Can someone explain to me why the debt thing is an issue?
The US can inflate it away over time, with the main cost being the US standard of living staying flat or going down (which is annoying but very much tolerable given current American living standards). Moreover, paying for the debt by inflating it is a lot more politically palatable, as people don't usually think in inflation adjusted terms. Plus, you can take measures to fudge the official inflation numbers anyway.
Now compare this with climate issues, where no amount of financial engineering or political cost is going to fix environmental damage.
I'm not an expert but I can tell you why I think it's an issue.
The national debt has to be continually refinanced as parts of it become due. That works when investors are willing to give you money. But if investors think you are no longer a good investment they will continually ask for higher interest rates and then eventually they will stop giving you their money altogether. And if that happens then we're going to be in be trouble because we will have no means to pay what is due and we'll default.
The problem is the interest payment on the debt is starting to become a large fraction of the income of America and we are starting to look like an increasingly bad investment. And that shows in the rates we have to pay. I don't think we're in any immediate danger but spending goes up every year which means we need to borrow more and we move more toward that risky place.
And if history is to be any guide, when you hit the bad spot, everything falls apart fast in a very uncontrolled way.
So IMHO, we should ramp down spending slowly, in a controlled way to avoid having it ramped down for us in a rapid uncontrolled way. Either way, I suspect eventually spending is going to come down whether we like it or not.
Cheap labour producing goods for the native population at low costs should increase your standard of living, no? It makes the products you buy cheaper.
By your logic, if you were the only person in the country, you'd live like a king.
Companies are importing labor so they can avoid pay competitive wages to native workers. If you need to hire people from other countries they should have the same pay and protections as everyone else.
That's way too naive, prices never go down, the owner pockets the difference, you pay the same, and once they come to your industry you have more competition
By your logic, slavery was one of the finest economic policies. Cheap labour, how about free labour? Have we thought of that? Everything would just be free.
In the real world, the evidence is obvious: average productivity/wages drop, incentive to invest in labour-saving technology disappears, and you get multiple decades of stagnation. Every country which had unlimited, unfree labour has had decades of slow growth as a result.
Income growth in the working age population in the US since 1990 has been about the same as Japan, a country which is widely regarded as on the verge of economic collapse. US per capita income is probably 20-30% lower than it would be with first-order effects from immigration, likely much more with second order effects. Under any other circumstances with economic policy elsewhere, the US economy would be growing 7%/year now (and ofc, the answer for Japan's ills is apparently, you guessed, lots of immigration).
China is seeing secular reductions in production costs because of capital investment, not low wages. The peculiarly statist notion of American capitalists that the route to economic supremacy was large numbers of illiterate Guatemalans should go down as not only an economic failure but a moral one (equally of H1B).
xAI's value is irrelevant here. This is about Elon throwing his weight around and rigging the game to create an artificial squeeze so him and his early investors can make bank by transferring wealth from everyone's retirement fund.
The company is irrelevant. The focus should be on the money making scheme
> regardless of election outcome, the next government is highly unlikely to roll this back
Well yes, it’s not a high priority. I’m not going to bring it up with my electeds. Are you? If everyone who thinks this is a huge deal is too lazy and nihilistic to do anything about it, it won’t be prioritized.
As long as it isn't mandatory like the Russian Max app, I wouldn't worry. The only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent).
> only reason to dislike it (other than privacy issues) is the money spent to develop it (which has already been spent)
There are plenty of reasons to dislike it. The money spent to develp it. The attention spent to maintain it. The abuse of users' goodwill. Dilution of the FBI's brand with a circa 2008. None of these are good. None of them are, frankly, issues I'm going to personally engage on.
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