No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch.
If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion.
The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too.
The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.
“If you can afford it” is not efficient. It’s merely priority queue vs FIFO wherein it is decided that some folks get to skip lines based on some arbitrary merit.
If it were efficient it would clear the queue with max throughput. This is not so.
The US has (without much debate) the absolute best healthcare on Earth if money isn't an issue. There are so many more experts in so many more fields with access to so much more cutting edge technology that...well rich people travel to the US to get care.
Yeah, what does it matter that the best healthcare, only available to the globally rich, American or not, is in the US?
A much better measurement of a given country's healthcare system in more meaningful terms is average outcomes of the whole population, like life expecrsncy, child mortality rates, etc.
you are a funny man. i live in the one of the wealthiest areas of the US, c with good healthcare: specialists are very hard to get. service rationing is everywhere. we are losing doctors.
your argument is ideological, not rooted in reality.
Are you getting faster or better outcomes in America than when taking _private_ treatment in Canada, or do you need the treatment in Canada to he public for your claim to hold?
I imagine that you can pony up to be seen in two days in Canada too, and also that the single-payer system keeps those private practice honest, so you'd pay less for your fast turnaround than in Freedonia. I may be wrong, of course.
I'm trying to take your comment seriously, but it's very difficult. My partner is a physician in the US. People are ending up in ERs because it takes a year for them to see the specialist who could have prevented the same problem.
"If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.
"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.
Interest and military and take a distant third and fourth place respectively. Here are the rough proportions of the top US federal budget expenditures according to the Treasury Department:
- Healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid): 24%
- Social Security: 23%
- Net Interest on Federal Debt: 15%
- National Defense: 13%
And I'll point out that the enormous bill for the interest on debt is a pretty good reason to avoid ringing up so much debt in the first place.
Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.
My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.
You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?
Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services.
The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not.
It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
The debt amount is very roughly proportional to the size of the economy.
It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
I agree with the system you describe, i tend to disagree with the conclusion.
I suspect the size of the debt is just a "dc offset" and not the main signal. While important, maybe not as "information-ally" significant as it's size would suggest. Still it is probably hiding something, a subtle bug in the accounting, and that something contributes to the frequent cycles of debt-jubilees, revolutions, upheavals etc.
Now the real question you have posed is what is missed in the debate - most wealth in our society is captured in the make up and choice of goods and services consumed, and what is the contribution of a bias towards wealthy consumption here? e.g. in my country there were about 150 luxury yacht sales totaling ~$4billion, vs ~80,000 luxury car sales @ ~$15billion, vs total car sales of ~1,000,000 at ~$100billion. The annual cost of our public disability insurance scheme is ~$50billion. The "sharing" seems to have a significant access to resources compared to luxury on those accounts. I personally think the public disability insurance scheme causes harmful distortion to the broader economy while also meeting the important needs of some members of society.
My gut feel the issue is not ideological or political or a luxury preference, it's structural - the economy is not structured to deliver the correct set of needs, and this is due to real material constraints that have always constrained the economic problem. Not in terms that just the wrong top down decisions are being made, but that the correct bottom up decisions are prevented from being made. If you apply a model of computation complexity, feedback and iterative improvement - bottom up generally has more access to information and compute to directly address problems, while top-down can occasionally deal with global biases and accumulated error.
One true material constraint is the scarcity of competence and accountability. Wealth accumulation is the natural consequence of that material constraint. Top down "political & ideological decisions" are generally the enemy of competence and accountability.
Anthropomorphising a system to give it attributes such as cruelty is silly.
Entertaining a lump of monolithic production fallacy is also silly.
There are any number of detailed and specific problems that need to be solved to solve the greater economic problem you describe. A system that promotes direct effort to solve specific problems is required.
We have runaway debt because since the 1980s Republicans have had a fiscal policy called 'starve the beast' whose intention is to make government funding so fucked government can't function.
Republicans just passed huge tax cuts, it is Republicans that have zero care about debt, again because they choose agenda over strong/healthy federal government so that people like you can make posts like this (and ignore such facts as Republicans are the drivers of debt in order to intentionally undermine/weaken our country/government).
