Yeah…
And the solution is what precisely no one in politics wants to do: increased taxes and cut spending. I’m convinced it’s literally impossible to deal with.
We have pretty strong real world evidence that austerity contracts the economy, makes things worse. Government spending brings more money into circulation, stimulates the economy.
Austerity measures may seem obvious, but we’d be far better off rolling back tax cuts for the wealthy of the last several decades, and provide better/more services to those who need it.
We have the world’s first trillionaire, yet he pays a lower tax rate than most of us.
That’s if the budget has been under control previously.
I think we have crossed the threshold where pain is unavoidable.
That’s actually the logic I use- if we hadn’t had those tax cuts we’d still have a huge debt but not “pain is unavoidable”. We could have been running a relatively flat deficit that you could argue we’d eventually grow out of. You can’t argue that anymore but perhaps restoring those taxes would bring us back to more sane territory
Or we could tax the rich and expand services to the poor and needy?
I mean, we could tax a worryingly large percentage of GDP, plus make significant cuts to the military, and existing services + the interest we pay on debt would still keep us in the red.
…That’s a nice sentiment, and social services can certainly be reworked.
But we are in a debt spiral.
GuyDudeman@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The military budget is what needs to be cut. Benefits and programs do not need to be cut.