Perhaps if they demonstrate a decisive victory over the forces of one Seaweed Lord, and they offer reasonable terms to the rest, they can win their vassalage without further bloodshed?
I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?
I understand that it’s way easier and quicker to do the latter instead of saving.
That’s the reason they do it in the first place.
I just wonder if there is a way to incentivize them to save instead. Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.
Warren Buffett, I believe, suggested passing a law making every sitting member of Congress ineligible for reelection whenever the federal deficit exceeds 3%
I suspect he suggested 3% because of the yearly GDP growth at the time, but I say make it 0%. Politicians shouldn't have the authority of indebting future generations.
Putting deficits below GDP growth can also be a roundabout way of slightly impoverishing future generations. A country that engages in countercyclical spending and growth via (less-than-GDP) deficits outperforms one that runs zero debt, and future generations end up wealthier.
What if people become increasingly dependent on their government’s spending beyond its means - so that they suffer more harm once the deficit is reduced than had it never been raised in the first place - making it impossible to rein in the deficit when borrowing costs rise and the debt is high?
My state (Indiana) has a constitutional clause that prohibits borrowing except in the case of an unexpected shortfall in revenue or war. This means the state may not pass a deficit budget except in time of war. It had worked out well for the state.
I believe most states have a balanced budget requirement and can’t borrow money for their operations, like the federal government can. CA, for example, has a rainy day fund that they use to even out the revenue fluctuations.
Then you might be incentivized to deliberately go into debt strategically, and remove the sitting opposition if you think you'll lose the next election.
>I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?
???
"I'll lower/won't raise your taxes" is politics 101. The bigger issue is how you prevent politicians from promising goodies and/or lower taxes, funding them both by borrowing.
The easiest place to save is in entitlements. Saving there is unfortunately a really good way to avoid reelection. If you want to save money, get a better demography. That's impossible, but not more impossible than cutting benefits.
You need to start by making taxes mostly optional, at the discretion of the payer, with the payers having power to choose its spending.
Personally i'm in the camp of:
1 - A minor poll tax on all citizens for basic sovereignty
2 - Local vote based taxes for local things:
- Want a hospital? Roads? Any local infrastructure or collective service? A private entity makes an offer to build/manage a hospital for a 20 year period at a X amount per year. Anyone is able to vote for it by choosing which amount they want to contribute then and there or with the ability to impose a lien on their land to secure ongoing yearly payments for a period of time. Have the vote happen and if enough people offer to pay for it, it gets done. If there are more people willing to pay everyone gets a pro-rata discount
The problem is they tax and save upon the wrong people which leads to wealthy transfer to the upper 1% which leads to economic problems.
They try to fix that by taxing and saving upon the wrong people even more.
Under Clinton the "PAYGO" rules enforced that all spending had to be covered by cuts or new taxes. This caused a lot of aggressive review and limited eagerness to spend.
Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.
Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment
> how do you get politicians that actually want to save money
What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Budgets for education, justice, police, healthcare often decrease too. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.
Somehow I'm paying more tax and getting worse services. I'm getting pretty sick of it, and the only way it's going to change is a reform of the public service.
I'd want to see quarterly budgets and funding vs yearly, penalties for any department executives that spend just so they use their entire budgets, and efficiency dividends implemented for any department that has been caught spending on pointless crap. We have the tech to move fast in ensuring funds are being used responsibly.
You're not rich enough: "The effective tax rate of U.S. billionaires (measured by the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers) fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 23.8% (or roughly 24%) in 2018–2020"
I shared this mental model until I read "The Almighty Dollar" by Brendan Greeley. Highly recommend! It shows how we moved through a few different monetary regimes in the 19th century, including regional variations and private banknotes. Spanish silver dollars were also widely circulated until 1857. The greenback wasn't introduced until the Civil War. Reliable convertibility of federal notes to gold was the exception, not the rule, available c. 1879-1933.
It's not actually about reducing spending vs increasing taxes, it's about regressive tax policies vs progressive tax policies. Inequalities are rising, because progressive forms of taxation (wealth tax...) are being removed in favor of regressive ones (such as this ridiculous internet tax), while the redistributive apparatus (social security, benefits...) shrinks year after year. The reason is simple: the rich basically own the government, evidenced by the fact that they are the only winners of the past decades.
We've been doing austerity and tax cuts for the rich for 50 years now, under neoliberalism. We have to stop and focus our attention on reducing the wealth inequality that are destroying our nations, before it's too late.
In a prior role, we realized something similar with outages. For our particular product, we AWS went down - we went down. We freaked out the first time, but after it was done we realized not a single customer had inquired. This felt unusual since we were getting emails quickly if we have a self-inflicted outage.
Turns out, when a major provider went down all of our users were too busy fighting their own fires. When they do notice, it's on a day when ALL of their vendors are struggling so we don't get singled out as a bad apple.
Imagine the PR when you are the only / one of few vendors who are still up, while rest is in shithole. That has its weight too, in certain situations at least.
Azure (and AWS) offer Gov clouds, and probably on prem air-gapped deployment of their full stack of Fabric for that type of NEED security customers who can pay for it.
It is trade-off between risk and access/productivity with a cost dimension always.
Depending on your threat model you could go to typewriters /paper as some Russian department did famously few years back too.
AWS (and others) have ladders of this was my point. GovCloud is just the one end of the this AWS also regions for Secret and Top Secret work which are reported to be air-gapped. There are probably programs beyond that where the customers are operating the stack fully on their own and so forth.
Yeah, if Exchange goes down, you get a day off. If the little boutique email provider you chose goes offline, you get a day in calls with everyone yelling at you.
Feedback: I don’t understand how the rising category works. I looked up a couple of books and they seemed to have peaked a while ago.
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