Is Trump embracing aggressive withdrawal?

[Kinser79]

(04-01-2017, 10:12 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(04-01-2017, 09:41 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Two nitpicks Rags:

Don't you mean 400 billion with a "B"?

and

But, but but, don't we need the immigrants to keep the social security and welfare ponzi schemes working?*


*note:  Not my actual position

1. Yes, that's a B, as in Billion, not an M as in million. M ybad.

2. I'm pretty sure robots / other technology will make lots of jobs redundant. As for Social Security, I think popping the cap would do something.   As for "welfare, I'm guessing, WIC, SNAP, etc. That money can be part of the 400 billion dollars I'd lop off the MIC.

3. MMT? That would work if some built in mechanism were added to force tax raises when inflation reaches a certain level. I don't trust politicians since they never cut spending / raise taxes when the economy if overheating and always cut taxes / raise spending in depressed times.

1.  Well it was a nitpick.  When discussing the federal budget one has to realize that it is a million dollars here, and million dollars there till you get to real money.

2.  Let us suppose that automation makes most jobs now done by humans redundant and as such just about everyone who isn't rich already is on some sort of welfare (IE essentially a Universal Basic Income [UBI]).  I've calculated that even if we take off 10% of the population (the very richest) that a UBI of 12K/year would cost the government 3.24 TRILLION dollars.

I calculated this using the following formula:  P equals population -10% or 270,000,000 (since I'm using rounded numbers); X equals the total expense of the UBI.

P*12,000=X

3.  I would argue that if politicians are expected to create this built in mechanism then they cannot be trusted to create it as it is clear that they themselves cannot be trusted to cut spending/raise taxes when the economy over heats or cut taxes/raise spending during depressions.