, now things are reversed. Wouldn't corporate tax be a better route? How many years would it take to pay off our debt? My goal was to pay off the entire thing in a year, it would probably take more. Most of my income is "unrealized" I wonder if there is a fair way to tax it, currently I pay nothing on it. Trump's tariffs are likely to produce a few hundred billion, sounds good to me.
Inflation can't be cured. All it can be is stopped. Prices never return to prior levels, except for rents, which are down nationwide, and fail to cause a blip on surveys, but if rents continue to head downwards, especially in the not nice apartments, people will notice. Rent is one of the biggest costs for the working class, many times as much as food.
What can happen is incomes can go up, and if incomes rise and rents sink things could change.
What worries me are the images of ICE tackling Hispanic folks night after night. Journalists are much much more left than the population, and they often feel guilty coming from well to do parents, so they wear their allyship on their sleeves running stories of widows with kids working for 16 hour days for 200 years while kids all serve in military etc. Immigration enforcement has a long way to go, and it needs some permanent legislative help that doesn't make the nightly news and is a lot more deliberative.
In a way, the 'problem' of AI people worry about actually encapsulates the economic roots of the public discontent, and exposes the wider economic problem we've been facing globally for going on 40 years.
To grossly oversimplify, since the advent of the computer, we have been moving away from an economy defined by industrial machines to an economy defined by digital machines. Industrial machines create and monetize physical products, and to make industrial capitalism sustainable, we created a wage system to go along with them--which boils down to roughly, "we're going to recycle a fraction of the proceeds from selling the products that come off the assembly line back to the people working the machines, so they can buy those products and we can have markets and an economy and a society".
Digital machines don't monetize physical products; they monetize information. *Useful* information. (i.e. data) Useful data is produced by people in cooperation with digital machines, same as products on an assembly line are produced by line-workers and machines--it is a form of labor. But we haven't created a wage system to pay people for this new form of labor. So very little of the vast proceeds of the digital economy have been recycled back to people who aren't part of the class that owns the world's vast data empires. And this lack of a system of *formal* benefits throws everybody into an economy where they must compete for *informal* benefits, by acquiring attention through behavior that maximizes 'engagement'. This, of course, incentivizes the perpetuation of mass paranoia and anger--the most powerful attention-getters, supercharged by social media and the smartphone. We need to invent a wage system, and quick--people need copyrights to the information they produce, and they need to be compensated when that information is monetized. Do that and there's no need to fear AI--because, behind the scenes, what we call 'AI' is really just a lot of computers running algorithms on reeeeeally big collections of data. It's a super-sized version of what we already have. Pay people to contribute to those collections and you can have a sustainable form of post-industrial capitalism, shorn of this rising tide of paranoia and anger we face--fail to do so, and you'll just accelerate the rush to inequality and conflict we're seeing all over the world now.
In Trump’s first 9 months he has not eliminated the 2020-2024 inflation. It would be interesting to know what the democrats” consensus is as to the cause of the 2020-2024 inflation and how they would address inflation. The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ has clearly failed.
I suspect they would disagree with Noble Laureate economist Milton Friedman who believed “excess government spending which leads to government printing more only to cover the shortfall, is the fundamental cause of inflation.“
We know that government spending under Biden and the democrats’ controlled Congress resulted in the national debt increasing from $27.72 trillion the end of 2020 to $38.44 trillion the end of 2024. President Trump is addressing inflation by a whole of government effort to increase federal government productivity to reduce its cost.
Trump is an abomination in respect of Ukraine and tariffs.
But does the American left have any capacity to find policies that will only worsen economic conditions via abusive taxation , regulation and destruction of educational standards?