So there's a handy table in that document that shows all the rankings and notes that the US position hasn't moved in the past year, how is this article even a thing?
You’re not wrong that the chart shows that rank didn’t change for some reason, but if you look at the 2017 report you’ll see the US was number 2 last year.
it's rising though, and will, I assume, rise faster as interest rates rise and the cost of the debt rises along with it (either immediately or in the near future). IIRC, current interest on debt is something like $400B, which is more than the budgets of many entire depts (dept of energy budget is ~$30B for example).
The real question would be "inflation adjusted per-capita tax receipts over time" but a mid-work googling didn't turn up anything promising; that being said from the above graph _and_ the knowledge that inflation is increasing, your statement doesn't seem to mesh. Feel free to point out if I was really thick and got the wrong data or something.
There has been a clear trend for decades now showing that the defecit grows under Republican presidents and shrinks under Democratic ones.
Aside from cultural issues like abortion the Republican agenda seems so far removed from what their constitancy needs it's hard to fathom.
The next time Democrats are in control you'll be sure to see GOP complaints that the defecit is a problem and entitlements should be on the chopping block.
It does makes sense from their standpoint though. In their mind, everything they want to spend money on is necessary, while everything the other party wants to spend money on is wasteful.
The missing piece of logic is that the Republicans don't actually want to fund their expenditures. Democrats may be the party of tax and spend, but Republicans are the party of just spend. The former provides back pressure to the electorate, the latter is a recipe for ruining the country regardless of your policy preferences.
> The next time Democrats are in control you'll be sure to see GOP complaints that the defecit is a problem and entitlements should be on the chopping block.
They are actually doing that right now, even though they created the massive deficit increase.
That's because to them, entitlements are the problem, and the deficit is just the standard excuse.
Isn't it too early to say what the cost of the tax cuts were? If the Republicans are right, they'll spur enough economic growth to be a net gain across the board in both new economic activity (wealth). I don't know if there's a proper name for it, but I'd much prefer a dollar spent in the private sector so the government doesn't have to spend two just to accomplish the same thing.
Don't know why you are getting downvoted since you are right, it is called the Laffer curve [0]. Granted, most evidence shows the maximum tax revenue rate to be closer to 70% so it is highly unlikely that these tax cuts will increase revenue.
>I'd much prefer a dollar spent in the private sector so the government doesn't have to spend two just to accomplish the same thing.
This is a false equivalence because the government and the private sector spend money on very different things. If the tax cuts end up being funded by reductions in entitlement spending, for example, the private sector won't funnel money into Social Security and Medicare to offset those reductions.
>If the Republicans are right, they'll spur enough economic growth to be a net gain across the board in both new economic activity (wealth)
CBO projections imply that the nearly all of the long-term gains from the tax cuts will flow to foreign investors [0], so it certainly won't be a net gain for the US as a whole.
The pensioners and tax payers in the particular states with the problem. It's not a federal issue at all as federal pensions have always been fully funded.
> It doesn't follow that the deflation has been due to the deficit.
It's obvious to the economic world. That's the reason BOJ keeps buying Japanese stocks and bonds (to keep asset prices high when others have stopped buying) and Japanese people have stopped investing in Nikkei (because holding cash == increasing value)
That's also the reason Japan (notoriously closed society) is admitting defeat and letting in immigrants to work.
> It’s convenient for deficit hawks that they can simultaneously blame deficits for deflation in Japan and fear monger about hyperinflation in the US.
You need to understand the sequence of events in Japan. They had a massive debt problem (national, local and corporate). That triggered a recession causing asset prices to drop. The caused deflation.
The only way to not have asset prices drop and some inflation was printing money. So they printed. Their population and economic investment dropped further while they kept printing money (two opposite pulls). This kept them going until today. It's a wonder they didn't hyperinflate. They pulled it off. But the expense of this is no GDP growth. Infact, whatever GDP growth they have is because of BOJ selling assets to BOJ who sells assets to BOJ. It's a mirage.
So, yeah, their real economic activity (thus, investments, wages, innovation) has dropped from zero to negative because for the average individual, holding money = gold!
For a long time I couldn't wrap my head around why defecits matter to the US when we print our currency. To be honest I still don't fully understand the hand wringing over a balanced budget and reading more about modern monetary theory is leading me to believe that for a superpower which issues it's own currency the defecit is more of a political issue that a concrete one.
The defecit just keeps ballooning but the only thing stopping the US government from running are self imposed restrictions on debt (the "debt ceiling"). The US is not a company, and it's not a normal household, why does the budget matter?
On the one hand, you are very correct to point out that the US is not a company or household, and that the US is a superpower that prints currency. Too many people ignore this. Another point, shared with less-sovereign governments, is that the US can impose tariffs and fees and other taxes.
On the other hand, the deficit leads to interest payments on debt. Defaulting crashes the economy, as does going to extremes printing money.
The US can also borrow at really good rates. If a business could borrow that cheaply it would be a no-brainer to take debt and build a new factory or whatever. Similarly, it makes a ton of sense for the government to borrow and then invest in future economic growth.
What crisis would be so large that the US would be unable to keep up with it's repayments? Especially when you consider that it can borrow more to repay current debt instruments i.e. issue more Treasury bills, notes and bonds.
Plus other countries always need to borrow dollars because it's what oil is sold in, which is one of the things that makes US Government debt considered the baseline or "risk-free" investment, with any other investment having increased risk, and accordingly increased reward.
The deficit mainly matters because we have to pay interest on the loans we take out. If the rates are good, it's actually a great investment. If the rates are bad, it hamstrings future growth, because now the budget is spent paying back old loans instead of building new things.
Well, why can't we just print money? We can, but it runs the risk of inflation. Inflation is historically low, so yes -- we could totally just print a bunch of money to pay back our debts with relatively little risk of inflation in the short term.
Essentially, debt doesn't matter, except that we have to pay interest. Interest doesn't matter because we print money, except that it might cause inflation. Taxes "destroy" money to dampen inflation. Thus, we can pay off our loans, but that might cause inflation, which might require us to raise taxes not to repay the loans, but to prevent inflation.
Yes but we also have an instution that controls interest rates, The Federal Reserve! As a poster mentioned earlier, the US also gets really good rates. Turns out being a superpower helps your credit score.
There has been lots of ink spilled with respect to lagging productivity gains and I think the at this point concern about the budget may be a factor. There are enough big problems that can be addressed (infrastructure, health care, homes, etc.) if there was enough government spending to spark to investment and growth.
I'm starting to believe that the real balancing act is a matter of controlling inflation rather than controlling the defecit.
In other words, we don't have to pay interest, we choose to, because inflation would almost certainly rise substantially if we printed a ton of money, and we're cautious (some might say overcautious) about inflation.
Of course there are some head-scratching rationalizations going around about why gargantuan deficits are good now, a decade into one of the longest economic expansions in living memory, but would have been bad to do when proposed in response to one of the deepest recessions in living memory.
Yes, the US government could simply print all the money it needs then pay off all it's creditors.
But how would those creditors respond? They would refuse to lend in US dollars in future, and the US government and private companies would be forced to borrow in a foreign currency. Net result is that the US loses a valuable asset - the ability to borrow in its own currency - and becomes more like Turkey or Argentina.
If creditors are paid off, why would that discourage them from making future loans? Creditors surely want to get their money back, and countries that have trouble borrowing money are those that don't make debt repayments, not those that do.
But even if that's true - does printing more dollars affect the price of crude oil on the international markets for instance - if the interest accrued on those loans exceeds the loss of value due to inflation, then they're still ahead overall. And that's the sort of thing that people take into account already when making investments.
And that's not considering that the same would happen with any alternative investments, nor the fact that risk is an important part of an investment calculation, and US debt is considered "risk-free".
This is all true, but look at the context of discussion... Why would someone be discouraged from making future loans if the government printed money for the purpose of paying them off? Because the government took action which directly and intentionally reduced the return on their investment beyond what they anticipated in their original analysis. That will effect their analysis for future loans, reducing the appeal of those loans. Thus discouraging them.
Because printing more money isn't an option for one thing. It might be a short term fix for some things, but in the long run it just devalues the currency and lowers the US credit rating, with the worst case scenario being hyperinflation.
Also, there's the question of who owns all that debt that the US relies on for its continued existence. For example, China owns a big chunk of it, like ~$1.2 trillion. They buy tons of US Treasury bonds because they're considered a safe investment. China gives the US a bunch of money up front, and the US has to give China a bunch more money back in the future, like over the course of 10 years. A lot of Americans also own US bonds, which help fund the debt, but they own them because they're a safe investment, not because they want to lend the government money.
So, as long as the US is in debt, it's forced to rely on other countries and its own credit rating to keep it going. That's a problem. And at some point, the sheer amount of debt will lower that credit rating, making those US bonds less of a safe investment, and that would be the tipping point at which everything starts falling apart. It will be much harder to fund deficit spending, which could snowball into printing money, then fast forward 5 years and boom, zombie apocalypse (or at least a potential Venezuela or Weimar Republic type situation).
TL;DR: the deficit is an existential threat the US if it's not kept under control.
The amount of debt isn't a problem for a country's credit rating as long as repayments are made on time, that's the same as for individual borrowing and their credit score. You have to explain why the US would fail to repay its debts before you can claim there's a problem.
China owns just 5.3% of US debt, only slightly more than Japan, which owns 4.8% of it. Most US debt is owned by government programmes such as Social Security.
In case of default, discretionary items can be seize and sold to at least repay part of the debt (while decreasing quality of life).
2008 has shown what seizing houses leads to.
Now think that there is nothing to seize for student debt loans.
If you fail to get a good enough income using the degree you paid using debt, you are as hopeless as if you had used it all on hookers and cocaine. At least with discretionary items you have a big TV which holds some value.
Cars might hold some value, houses might hold more value over time, but TVs? Don't expect much.
What we need is to make college debt discharable through bankruptcy, same as any other debt. Then the only people who can borrow are those likely to be able to pay it of, which nicely solves the problem of unplayable college debt (while reducing the interest students of medical, science, law etc have to pay, since more money will be chasing fewer students), for profit colleges and useless degrees.
Does it mean some people won't be able to study their favourite subject? In general no[0], in college? Yes.
[0]: Remember the " you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!"? Today it is probably 15 USD on Beeminder, and you won't have a degree, but that degree is worthless in the first place, so overall huge win.
I'm not quite sure how to parse that particular piece of data. It seems as though it may be nominal if we consider that the Household Debt-to GDP ratio is substantially decreased from 2008. Further, household debt service ratios have also decreased substantially (by roughly 30%).
I think it has been competitive for a lot longer than that. Despite all the bad news about partisanship, Trump, wealth inequality, there is a lot of innovation in the US and intellectual output from research universities and the private sector. It's why the rich Chinese keep coming here and keep buying up the real estate and applying to the most prestigious of universities. There's more good news than bad even though the former gets so much attention.
It moved up from #2 last year. A less sensational headline would be something like "A bunch of countries with approximately equal competitiveness scores had their scores change by approximately 1%".
Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy just as many normies do. Earlier there was an NYT opinion piece from a sad conservative college professor (flagged), and before that a page from GOPUSA.com calling an internal Google presentation "the end of free speech as we know it" (flagkilled).
Well, big argument about this was as it's technically "about" hacking, it just seems that they made most of it up. It is definitely China fear-mongering, though, so I'd say you're both right.
I would like it if submitters could tag their posts in three different categories or so; pure tech, economics, and politics. Users could then configure their settings to see the content they want.
I think that this approach could be taken too far so that we would end up with a reddit clone, but a step in this direction seems to be in order now.
Yea I've noticed that too, especially the number of bogus Bloomberg articles. They get upvoted because people don't know the guidelines and just vote on stuff they find interesting, so perhaps it's a moderator who should be trimming the feed a little more closely?
People always bring up “the guidelines” when they see content they don’t like.
However, the fact of the matter is that people are free to upvote things they find interesting. If you don’t find something interesting, you don’t have to read it or comment on it.
I’ve been noticing this for some time as well. Either HN is becoming more political or someone is manipulating the voting. I honestly think HN is at its best when it’s apolitical.
What about when technology or a technological platform is used for political purposes, and the stewards of said technology or technology platform are slow to acknowledge or catch up?
You know honestly I don’t have a good answer for that. On the one hand I feel like we’re intelligent enough to rise above partisan or two sided politics but on the other hand we’re not intelligent enough to realize what the true implications of some of the platforms we’ve built are. And we’re definitely don’t have the forethought to understand that our platforms will and should be used by people we don’t agree with.
I appreciate your answer, and answers like yours are reason enough for me to believe that this topic is one we should talk about more openly despite the risk of the conversation devolving into something undesirable and unhelpful.
idk if it's that the articles get up voted or the comments on the article and how it sucks and shouldn't be here getting up voted :P like I definitely just up voted your comment here
There are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day.
I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later.
I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons. I certainly don't post things to promote any kind of political agenda per se.
I also didn't notice the things you are specifically commenting on. I recall different details from the front page. So there's possibly a certain amount of "You just happened to see X for some reason." which isn't conclusive proof of objective fact.
I don't know what you mean by that. I participate on Reddit. I experience HN and Reddit as completely different animals. I see them as very extremely an apples to oranges comparison.
Three years ago, HackerNews seemed (to me) to be a forum for intellectuals to discuss things business/tech-y. Opinions were mostly well thought out. When they weren't, they were challenged (thanks for calling me out [= ).
Now it just seems like the break-room banter. A lot of sensationalist articles seem to make the front page. A lot of purely comedic comments (which I do appreciate). A lot more unfounded anecdotes. A lot of promotional posts, etc.
Also -- and I'm admittedly putting on my tin hat here -- I've seen a lot of discussions that seem like they're just troll accounts trying to further polarize the community.
Hacker News is a single entity. Reddit is a conglomeration of sub forums, each with their own interests, rules and moderators.
Reddit is a very cosmopolitan environment. It's like a big city, where you can participate in different social groups and there can be overlap in members, but it isn't guaranteed. Your behavior on one sub forum can impact your reputation on another, but it isn't the same as a situation where you deal with the same moderators and same group of people all the time for everything.
I don't hang on "the front page" of Reddit. I have a few niche interests I dabble in a bit over there.
I occasionally consider writing a blog post to talk about some of the differences between forums of various formats that I've experienced. It's more than I care to try to catalog in a comment here.
But when you say "HN is like Reddit," that doesn't even parse for me. Because it's like "So, exactly what part of Reddit are you comparing it to?" It strikes me as a six blind men and the elephant scenario.
People have been saying this literally since HN started. In fact the HN guidelines used to include a line asking people not to post about it ("it's a semi-noob illusion"). We removed that guideline for brevity a while ago, but maybe we should bring it back.
> I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons.
As politics has become more contentious in recent years, both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs", which promotes people seeing information that is for or against (or even just about, and confirmation bias does the rest) one of these areas as being political.
There's likely also an increased number of political articles as well, which contributes it's own little bit.
Well, I posted a tweet recently about the difficulties facing (some?) Native Americans in registering to vote. I hesitated to post it knowing it was clearly a political subject. But my interest was in how it was a kind of "bug" in the political system.
Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.
I'm very slightly Cherokee. I've begun following more Native American twitter accounts and I started a new blog to explore my Native heritage a bit. I've posted a number of items about Native issues because that's something I happen to be reading here lately.
There's no political agenda there, though I keep waiting to be accused of such. I post things I happen to trip across. HN can upvote or flag (or just ignore) as it sees fit.
I've largely given up on predicting what works here. I have essentially zero ability to do that.
> I've largely given up on predicting what works here. I have essentially zero ability to do that.
That's part of what makes it fun, at least when it's general randomness that pulls really interesting people into the discussion :)
> Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.
I think that would have been an interesting discussion, if it could have avoided devolving into political tribalism. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether it could have. I will say it's interesting to be early in a submission that slightly contentious and to help or see some early comments steered or redirected usefully, and see an article that spent a few minutes flagged come back to life.
> both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs"
As someone who identifies as a relatively apolitical moderate, this has gotten ridiculous in recent years. I mean, whoever thought that "social justice", "science", "reality-based", "clean air", or "international relations" would be identified as partisan liberal issues, or "freedom of speech", "strong economy", or "life" could be partisan conservative issues?
Even more strangely, both sides have claimed "rule of law", and yet it seems to mean completely opposite things depending on who says it.
Definitely. I'm left more and more with feeling like I was happily walking around the center of a party chatting with people, and next thing I know, I look up and the majority of people have rushed the walls, leaving me milling about with with a few other people just as surprised as me.
That's a nice-sounding claim but "truth" isn't a coherent agenda. There are many things that are true, and a finite life; which true things are worth paying attention to?
Five hundred star-bellies Sneetches and five hundred plain-bellied Sneetches died in combat yesterday; reading just the obituaries of the heroic star-bellied Sneetches and how they gave their lives for peace is truth-based, but it's a very different agenda from the equally-truth-based approach of reading the obituaries of the martyred plain-bellied Sneetches and how they sacrificed everything for their people's freedom.
It's not truth-based if it omits different relevant claims. Naturally there is no such thing as absolute truth but there is a choice of whether more truthful should be of primary concern or not.
Saying that truth doesn't matter because "everybody has their own truth" is a political agenda whose purpose is to make people believe any "truth" is as good as any other and therefore we should not even try to look for evidence.
This is not really political per se, and I think it is relevant to an audience of entrepreneurs. Hacker News was once called Startup News.
As for why things are upvoted, they are upvoted because registered users click the button. You can promote your own preferred stories by upvoting them.
I suspect there is something at play here. I've also noticed the front page is constantly bombarded with economic/political news. Everyday is a new nytimes article, bloomberg twice a day, etc.
It's as if startups have slown down and programming novelties have died off, and it's being padded with politically driven articles.
Both of these are about economics moreso than politics. A lot of HN readers are interested in economics, since the current state of the economy can have huge impacts on startups.
If we have a sufficient corpus of flagged and flagged killed submission. Maybe we can train a classifier for it. And maybe send for review if the confidence of the classifier is high enough for a new post.
News about the economy is only political if you dislike the current administration and hope to blame them for all economic bad news while finding ways to avoid crediting them for any good news or the exact opposite of that. If you look at economic news as just facts about the current situation avoid forming strong opinions about which policies may or may not have brought that situation about, you won't see such things as political issues. You'll also probably be better positioned to make the most out of whatever economic climate you find yourself in.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadThe budget deficit blew out by 17% in 2018 as a result of the tax cuts.
And I am more concerned whether the tax cuts delivered an effective ROI.
During full employment. During what can reasonably be called boomed times. Historic deficits.
This isn't normal.
McConnell is demanding that the Democrats work with Republicans to cut entitlement programs.
Even though they control all three branches and are the ones who passed the very expensive tax cuts.
The real question would be "inflation adjusted per-capita tax receipts over time" but a mid-work googling didn't turn up anything promising; that being said from the above graph _and_ the knowledge that inflation is increasing, your statement doesn't seem to mesh. Feel free to point out if I was really thick and got the wrong data or something.
[0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W006RC1Q027SBEA
Aside from cultural issues like abortion the Republican agenda seems so far removed from what their constitancy needs it's hard to fathom.
The next time Democrats are in control you'll be sure to see GOP complaints that the defecit is a problem and entitlements should be on the chopping block.
They are actually doing that right now, even though they created the massive deficit increase.
That's because to them, entitlements are the problem, and the deficit is just the standard excuse.
https://www.thebalance.com/deficit-by-president-what-budget-...
It isn't a "trend".
Voodoo Economics
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
This is a false equivalence because the government and the private sector spend money on very different things. If the tax cuts end up being funded by reductions in entitlement spending, for example, the private sector won't funnel money into Social Security and Medicare to offset those reductions.
>If the Republicans are right, they'll spur enough economic growth to be a net gain across the board in both new economic activity (wealth)
CBO projections imply that the nearly all of the long-term gains from the tax cuts will flow to foreign investors [0], so it certainly won't be a net gain for the US as a whole.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/05/10/cbo-estim...
I'm not sure a deflation is good for us.
It's obvious to the economic world. That's the reason BOJ keeps buying Japanese stocks and bonds (to keep asset prices high when others have stopped buying) and Japanese people have stopped investing in Nikkei (because holding cash == increasing value)
That's also the reason Japan (notoriously closed society) is admitting defeat and letting in immigrants to work.
Your comment also doesn’t link the deficit to the deflation, only speculates on the effects of and policy response to that deflation.
You need to understand the sequence of events in Japan. They had a massive debt problem (national, local and corporate). That triggered a recession causing asset prices to drop. The caused deflation.
The only way to not have asset prices drop and some inflation was printing money. So they printed. Their population and economic investment dropped further while they kept printing money (two opposite pulls). This kept them going until today. It's a wonder they didn't hyperinflate. They pulled it off. But the expense of this is no GDP growth. Infact, whatever GDP growth they have is because of BOJ selling assets to BOJ who sells assets to BOJ. It's a mirage.
So, yeah, their real economic activity (thus, investments, wages, innovation) has dropped from zero to negative because for the average individual, holding money = gold!
The defecit just keeps ballooning but the only thing stopping the US government from running are self imposed restrictions on debt (the "debt ceiling"). The US is not a company, and it's not a normal household, why does the budget matter?
On the one hand, you are very correct to point out that the US is not a company or household, and that the US is a superpower that prints currency. Too many people ignore this. Another point, shared with less-sovereign governments, is that the US can impose tariffs and fees and other taxes.
On the other hand, the deficit leads to interest payments on debt. Defaulting crashes the economy, as does going to extremes printing money.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
The current administration cuts the tax rate and borrows to make up for the shortfall in tax revenue.
All this is in hopes that the economy grows enough such that the reduce tax rate can support government spending and pay back the debt + interest.
If the economy goes south for whatever reason (e.g. China imploding, another bubble pops) ...
Plus other countries always need to borrow dollars because it's what oil is sold in, which is one of the things that makes US Government debt considered the baseline or "risk-free" investment, with any other investment having increased risk, and accordingly increased reward.
Well, why can't we just print money? We can, but it runs the risk of inflation. Inflation is historically low, so yes -- we could totally just print a bunch of money to pay back our debts with relatively little risk of inflation in the short term.
Essentially, debt doesn't matter, except that we have to pay interest. Interest doesn't matter because we print money, except that it might cause inflation. Taxes "destroy" money to dampen inflation. Thus, we can pay off our loans, but that might cause inflation, which might require us to raise taxes not to repay the loans, but to prevent inflation.
There has been lots of ink spilled with respect to lagging productivity gains and I think the at this point concern about the budget may be a factor. There are enough big problems that can be addressed (infrastructure, health care, homes, etc.) if there was enough government spending to spark to investment and growth.
I'm starting to believe that the real balancing act is a matter of controlling inflation rather than controlling the defecit.
Of course there are some head-scratching rationalizations going around about why gargantuan deficits are good now, a decade into one of the longest economic expansions in living memory, but would have been bad to do when proposed in response to one of the deepest recessions in living memory.
But how would those creditors respond? They would refuse to lend in US dollars in future, and the US government and private companies would be forced to borrow in a foreign currency. Net result is that the US loses a valuable asset - the ability to borrow in its own currency - and becomes more like Turkey or Argentina.
And that's not considering that the same would happen with any alternative investments, nor the fact that risk is an important part of an investment calculation, and US debt is considered "risk-free".
Also, there's the question of who owns all that debt that the US relies on for its continued existence. For example, China owns a big chunk of it, like ~$1.2 trillion. They buy tons of US Treasury bonds because they're considered a safe investment. China gives the US a bunch of money up front, and the US has to give China a bunch more money back in the future, like over the course of 10 years. A lot of Americans also own US bonds, which help fund the debt, but they own them because they're a safe investment, not because they want to lend the government money.
So, as long as the US is in debt, it's forced to rely on other countries and its own credit rating to keep it going. That's a problem. And at some point, the sheer amount of debt will lower that credit rating, making those US bonds less of a safe investment, and that would be the tipping point at which everything starts falling apart. It will be much harder to fund deficit spending, which could snowball into printing money, then fast forward 5 years and boom, zombie apocalypse (or at least a potential Venezuela or Weimar Republic type situation).
TL;DR: the deficit is an existential threat the US if it's not kept under control.
China owns just 5.3% of US debt, only slightly more than Japan, which owns 4.8% of it. Most US debt is owned by government programmes such as Social Security.
This article seems like fluff/propaganda.
In case of default, discretionary items can be seize and sold to at least repay part of the debt (while decreasing quality of life).
2008 has shown what seizing houses leads to.
Now think that there is nothing to seize for student debt loans.
If you fail to get a good enough income using the degree you paid using debt, you are as hopeless as if you had used it all on hookers and cocaine. At least with discretionary items you have a big TV which holds some value.
What we need is to make college debt discharable through bankruptcy, same as any other debt. Then the only people who can borrow are those likely to be able to pay it of, which nicely solves the problem of unplayable college debt (while reducing the interest students of medical, science, law etc have to pay, since more money will be chasing fewer students), for profit colleges and useless degrees.
Does it mean some people won't be able to study their favourite subject? In general no[0], in college? Yes.
[0]: Remember the " you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!"? Today it is probably 15 USD on Beeminder, and you won't have a degree, but that degree is worthless in the first place, so overall huge win.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
Households owe more, but they are also making more money and creating more value.
A nice summary of all the important econ numbers:
http://www.usdebtclock.org
How is this stuff getting upvoted?
But if we start seeing articles about, say, midterm elections, that would suck. :)
I think that this approach could be taken too far so that we would end up with a reddit clone, but a step in this direction seems to be in order now.
However, the fact of the matter is that people are free to upvote things they find interesting. If you don’t find something interesting, you don’t have to read it or comment on it.
I dunno... prob because it's popular and people want to read it.
I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later.
I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons. I certainly don't post things to promote any kind of political agenda per se.
I also didn't notice the things you are specifically commenting on. I recall different details from the front page. So there's possibly a certain amount of "You just happened to see X for some reason." which isn't conclusive proof of objective fact.
What I meant is:
Three years ago, HackerNews seemed (to me) to be a forum for intellectuals to discuss things business/tech-y. Opinions were mostly well thought out. When they weren't, they were challenged (thanks for calling me out [= ).
Now it just seems like the break-room banter. A lot of sensationalist articles seem to make the front page. A lot of purely comedic comments (which I do appreciate). A lot more unfounded anecdotes. A lot of promotional posts, etc.
Also -- and I'm admittedly putting on my tin hat here -- I've seen a lot of discussions that seem like they're just troll accounts trying to further polarize the community.
Maybe I'm part of the problem ]=
Reddit is a very cosmopolitan environment. It's like a big city, where you can participate in different social groups and there can be overlap in members, but it isn't guaranteed. Your behavior on one sub forum can impact your reputation on another, but it isn't the same as a situation where you deal with the same moderators and same group of people all the time for everything.
I don't hang on "the front page" of Reddit. I have a few niche interests I dabble in a bit over there.
I occasionally consider writing a blog post to talk about some of the differences between forums of various formats that I've experienced. It's more than I care to try to catalog in a comment here.
But when you say "HN is like Reddit," that doesn't even parse for me. Because it's like "So, exactly what part of Reddit are you comparing it to?" It strikes me as a six blind men and the elephant scenario.
Had you read the site guidelines then (or now!) you'd know that the very first thing they say is that HN is about more than this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As politics has become more contentious in recent years, both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs", which promotes people seeing information that is for or against (or even just about, and confirmation bias does the rest) one of these areas as being political.
There's likely also an increased number of political articles as well, which contributes it's own little bit.
I hope it doesn't impact the content or discussion too much.
Presumably it's a mirage, since "turning into Slashdot/Digg/Reddit" would hardly have been a steady state.
Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.
I'm very slightly Cherokee. I've begun following more Native American twitter accounts and I started a new blog to explore my Native heritage a bit. I've posted a number of items about Native issues because that's something I happen to be reading here lately.
There's no political agenda there, though I keep waiting to be accused of such. I post things I happen to trip across. HN can upvote or flag (or just ignore) as it sees fit.
I've largely given up on predicting what works here. I have essentially zero ability to do that.
That's part of what makes it fun, at least when it's general randomness that pulls really interesting people into the discussion :)
> Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.
I think that would have been an interesting discussion, if it could have avoided devolving into political tribalism. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether it could have. I will say it's interesting to be early in a submission that slightly contentious and to help or see some early comments steered or redirected usefully, and see an article that spent a few minutes flagged come back to life.
As someone who identifies as a relatively apolitical moderate, this has gotten ridiculous in recent years. I mean, whoever thought that "social justice", "science", "reality-based", "clean air", or "international relations" would be identified as partisan liberal issues, or "freedom of speech", "strong economy", or "life" could be partisan conservative issues?
Even more strangely, both sides have claimed "rule of law", and yet it seems to mean completely opposite things depending on who says it.
Posting factual and informative articles is promoting a certain kind of political agenda, truth-based.
Five hundred star-bellies Sneetches and five hundred plain-bellied Sneetches died in combat yesterday; reading just the obituaries of the heroic star-bellied Sneetches and how they gave their lives for peace is truth-based, but it's a very different agenda from the equally-truth-based approach of reading the obituaries of the martyred plain-bellied Sneetches and how they sacrificed everything for their people's freedom.
Saying that truth doesn't matter because "everybody has their own truth" is a political agenda whose purpose is to make people believe any "truth" is as good as any other and therefore we should not even try to look for evidence.
As for why things are upvoted, they are upvoted because registered users click the button. You can promote your own preferred stories by upvoting them.
It's as if startups have slown down and programming novelties have died off, and it's being padded with politically driven articles.
Complaints like this go back about as far as HN does. I wrote a thing about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
A lot of the users seem to be more business oriented though, and they will want to hack the economy... So good luck.
So okay. Great. Now let's do it in a way that doesn't turn the entire nation into a series of hyper-reactionary tribes fighting over leftovers.