Basically, AI is replacing tasks of jobs, not jobs per se. There's a study by folks from MIT on what tasks, and which roles are most at risk.
- "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it.
- aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets.
Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division.
Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up.
---
All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages while maintaining their passive income.
If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value.
---
EDIT: If you disagree, you should be able to express why and we can have a rational discussion about it.
If you cannot express why, consider not participating in the discussion at all, not even by reducing the visibility of my opinion by downvoting it.
Why is everyone and everything getting worse? A sort of "Prisoner's dilemma" I suppose: no one wants to take a stand and lose their business edge just for principles sake.
So long as it achieves something and saves money, great.
I do feel from my own anecdotal experience, they're getting better, it's hit and miss but still some terrible implementations out there.
not sure if it really needs to have the power to act too, but if it can escalate with a really good description of my problem, and then the human support can take action, thats just fine by me
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
The article that flags AI risk still projects that the top 15 growth employment through 2033 contains software related jobs like Computer / Information Research Scientists, Data Scientists, Operations Research analysts.
Affected occupations: procurement clerks, credit authorizers, checkers, and clerks, customer service representatives, nonmedical secretaries and administrative assistants, sales engineers, insurance sales agents, other types of sales representatives, paralegals and legal assistants, translators and interpreters, graphic designers, models, technical writers, broadcast announcers and radio DJs.
Benefitting occupations: computer and information research scientists, data scientists, and software developers. It also says AI/cloud/data growth supports demand for data-related work such as operations research analysts and actuaries.
> led by customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople.
There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
Problem is though that nobody is really buying that narrative anymore.
When I worked in finance the thing that made the analysts happiest was a split election wherein neither side could accomplish much. We now have the opposite of that, and worse a capricious leader who makes huge changes without much justification or explanation. Pressing "shuffle" on the economic policy doesn't help anyone.
To finance the best government is the least effective government.
No executive will ever want to say they made poor decisions that resulted in overhiring.
Instead, someone else's fault.
The same way for awhile the failings of certain businesses "those damn millennials refusing to spend money here" instead of "we priced ourselves out of the market".
Some management may even believe AI can fully replace all work done by those positions. In some of those cases they will learn they were mistaken. The eventual rehiring of some positions will happen unevenly over time, be attributed by management to "ongoing growth" and not be reported by the media.
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23iPFc
1. For example,
links https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23iPFcMany ego’s are gonna be battered after all this fizzles out
But by the investment contracts OpenAI announced, if they replaced every white collar job in the world and captured all of their salary, they would have a P/E of ~1/70. (Assuming no costs at all.)
You decide what return horizon you are comfortable with and solve the linear equation for it. (But my numbers are from the end of last year, I haven't seen any more recent compilation of their contracts.)
A 0.2% drop seems more like too small to tell from statistical noise more that heavy.
So, the "AI job losses" just happen to be before AI started to boom, during the kickoff of largest trade war in 100 years?
They don't mention the trade war at all in the piece? And no analysis whatsoever of what other factors could have resulted in "customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople" being let go. Who the hell writes this crap? What was the point?
I personally think that AI is being used as a convenient blanket to hide the plumes of smoke emanating from an economy engulfed in flames.
We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).
If you're arguing against "AI" on HackerNews, you might as well join the Washington Generals. You and your opinion are tolerated only as long as there is a more popular pro-AI opinion in the replies to your comment.
If this administration works against its people and the whole world, maybe there should be a regime change. Peaceful version of Jan 6th. All the unemployed have little to lose.
Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.
This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable
Even after layoffs most of big tech could cut 50% of its workforce tomorrow and see minimal impact long term. Thats driving a lot of the present layoffs as CEOs go “oh crap we gotta look like we’re with the cool kids on this AI stuff”… and then just do a big cut and cite AI. Truth is they could have cut years ago but had no social pressure to do so.
Looking through the list of those professions, I would bet that nearly half of them won't even exist anymore except for some extremely niche cases. Paralegals, translators, credit authorizers, many types of secretaries - AI can basically do nearly all the work for many of these occupations.
But in any case the primary source mentions tech: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
Wow, I really hope that you're just too young to remember when Google famously invested in tons of "let's see what happens" projects. Google X projects is still a thing: https://x.company/projects/. And important things like Waymo came out of these Google moonshot projects.
Still, I think your comment also just shows how much Google has changed in the past 15 years. A lot of those projects on that x.company website are dead, and of course Google is also famous for killing projects that don't become huge, even if they're useful to lots of people.
IMO, rather than hiring more people than necessary, we should have a safety-net so that our society isn’t structured around “work or die.” I bet we’d see much lower admin costs at that point, as people aren’t incentivized to find less-essential tasks.
The solution may be to modify the incentives. Maybe federally cap all salaries to 90k or so, to filter out the serial job-hoppers and con-artists, and to also prevent poaching and "nerd-hoarding"[3]. Has the additional benefit of forcing rents and property prices to go down, and stops gentrification in its tracks (I mean I would expect this to be partially true, though it might force people to instead seek massive loans to compensate -- which should also be capped by salary to prevent it). And since we are already talking about federal limits, maybe a federal guarantee that covers healthcare and housing would further improve things.
[1]: This depends on context. If the IP is already open source, then there is no laundering. But I know people who have been building the same software system for the last 3 employers, and they do it (ostensibly) from scratch each time (but in fact they are permuting/improving the old version -- which does not actually belong to them -- and are over-reporting how much time they spent working on it). My point here is not that employees are ruthless rogues, but rather that the incentives are set up in a way that encourages the rapid dilution of the value of IP (it is effectively non-exclusive, which makes industrial espionage _unnecessary_), and discourages any kind of mutual responsibility between employer and employee (in a different knowledge-work field, I hear from a friend, seniors give juniors only minimal training because they do not expect to have to deal with them in two years -- and this was true since at least 2017, and has only gotten more true since 2020).
[2]: With or without LLMs, the biggest winners of this dynamic are the quasi-monopolies (or, more precisely oligopolies and duopolies), like MSFT, GOOG, META, etc. Everyone else will lose, and if they happen to win, they will get acquired (not for the tech, which is probably slop anyway and cannot run at hyperscales, but for the clients/customers/users -- why else would MSFT buy LinkedIn and GitHub, why else would startup incubators like YC be such a huge success (I doubt YC would have been possible in the 70s or 80s)). Software is awesome, and I love it, but the software _industry_ has always been an operation designed to extract money and data from the populace, using deceptive and predatory practices (see: Uber, Theranos, Celsius, Alameda for outright fraud, and Oracle for mere deception and plunder).
[3]: Sorry, could not think of a better term. The idea is basically the corporate equivalent of nerd-sniping, but instead of sniping by offering interesting problems/puzzles, you snipe by offering large paychecks and golden handcuffs.
In retrospect look at the graveyard filled with projects - this is a reflection of over hiring and poor project selection.
I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda
the group got hit the hardest is gen-z tech graduates, no fixes ahead for them,sigh
The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.
Especially when it's actually "services sales jobs a little up, manufacturing a little down"...
If everyone's already taken on as much debt as they can, and interest rates aren't consistently marching lower for ~25 straight years, it's going to be a little harder to grow.
Doesn't make it impossible, just harder.
We're paying for growth we got 25 years ago now.
Wish we invested that money better. You can't change the past. But you can change the future.
Unless you happen to have a media empire at your disposal. Maybe then you can change the future. The problem is that those people are changing things for the worse.
Also, supply chain shortages will continue to impact us - they are not even beginning to reach our shores.
The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
You are describing stagflation, that is a kind of recession. Despite all the fundamentals pointing towards it for a while, the US hasn't seen a lot of inflation (at least yet), so that's not what is happening.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-...
Although the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, the most relevant concern is the staggering 40TN+ of debt that can't ever go down as long as the dollar is the reserve currency and have no choice but to endlessly supply more dollars.
The issue with oil rising will make it completely impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut any rates and instead will either hold or raise them.
Then the stock market will have a problem; and those that have properties tied to their RSUs will start panicking.
Hardly. Those 'invented things' are invented for one purpose, to make the inventor money. That's how capitalism works.
Fun fact, let's say that tomorrow, all new credit was outlawed. And by law, all existing credit would require payments that took 3 years to pay off. In this fantasy world where we ignore mortgages, my point is that salaries would diminish.
Right now, the cost of everything a person buys is factored into salary costs. Take away interest, and all those 30% interest credit card debts would eventually no longer be part of your salary. This process takes years of course, but no one would issue credit cards, if every person defaulted on them, yet if you look at where salaries really go? With a lot of people, 30%+ goes to just holding debt.
It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking.
I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.
The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.
I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.
they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest
I don’t think it’s reassuring the way this goes away from AI layoffs. Just like in life, you need downtime and boredom. This is when you learn and reflect and develop taste, this is where your team steals time when an “emergency” breaks out and someone gets paged over an outage. This is where you take time to mentor the younger employees.
Relatedly, it seems that AI is entrenching cumbersome processes because it’s easy to write that extra doc, compile those notes, etc. When you make a team more lean, you’re supposed to cut out the extra process and let people work in a high-trust environment. That’s why startups are fast - everything is low process and the business has to trust employees. As companies grow, they develop all sorts of bureaucracy as scar tissue. But layoffs and cuts fail if you keep that stuff along the way.
It's about professions like paralegals, translators, office type jobs.
And no, those people can't just be fired without some replacement -- they do actual work that is necessary for these companies to function.
But now they are being replaced, and it's not like they'll find some other job because the "other jobs" are also threatened by AI.
Not a good outcome.
google was probably the worst example for me to use tbh, especially since it still has such a good culture of funding researchers. There was a "meme" a few years ago saying gmail's UI has dozens teams working on each of the different buttons, so that was why I said google/gmail.
huang's original comment was referencing layoffs due to AI, and I think a lot of the "maintaining/replacing existing stuff" engineers are at the most risk atm. But why lay people off why they could be pushed to work on new risky projects :-/
I do sort of think the stereotype of killing projects is kind in the vein of what I meant. like idk, google has so much money I feel like they don't need ~everything to clearly and immediately fit into their ai / data / advertising / search stuff. earnings - expenses is so huge, I think it should be fine to just allow some things to stay "small" without being a more "distinguished" moonshot-style project.
Vision cannot be bought (thankfully).
A small team led by a real visionary can achieve much more than these bloated tech firms.
Seniors in my org still have them and they make things happen, partly through being able to use the senior's name to open doors and force action but mostly though their deep organisational knowledge.
All a boss has to say is "I need everyone involved in Project X in a meeting in London next week" and it's done, the boss just gets told when and where to get into a car.
Some or them like translators or graphic designers are kinda risky. Translating instruction manuals for sure is going the way of the dodo, but there is a ton of work in translating literature that shouldn't go away, it's its own art form. No coincidence that we're still publishing new translations of the Odyssey.
I think the art world has a problem in that they were surviving by making art-adjacent material, where people wanted content more than art and won't care about the loss of quality. Corporate logos, ad jingles, etc.
Paper from OAI 2020 about scaling laws: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361 The idea that you can make a system smarter by just putting in more money is very appealing. The earliest OAI coding model is here (Aug 2021): https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations with some "pure" vision of some architecture or another.
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/sam-altman-open...
OpenAI also announced enough deals this year to more than double that amount. But I don't think anybody has put those announcements together and deduplicated them.
Thanks for the response.
The price of everything has crashed in the last 10 years when denominated in Bitcoin. If we measured GDP in Bitcoins, the statistics would show that we’re in an unprecedented depression.
I believe I'm accurate in saying that most employers who overhired during COVID corrected long ago. Especially in tech. The layoffs have been ongoing since 2022. Wih more than 127k just in tech last year.[0] For most people COVID ended half a decade ago. Though technically the WHO called it in May of 2023, three years ago.
"Shareholders" are often people who invested in fonds which invested in fonds and they are thus several steps of separation from the final invested corporation. They only want their pensions to be stable, and de-facto own tiny slivers of hundreds of corporations, maybe not even exactly knowing which ones.
That detaches them mentally from those corporations, much like when you go to a restaurant and eat the food without being particularly bothered whether the cilantro in your soup, supplied by a large-scale supplier and imported from another country, didn't originate in conditions worse than typical for that developing country.
Modern civilization is so complex that if you wanted to check conditions of every vendor of everything you consume, you'd simply not have enough time and energy to do so.
I am typing this on a Dell laptop; should I be particularly interested in what happens in every Dell supplier which contributed to building of that laptop? Are you? I just bought it and started working on it; we may certainly call this "complete disregard".
If these companies can afford $trillions, then the government can collect some dues that can fund retraining programs or whatever.
And what are you retraining to? We've long abandoned serious manufacturing and mining. Most people's job is the application of knowledge and communication and LLMs are coming for them all. From retail and call centres through to doctors and lawyers.
We can't all retrain as plumbers, waiters and surgeons.
On the technical side, perhaps none. But countless people in the labor movement spilled blood for their rights and dignity. Maybe something similar will be needed here, too.
Anybody reading hackernews that cares about GDP growth is profoundly misinformed.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-needed-get-ahead-145k-ha...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
The article also repeatedly discussed median salaries, but average costs.
And it includes full time daycare costs for young children that only last for a few years.
Also housing prices are high but you can certainly afford an apartment as a single person making $100k a year. But if you want to save, having a roommate doesn’t mean you are living in poverty.
The main way these numbers are gamed is by finagling with healthcare and post-secondary education, each of which can be as high or as low as you want, depending on what you’re torturing the numbers to confess.
I don't see how you can say that he deserves "immense blame" for the inflation that we suffered. He was a passenger for most of it, and lacked a crystal ball to see the events of 2023 with the release of ChatGPT.
Unlike the current inflationary spike which is entirely due to an energy shock caused by a President starting a war of choice.
You’re right though that I should emphasize Trump engaged a lot of the same behaviors. It’s certainly unambiguous that the current situation is entirely his fault.
It is true in 2024 that there was a hell of a lot of gaslighting going on that the economy was great for everyone and that we were having a "vibecession" and praising "Bidenomics" when the K-shaped economy was already appearing, and this DNC messaging effort clearly failed. But it also didn't have a lot to do with Biden, and arguably pushing the message that implicitly accepted that Biden was entirely responsible for the economic conditions of the previous 4 years was flawed and factually inaccurate messaging. Maybe it wouldn't have been possible to argue otherwise, but I do remember a lot of Democrats who argued that Trump's economy had relatively little to do with any of his policies in his first term. I similarly think that Biden had relatively little control over the economy in his term.
Currently, though, Trump pretty well owns this economy due to what his war with Iran is doing. He doesn't own the background of what is going on with AI and hyperscalar spending and the likely bubble and the inflationary pressure and K-shaped economy (although Republican tax cuts over the past 45+ years are cumulatively responsible for the K-shaped economy and Trump owns some of that), but Trump is doing his best to just pour gas over the economy and light it all on fire.
In the former, you can see some of the products that MSFT is shipping such as MAIA chips, Azure Horizon DB, MSFT Fabric, Sovereign clouds etc. These businesses are seeing steady growth and there’s plenty of work to be done whereas for products like IoT, XBox and anything to do with gaming in general etc you will see that there isn’t much growth left and yet these products have a lot of headcount behind them.
So MSFT isn’t stagnating (revenue keeps increasing). Although there are quite a few businesses within MSFT that can use a lot of headcount reduction, this is my take as a low level L63 grunt.
It's just a different mindset. It's no longer move fast and be first. It's well we'll get there eventually. Let's do it cost constrained and with minimal risk.
There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly.
As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point
> In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.
This is completely right.
Sometimes these puff-pieces blow my mind.
I know it's not true yet of Amazon, Meta, and Google. They may say otherwise. TLAs say lots of things and hope you forget they ever said them when they are proven wrong, but all my idiot canaries for my claim remain in place in all three companies. Layoffs are a blunt force weapon and little warms the cockles of my heart more than knowing they are still draining that shareholder value(tm).
Cool. Let's start with taxing those, or any other place where they bury or hide from taxes. Thanks for the suggestion.
We can also tax on the numbers of job losses vs capital expenditures. IE: if you spend a $Billion on stuff while firing tons of workers, you get taxed more.
-------
As far as retraining: easy solution. Whatever people want to retrain to. The details will work themselves out. The important tidbit is to have large scale mass retraining if this really is the future.
It's not like the government forced me into my current job. I'm more than capable of choosing a new field myself.
And if YOU can't see the possibilities, them you don't have to take the retraining program. But from my perspective, there's plenty of work needed in the USA to improve our country. Plenty of problems to solve.
On its own terms, 2% isn't great. It's kind of the bare minimum. Anything less is losing ground in absolute terms, since that's the target for inflation as well.
That's also assuming the number is trustworthy. The number is a mediocre metric to start with, and I don't trust the administration to be calculating it correctly. They have shot the messenger more than once, after which the messages started to improve with no change in policy.
I would also not that China's numbers are even more opaque and less reliable.
China's sustained growth from a developing economy points to a bright future where they install more up to date infrastructure. The US is failing to keep up. But it's an investment it could choose to make any time... if it could focus.
2% is average for past decade+.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
I never said anything about obligation. Of course they’re not obliged to provide extra jobs, but it is a moral obligation to treat those whom you employ with dignity. I would love to understand what you actually define as a moral obligation considering your vacuous response.
> In both Germany and Switzerland, health insurance is mandatory and not employer-based - so you cannot simply say "no". In fact, in Germany you pay much more than in US as a share of your income, especially if your income is at least like 30% more than a national median: 1000+ EUR is a minimum per person per month (probably higher today). It doesn't cover dental care - you will pay in full - that's why many people travel to Turkey, or Eastern Europe, or to Baltic countries - just to take some dental care - which is extremely expensive in any German speaking country - we are talking about multiple months of your income after taxes.
By that definition someone making the equivalent of $100k in Germany could be “worried about healthcare”. And in many countries with public healthcare, people are worried about paying for access to better private healthcare.
So by the metric of “worrying about healthcare access” almost no one is above the poverty line.
There are people in the US making $100k who are genuinely worried about healthcare access. Say someone who retires early at 55 and has enough savings to provide $100k income but is 10 years away from Medicare. But acting like it is at all remotely normal for a single person making $100k to lack healthcare access or to be “living in poverty” by any objective measure is absurd.
Neither has any free will to deviate from the script. Both are useless in any case that's not handled by the script. The silicon one has better wait times though.
I mean, it's my money, you need to justify your reasons for deserving it.
I mean, if you _want_ a customer base that hates you and will leave the very minute something better comes along, I guess you can choose to do that. I just have no idea why you would.
Taxes definitely solved that problem. And it even brought about the golden age of post WW2 US economy.
The correct taxes in the correct areas serve as an incentive structure to help encourage businesses and individuals to make good decisions. At least, that's what we did 80 years ago.
The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem. It will be used though but one of the two political parties to win election(s) and kill any tax law that was previously put in place
I asked what was the tax rate that got rid of our WW2 debt.
The golden age thing is an aside. Just a reminder that you can't call 1950s America weak on the world stage.
> The US Government is at present (without any chances of this being fixed ever again) about the least efficient entity that exists on the Planet Earth and giving it more money will not solve any problem
Taxes directly solve the debt and deficit problem. Period.
Let's start with things one step at a time. Now that we've had 40 years of trying to drown the budget in a bathtub (and only ballooning our debt), we should seriously start trying something different.
The 2008 crisis is on a long list of examples of how corporate efficiency harms me.
Governments have a mandate to benefit the public. Conversely, shareholder models encourage exploiting everything they possibly can (for shareholder benefit), corrupting government processes, harming the public and harming the corporation itself.
Instead of the Either Or fallacy, I suggest good-faith examination of actual harms and good. Governments (inc LEO) and corporations famously improve outcomes, when meaningful transparency is mandated, corrupt processes aren't hidden and ethical+competent overseers can pull the needed levers.
if your family is running a budget deficit, there are two ways to mitigate it
- make more money (drive uber and pizza (at the same time to make double money at night) or get a higher paying job
- stop spending so much fucking money
it seems politically, the left-leaning part of the countries and political party will make you believe that we just need to make more money, give that money to the Federal Government and all our problems will magically disappear.
the right-leaning part of the country and its politicians will make you believe that rich already pay a lot more than most (they do) and that taxing corporations makes no fucking sense (it doesn’t in general).
neither party actually gives a shit about the fact that country is drowning in debt which will eventually be its undoing (those who study history know this as absolute certainty), they are just looking for where more votes are there to be had
I'm all in favor of this but part 1 has been made politically toxic for decades, and part 2 only seems to be taken seriously when the Other Guys are in power.
For example, in the US I simply cant take the Republican party's fiscal opinions seriously when they bleat about the debt on the one hand and yet dont blink when asked to fund another foreign war.
Yes, when one half of government intentionally choses to work against our country, and to STRUCTURALLY destroy our government via debt/financial distress, it results in debt and financial distress.
Complaining about anything other than Republicans INTENTIONAL POLICY OF DEBT when talking about US debt is nothing but an extension of that destructive policy.
In order to be socialism, it has to be spending money specifically to help the people, and broadly to reduce inequality.
Republicans do not do that, by any stretch of the imagination.
The West saw its golden age when redistributive taxation was maximum. We have to get back to that, or the country will continue to agonize under crumbling infrastructure and failing institutions.