OK, OK, more game design goodness in the queue (tomorrow morning and beyond… there’s a lot of game design stuff I really want to dig into, from tabletop mini games to MMOs to Candyland), but I wanted to throw this one out there and get it out of my system. What if a politician ran on a platform with the tenets espoused by Mr. Denninger here?
Talk about Hope and Change. (Anyone else find it interesting that Obama’s splash page is a commitment to vote? OHai, Big Brother, ya man, here’s my info, rock on!) I’m idly curious if such a platform would gain any traction in a political climate that all too often wins by promising the moon in as vague of terms as possible, with no actual intent to deliver. Mr. Denninger’s tenets are altogether too… specific, dramatic and pragmatic.
I like that. I also find myself oddly reminded of that Dave movie, where an accountant or some such who looks like the President finds himself doing the job. I found it funny that he’d actually take time to work on cutting spending and balancing the budget. What a weird notion. I mean, austerity, pfft.
I find myself detached from any real politics these days, though. Maybe that’s because the politicians are detached from the people? Interesting times, these. If I wasn’t living through them, I’d find them utterly fascinating to study.
Disclosure: I didn’t vote for Obama… or Bush… or McCain… or Kerry. Can’t stand either party, or most politicians in general, no matter the country or party. At least gamers have the courtesy to keep their megalomania restrained to fictional worlds.
Dave was a good movie. He was being practical when he balanced the nation’s budget. I think everyone tries to make it so complicated when it shouldn’t be so.
Mr Denninger was certainly specific and clear, and as much as I’d love a politician to be that way, chances of it happening are slim. A politician of our world needs to be attractive to multiple audiences, being TOO specific would engender them to a niche group of followe only. So what they do is go broad message: Chope (change/hope), 1,000 points of fireflies, Maverick & Goose, etc.
Ross Perot tried to be specific, he even televised infomercials to educate the American public on his views. I guess Americans didn’t like what he had to say, or more likely they didn’t watch and remained in their state of blissful ignorance up through voting day. I’m not sure most people want to know specifics, it seems like most voters are happy with whatever is spewed from CNN or Fox New and the messages of Maverickism and Chope that come from the candidate’s mouths.
I mean, why fix something that ain’t broke, right? (sarcasm
)
[...] is OOT for Tesh, who posted on a subject here. Basically he’s wondering “what if we took this guy’s advice. Rather than write a [...]
My response was too long, so I posted it on my site. Trackback should follow shortly.
I commented over there, thanks for the writeup.
Note, I’m not saying I agree with all of Denninger’s comments (because I don’t). I’m wondering what the political scene might be like if this sort of thing were the “mainstream” of political conversation instead of the endless fingerpointing and bloviating we now have.
It’s not that I think Denninger has all the answers, it’s that he’s asking better questions.
One of the interesting things about politics, and budgets and all that sort of jazz, is that no matter what you do, someone will take offense to it, because of vested interests.
It comes down to whether the person thinks that the purpose of government is to provide things for other people who might not have been able to have them any other way… or not.
And the bigger question… to what extent?
You start getting into it, should the government collect tax money from citizens in order to fund x… and you’ll find that there are people who will say no, and people who will say yes. They will disagree. But neither will truly be WRONG, they are simply in disagreement with each other over what the role of government should be.
There are two extremes; government should spend nothing, and government should pay for everything. if you’re not actually at one of those two extremes… then everything is a debate, give and take… with TONS of greed and corruption in the middle.
And the give and take usually resolves into “I don’t want to pay for THAT, because I don’t value it… but I do want to have THIS paid for, because I DO value it.”
Then you get morals brought into play to try and justify one point of view over another, and etc…
Politics is such an incredibly huge sticky mess, that virtually guarentees that anyone that uses specifics about anything WILL be hated by a large group of people.
Isn’t it awesome?
Much like you, Tesh… I don’t like the rhetoric used by any side, when it’s all about demonizing the opponent. Both sides are doing the same thing, trying to get what they value, and get rid of what they don’t. And in order to do that, they need to get in charge, any way possible.
Politics. Blech.
Blech indeed.
I guess I’m just hankering for some details out there so we can really dig into those debates in the vast middle ground, rather than the demonization and power brokering that winds up with an elite few making policy decisions in back rooms. I’d like to have debates *before* policy is passed, not after.
The previous article from there that you linked seemed reasonable, if not entirely something I’d agree with. But this one, for lack of a better single-word description, is crap. I’ll break some of it down.
China: I agree.
No more ridiculously cheap crap: I agree. Nothing is cheap if people are unemployed!
Nuclear power: I agree, though we do need to agree on a place to put it all, eventually.
Nuclear welfare: Um… I would never ever trust the current welfare people to work at a nuclear power plant. I’d much rather they freeload if that’s what it comes down to.
The removal of general taxes in favor of specific taxes would be a huge help in balancing the budget, think of it as “would you like a 50 cent tax on pop to pay for invading Iraq? No? Okay then.” But if you look at the data, tax levels have almost no impact on economic growth.
Healthcare reform 2.0: Frankly I doubt this is going to get better than what Obama signed any time soon, since the mere mention of rationing or efficient use of money results in cries of death panels.
No more illegal immigrants? What a great rallying cry for… what? Prisons are expensive, more expensive than them taking our jobs.
Cleaning up fraud in finance? I’m all for it. That would help a lot with the previously mentioned 20% wasted GDP, but like healthcare reform, not going to happen unless we either get extremely authoritarian or have widespread violence.
Inverting inflation is a terrible idea. The money supply must grow with the economy, though I would agree that it has grown far, far too quickly, though much of that is due to circular lending, not actual money.
Economic growth through technology rather than fraud? Now that’s an idea that I rarely ever see, and again, is unlikely, since people are far too attached to the idea of a growing economy.
Also the opening statement demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of Keynesian economics: if private spending fell by more than one trillion (over the total time of the stimulus), then obviously one trillion of government spending will not be enough. That’s like saying you gave someone a blood infusion and they still died, proving that blood transfusion doesn’t work. Well no shit, you gave them one ounce after they bled out from a lost arm. The Bush tax cuts didn’t help in anything remotely approaching the long term. Supply-side economics have been shown to not work. If indeed spending is useless and tax cuts are the key, how did we get anywhere with a top tier tax of over 75% (it’s somewhere higher but I don’t want to commit to too high of a number) and huge government spending get us out of the Great Depression?
That ended up a bit longer than I expected. Sorry about that.
Maybe we can start with common ground: calculate the cost of a human life and then charge big-time frauds with the corresponding murders.
Heh, did you head off to read DBlade’s response? It’s even longer. I really don’t mind long or even disagreement, as long as it’s civil. You guys are fine.
One thing that comes up on Keynesian comments over there in a few places is that what we see these days isn’t really Keynesian. Apparently, he suggested saving during boom times and spending during down times, evening things out… a vaguely reasonable notion, though it would mean sticking pretty strictly to a budget rather than allowing spending to always chase productivity like a goldfish filling its space.
Arguably, Clinton tried to do that a bit by paying down the debt, but it’s not a common practice. “Budgets” are as scary to politicians as they are to many citizens. People don’t like being told “no”, and you don’t come into power these days by telling people to be responsible and govern themselves… especially if it means living within your means.
The Nuclear power thing is one that caught my eye. I keep meaning to check out Thorium reactors, if only from a technological interest point of view. Oh, and in the comment thread he does clarify what he meant by welfare guys running reactors; not as technicians or administrators (which would be insane), but as maintenance guys on the low priority stuff like barracks and the like.
Hah, oh god, that makes me laugh more than it should. Just today I was thinking of a thought I’d had earlier: Government should be actively hostile to business in good times. Tax the shit out of everything, tax some more, grab all the money they can and actively attempt to slow growth, not stop it, but do not encourage it either. That’s to stop bubbles. Then if there is a downturn (though perhaps not if we have no bubbles!), then there are huge reserves to deal with it. These days we have a sort of half-Keynes: we try for the stimulus, but since no one was saving during the good times (with the slight exception of Clinton, as you mentioned), so it ends up working out not quite right.
It would help if people hadn’t reacted to “budget surplus” with “omg taxes are too high, balance the budget!” I guess we have to figure, if individuals cannot seem to properly balance their books, how could we expect a representative government to do so? Maybe those smokey back rooms wouldn’t be so bad after all! I’m kidding. Maybe. But really, when a big portion of the population somehow thinks that housing must and should always go up in price, regardless of improvements or the neighborhood, what can we expect in government? Maybe it would help if we stopped electing people we think we’d want to be friends with and started electing elites or badasses, such as Roosevelt (either one, and Teddy can be either)) or Eisenhower.
If by not a common practice you mean it pretty much never happens, yea. I’d vote for the first politician to admit that the military is mostly wasted and is the one of largest socialist systems on the planet. No one ever likes to remind the public that national defense is socialism. I guess it hurts the narrative.
Let me expand my opposition to the nuclear welfare idea: I don’t want former welfare people anywhere near a nuclear power plant. Given the nothing or this job option, they may feel bitter, somewhat understandably given the huge disruption to their lives, justifiable or not. I don’t want bitter people anywhere near a nuclear power plant or in any way involved in its operation. Or even cleaning a military base. That’s just asking for some bitter asshole to mix some bleach and ammonia in the barracks and then we’re missing a whole bunch of young patriots.