Is there any way to take money from bad programs and redirecting them to less bad programs that does not involve cancelling programs?
And is there any way to cancel bad programs, in the current situation, that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground?
Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use" is another way of saying, "you can't cancel any programs", which is another way of saying, "you can't fix this, give up, stop trying".
What makes you think that replanting will result in “good” programs? Why cut good programs? Seems arbitrary, especially when establishing a good government program is non-trivial.
The same reasons you think "tell Congress and the people Congress and the executive branch appoints to sort out what the good programs are ahead of time" will result in the good programs being kept.
If one is feasible, the other is feasible, because you'd be using the same sets of people to make the distinction. If neither is feasible...
Removing programs one by one just requires that the government can slowly change. Burn and replant requires the government can quickly change.
If one thinks the government cannot effectively quickly change (that is that ~600 decision makers their 300 million stakeholders will struggle with alignment the more complex the ask per moment) then it should bias one towards more incremental approaches.
I think it's plausibly easier to quickly change than slowly change the government, due to new bureaucracies being less ossified than old ones, although the transition costs are also higher.
Will the fire that burns the field also take all the terrible straw men with it? If so, it does sound a little tempting.
It's a safe assumption that the government of a country of 330 million people is going to be very complicated, have a lot of moving parts, and it's going to have quite a lot of parts that look bad to any given person. This is because 330 million is a LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE. They have different perspectives, different interests, different valuations of what's good and bad and every single one of them is working from a substantially different set of information.
A government full of programs that grew up organically, bit by bit, is certainly going to be messy and confusing and unpretty. But a government that results from burning everything to the ground and replanting[1] is going to represent exactly one small set of interests, perspectives and valuations. You'd better have really, REALLY high confidence that those interests are extremely well in-line with yours, and that the perspectives and valuations result from accurate information and sound judgement. Because if they don't, if they're hostile to you and yours or out of touch with reality, you literally just torched your safety net.
[1] Taking it on faith that the replanting happens.
A government opening to replanting promises to hear the concerns of people wanting programs reopened and to let them make their case. This would also weed out many programs with very weak cases.
"the nature of the Constitution is simply such that there is a better case for the president being able to spend less money than appropriated than more"
All around us are examples of success being achieved by pruning net negative options, redirecting, and slowly honing in on the optimal outcome – business, horticulture, evolution, science, navigation, health, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, that is not to say that there's never a place for catastrophic change – revolutions, forest fires, demolition, creative destruction. But the cost of that is enormous, total, and it takes a painfully long time to build back, and even longer to get to something like "thriving".
Like everything else, it's a tradeoff, and if you care about the outcome, you have to understand both sides of the ledger. It's not enough to be displeased with the status quo, and with the unbearable patience and work required to improve slowly. You have to understand the costs – not least in terms of patience and work – of burning it all down, building it back, and going without it in the meantime. If you want to get to success faster, you also need a crystal clear vision for what you're trying to achieve, that you can share with people and get buy-in for. Otherwise it'll just be more burning.
I don't know how you, personally, make that calculation. What worries me, however, is that I don't see a lot of evidence of people in charge making the calculation at all, nor sharing a vision or direction other than "not this".
The PEPFAR issue is a good example, as it looks very much like someone taking a torch to something they don't understand, with no clear goal other than to burn things down. Feels a lot like the summer of 2020, TBH, just with different players and methods. Just dumb iconoclasm.
I don't think it is feasible to expect our government to prioritize good programs. The best we can do is probably indeed to torch programs on the assumption that they tend to be bad and thus nothing is better than something.
PEPFAR was not established during the Continental Congress, as an inviolable part of the foundation of the nation, it was established in 2003 by George Bush during his first term. So if it is possible to create a good programme in the 00s it should also be possible to create good programmes in the 20s.
What sense I can make out of it is that there are complaints about creep, that it has expanded from "treating AIDS" to other areas and gone beyond its original remit. I can't speak as to how accurate that is.
But if I go by Wikipedia, PEPFAR itself was a replacement for previous efforts considered less effective. I'm sure the people involved in those programmes also complained hat they were doing good and closing them down would be a terrible idea:
"[Condoleeza Rice] also told [Bush] that HIV/AIDS was a central problem in Africa but that the United States was spending only $500 million per year on global AIDS, with the money spread across six federal agencies, without a clear strategy for curbing the epidemic."
So it seems possible at least theoretically to shut down one or more programmes and replace them with something better suited to the situation as it now is. PEPFAR itself has undergone that change, with a reorganisation in 2008 and expansion into new countries:
"When PEPFAR was signed into law 15 resource-limited countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates were designated to receive the majority of the funding. The 15 "focus countries" were Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia. Most of the $15 billion for the program was to be spent on these focus countries, $4 billion was allocated for programs elsewhere, and for HIV/AIDS research (the other $1 billion was contributed to the Global Fund).
With the reauthorization of PEPFAR in 2008 there was a shift away from the "focus country" approach by authorizing the development of a Partnership Framework model for regions and countries, with the aim of ensuring long-term sustainability and country leadership. Through bilaterally-funded programs, PEPFAR works in partnership with host nations to support treatment, prevention and care for millions of people in more than 85 countries. Partnership Frameworks provide a 5-year joint strategic framework for cooperation between the U.S. Government, the partner government, and other partners to combat HIV/AIDS in the host country through service delivery, policy reform, and coordinated financial commitments."
I mean it is possible, but as Scott points out, is it a priority? What are the odds and the marginal gains of picking a program in the top 1% of success and improving it *further* rather than picking some completely disastrous bottom 1% shitshow that you literally couldn't make worse if you try?
Realistically, this is not a "we can make this better" thing, it's a "we don't care shit about some Africans dying of AIDS, we'd rather save the money even if it means then wasting on something completely inefficient".
1) replanting comes with massive overhead - most likely, most of the institutional knowledge is lost, and the knowledgeable and dedicated people no longer available, when you decide to "replant". Especially since the stated goal of Project 2025 is to replace employees dedicated to their respective institution (the so-called "deep state") with ones dedicated to the current president, so the best people wouldn't even be eligible.
2) who do you expect to do that? The current administration obviously doesn't bother to find out in advance what's worth saving, so why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
>why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
Presumably because people would notice that shit is hitting the fan, as they did in this instance, and because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains.
"because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains" - forgive me if I don't have a lot of confidence in that motivation, after Trump has threatened to invade a NATO ally and suggested to occupy Gaza (after expelling the Palestinians).
If anyone knew how to reliably create good organizations that infallibly and efficiently pursue their goal from scratch the world would be a very different place. "See how they go, weed out the bad and keep the good" is pretty much the state of the art.
The problems with trying to do a massive overhaul of an airplane mid-flight are pretty easy to understand. If you cancelled Medicaid tomorrow and it took you even a few months to stand up the new Good Medicaid, incredible amounts of suffering would happen in the interim. As we're seeing right now, the same goes for research spending, overseas deployments, etc. etc. etc.
This plane you can’t land, or at least you really really shouldn’t. And not even trying to fix things (i.e. “don’t do that while in mid-air”) is going to result in uncontrolled involuntary landing.
It’s a horrible set of choices, but sometimes you get those.
It would be nice to have a gang of maintenance people who could carefully and quickly swap out only the parts that need it, and a long term expert crew who could be trusted to advise and assist in good faith. Unfortunately the only maintenance gang the passengers are in the mood to give access, tools and materiel are ones that have never been anywhere near most of the crew, because the crew seem to have made a living out of getting the plane into this state and have no intention of stopping unless forced.
That particular maintenance gang are good at angle grinders and plasma cutters, and figure you can just wed back bits after determining they were necessary after all. But they don’t know what the long term expert crew know and they listen to the latter with skepticism and a jaundiced look at the written logs.
But the alternative isn’t some hypothetical better nicer maintenance gang from the Land of Counterfactuals, it’s no maintenance until the crash. Just look at the trend graphs.
Everyone is going to argue "But my program is a good program, not one of the bad ones!"
PEPFAR seems to be one of the good ones, and I think there is an obligation to help others. But I'm a Christian and I get that from divine guidance, something which has been sneered at as a source of moral authority and instruction. So if we're now asking the questions "Why am I obligated to help people who are complete strangers?" that's not a bad thing; when was the last debate about public morality? Just saying "Because we should" is not good enough: what are your reasons?
It would be wild if Trump, of all people, was responsible for kicking off a public debate about "why should we do good?" and getting agreement on a system of ethics for the state.
Well then you get into the question of “why try to be a good person if not because of the fear of divine punishment”? Which is a problem if you don’t believe in some sort of objective morality to ground everything.
The answer I’ve arrived that is that (most) people have a conscience either pre-installed through selection for prosocial behavior or socially conditioned into them, and said conscience must be appeased to remain psychologically stable. To do this, you can either do good (as defined in your own particular worldview but hopefully having something to do with reducing suffering) or you can do non-good and try to convince yourself it is good via a series of “copes” ie. faulty arguments that are intentionally under-scrutinized because they serve to appease the conscience. Copes are an inferior strategy for appeasing your conscience because deep down you probably are aware it’s cope. So the best way to live is to genuinely try to be a good person, and to do so in a logically consistent fashion, while avoiding “copes”.
Pretty much any argument one could deploy against PEPFAR strongly seems like cope.
I admit that the problem with this is there’s no known solution for convincing the general population to behave this way, but that applies to pretty much every framework.
Why be a good person without fear of divine punishment? Because cooperation beats defection as a long term survival strategy, as groups are stronger than individuals. That's your objective morality, if you need one. It isn't complicated, it predates religion, and it's almost certainly why we evolved to have the prosocial behaviors you mention in the first place. Apes together strong.
And then we hit the disparity between what is good for the survival of the species, and what is good for the survival of the individual, and bad actors arise and punishment has to come into play to ensure people keep playing nice.
The real problem is scarcity, as usual. Specifically scarcity of information. In a tribal society it's easy to watch for bad actors defecting and punish them accordingly, and unfortunately all our social mechanisms for dealing with bad actors revolve around that small scale paradigm. In a country of hundreds of millions and systems of endlessly increasing complexity, those social mechanisms collapse and bad actors run rampant without consequences.
I would say with AIDS, like with many other diseases, there is also a general selfish reason: because we want diseases to generally have as little a chance to spread and mutate as possible.
But the altruistic reason can very well be "because human life and prosperity is a terminal goal in and of itself". You don't really need any particular justification or rationalization for it. I like being healthy, I imagine everyone else in the world is also a sentient being like me since we're all built the same, I imagine everyone else also wants to be healthy internally. If I am in a position to make someone else healthy at tiny expense to me, why not do it?
If your aim is to cut all foreign aid programs, because their effect is net-negative, you gotta prioritize the most obviously net-positive programs first.
It's about divide and conquer. All programs involve the corrupt running net-negative/harmful/detrimental programs and the virtuous running their beneficial/net-positive programs. The corrupt will only care about their net-negative programs and not help the virtuous. Once all the net-positives are gone, you can then move on to remove all of them. The corrupt will not get any protection from those annoying, virtuous, altruistic saints, as they're no longer invested in protecting the rest of the foreign aid.
Then maybe once they're are all gone, their political power entirely broken, you could try rehiring the best of the saints and your entire foreign aid department might actually become a net-positive, trustworthy institution. Which at the moment it obviously is not, since it funds net-negative programs and everyone knows it. Obviously someone should go to hell for this, but since this is a democracy, sending them there before their natural death is not an option.
Imagine, you tried going after the net-negatives first. You're falsely assuming that those don't do anything and that you've got infinite political power to do whatever you like, in whatever order you like. But those programs convert money into clout and connections. Instead of saints, now you're fucking with a bunch of sociopath pull peddlers now. The first thing they do, is instrumentalise the saints for their PR.
And, no, you're not allowed to assume Hypothetical Optimised Congress where a majority, or even a plurality, of both houses is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Or rather, feel free to assume whatever you want and do whatever you want with that, but it won't move me, or get me or the millions like me to listen, or believe you're trying anything but feel good about... feel good about what, exactly? Noting that someone will have to put PEPFAR back? Claiming that hypotheticals in moral reasoning don't matter because "it's all fake"?
Too bad, I was kind of hoping to discuss the pluses and minuses of the CATGIRL Act.
Seriously, I think the red team-blue team culture war is so ingrained at this point it's just going to swing back and forth until the Chinese eat our lunch.
Why do you think the White House will stop changing hands to the other party every 4-12 years? It's not Trump won in a true landslide. It was still a close election, just less close than is typical these days.
There are more or less stupid ways to cut government. The last time anything even halfway reasonable was attempted was in the 90s. It involved government audits and was headed by Congress and supported by the President. After that, we had a President who waged two massive wars that blew up the deficit (Bush), and then we had a half-hearted attempt by Obama in his second term to do the same thing that was done in the 90s. (the Republicans didn’t bite and Obama didn’t try particularly hard.) Neither Trump 1.0 nor Biden had any interest in taking on the deficit. What makes you think that haphazard cuts to government are the only, much less “best” way to cut government, when we have an approach from the 90s that worked well and has mostly just been left untried since then?
Who was it you thought would be trying it now? The minority party, who are too busy rabidly attacking everything they can reach in the majority party? Or the majority party, who haven't managed to even try this since the 90s? (And are also, with less urgency, busy attacking anything they can reach in the minority party.)
"Yes, we have this method, but it's impossible for any of the people who would have to try it to try it, any more than the second through ninth-best, so we shouldn't try this tenth-best method that does have a constituency and support and should give up instead."
Why does it have to happen this second? I’m not an arsonist; ensure the conditions are right (austerity Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader, austerity President) and one of the better methods will be viable. There’s already a reasonable constituency for this in Congress, we just don’t have a good President. I don’t want to torch the government right this second just because we don’t have the right conditions. Since these conditions have been achieved in the past (and probably will be again when Trump is out of office), I think it’s perfectly reasonable to achieve these conditions rather than flamethrower the government. You should try to explain why this needs to be done now in such a slapdash way, rather than being done later in the way I’ve described.
In the past, when those conditions were achieved, did the government shrink, and stay shrunk? And how often do the stars align for that?
And, if you had to put names to the people who are the constituency in *the current* Congress for this, who would the top... eh... twenty be? ("You don't know 20" isn't a disqualifier, by the way. But one Rand Paul and a half dozen fellow travellers doesn't qualify the careful-scalpel method as viable.)
Some things require constant attention - hot stoves and government deficits in a democratic society, for example. Neither one requires a flamethrower.
Freedom Caucus + New Democrat Coalition + Blue Dogs are a reasonable start, since these caucuses have a history of working for cuts to the deficit. These are about a quarter to a third of Congress depending on the year; non-caucus members have also joined these efforts when the conditions are right (that is to say, when they’re badgered by a Speaker of the House or a President of their party to vote for an austerity bill). Since many Republican and Democratic speakers have come out of these caucuses and tried pushing for austerity bills, I would say that the major missing piece is a President who can push for this and enlist his counterparts in the opposite party. Trump can’t do this because he’s polarizing, and Biden didn’t have any interest in deficit reduction, but it’s likely that if we elect a President who isn’t a warmonger, we have a reasonable chance of getting someone who’ll cut the deficit like Clinton and Gingrich did in the 90s. Not as fun as watching the world blow up, but green shade budget balancing rarely is.
Nothing is ever going to "stay shrunk". That's just not how it works. You have to keep doing laundry. You have to keep doing dishes. You have to keep brushing your teeth. And the government has to rebalance its budget.
Burning and replanting, as people suggest, certainly is a method, but even then you're not creating a new system that's going to be infallible forever - at best you're paving the way to have to burn and replant again later on.
I'm not going to claim to know that it's better or worse, but the argument that it doesn't "permanently fix" anything is invalid for every possible change.
I'm not an arsonist in the literal sense that I don't burn down buildings (after all, most buildings are privately owned rather than government buildings). But the government is not like a civilian owner of a building, it is based on taxation of the governed and only exists with out support, and is thus subject to the results of elections. The analogy would thus not be to torching someone else's property, but demolishing some of your own, which is an entirely standard thing to do over time.
Why is it impossible to figure out which programs are bad, then take a flamethrower to them? Even people who disagree about whether a program to bring broadband to the rural US is a worthwhile program can agree on whether it is an is an effective program.
The plan for progra would include a budget and a timeline .. You could use simple criteria for torching: torch programs that are both over budget and more than 40% behind where timeline said they would be. Those guidelines are imperfect, but certainly better than torching everything.
Maybe you're just somebody who thinks great big fires are really cool and thrilling?
Happily, they're not torching everything, and never have been. Pausing a lot of stuff. Pausing implies the strong possibility of unpausing, which is the difference.
Now tell me about how your method has less collateral damage, i.e. less PEPFARs cut (and then reinstated after enough screaming and/or lobbying for it before Congress) than the one they're using.
You are suffering a lapse of logic here. My proposal is not an alternative to what is being done now. It is also not a method I think is great. It is an alternative to your proposal of taking a flamethrower to everything. I made my counter-proposal because you said eliminating programs by identifying the bad ones was impossible in practice so we'd have to just resort to torching everything. Coming up with something better than torching everything's a pretty low bar to clear.
It'd take too long, and you might lose the House in two years.
If you don't burn the whole thing down, the agencies will simply stonewall you on every level, and can easily drag the process out long enough. A rough sketch of a strategy an agency could employ: first, the head of the agency simply refuses to follow orders to cut the programs. And when fired, will file suit against you saying you don't have the right to fire him. Some Liberal court, say, the Ninth Circuit, will rule in his favor, and reinstate him, and then he'll stay in place until the Supreme Court weighs in. If you have appointed an Acting head in the interim, he'd be hamstrung by someone filing suit declaring that he has no authority to issue any orders. The Democrats then drag out the confirmation process for your replacement nominee. Maybe get him "credibly accused" of gang rape or something, and have a long show trial. If you manage to get your guy confirmed, then the lower-level members of the agency don't implement his directives. Maybe someone leaks a damaging story about him to the press, and get him to resign (and then you have to go through the whole confirmation thing again). If they DO start cutting a program or two, they do it in gradual and easily reversed way that will take years to fully wind down. And you have to do something like this at every single agency you want to implement changes in. And when the administration changes, every last one of them moves quickly to undo all your changes in less than a month.
The deep state is better thought of as a leaderless resistance with many independent cells, rather than a strictly hierarchical organization that can be decapitated. It takes … cruder methods to fight such a foe.
That makes sense. But if we start by torching everything wouldn’t there be the same massive bullshit phenomena at work in setting up sparser and better programs, so that nothing much gets set up? Also it seems like a lot of the cleared ground and freed up money could end going to new “programs” that are really just little oligarchies run by Trump favorites. Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit.
If some individual program is really that good, Congress can legislate for it directly instead of setting up "independent" administrative agencies that inexorably go rogue to manage a whole bunch of them at once, the majority of which are bad.
Okay, yeah, that kind of thing could happen, but when the other guys take office, they're not going to pretend the Florida Seaside Improvement Program is a nonpartisan independent agency run by career civil servants the President cannot fire at will. They'll promptly remove him, and put their own guys in charge. That regular churn will keep it from becoming too much of a nuisance. They would be bad, certainly, but the alternative looks like permanent oligarchies telling you you can't build on your land because the puddles on it are "navigable waterways" or something (see Sackett v. EPA). The "fat profit" they make is negligible; if you like, you can think of the election as a bet that you profit from when your guy wins. In expectation, it basically evens out.
A stable america will slow the collapse drastically.
Nation states are decaying, but if the middle east drops the charade, then russia then china but it takes 100 years for europe and america to balkanize it will be allot less violence and maybe segments of international trade still work and we get to have chips to store all the ebooks.
"Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit."
While horribly corrupt, that (ironically) would be better than the infamous eminent domain cases where property was seized in the name of civic development, then nothing happened (save that some people made a tidy profit). At least flipping derelict properties means that those properties are now either repaired and improved, or demolished so building on the site can go forward.
"Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
...After the Court's decision, the city allowed a private developer to proceed with its plans; however, the developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the project, and the contested land remained an undeveloped empty lot.
...In spite of repeated efforts, the redeveloper (who stood to get a 91-acre (370,000 m2) waterfront tract of land for $1 per year) was unable to obtain financing, and the redevelopment project was abandoned. As of the beginning of 2010, the original Kelo property was a vacant lot, generating no tax revenue for the city. In the aftermath of 2011's Hurricane Irene, the now-closed New London redevelopment area was turned into a dump for storm debris such as tree branches and other vegetation. However, as of May 2022, a private developer was building 100 apartments, a 100-unit hotel, and a community center on the property.
Pfizer, whose employees were supposed to be the clientele of the Fort Trumbull redevelopment project, completed its merger with Wyeth, resulting in a consolidation of research facilities of the two companies. Pfizer chose to retain the Groton campus on the east side of the Thames River, closing its New London facility in late 2010 with a loss of over 1,000 jobs. That coincided with the expiration of tax breaks on the New London site that would have increased Pfizer's property tax bill by almost 400 percent.
After the Pfizer announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle, in November 2009, in its lead editorial called the Kelo decision infamous:
The well-laid plans of redevelopers, however, did not pan out. The land where Susette Kelo's little pink house once stood remains undeveloped. The proposed hotel-retail-condo "urban village" has not been built. And earlier this month, Pfizer Inc. announced that it is closing the $350 million research center in New London that was the anchor for the New London redevelopment plan, and will be relocating some 1,500 jobs."
Again ironically, the dissent on the Supreme Court decision included some of the infamous horrible conservative judges:
"The principal dissent was issued on June 25, 2005, by Justice O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas. The dissenting opinion suggested that the use of this taking power in a reverse Robin Hood fashion — take from the poor, give to the rich — would become the norm, not the exception"
Shortly thereafter (after Kelo), a little town in Texas boldly tried to take the farm/home, its acreage fronting the highway, of an elderly mother and daughter we knew* (which homestead was incidentally protected by a conservation easement) - because here was some undeveloped land and the town "decided" it needed a ...
Target.
Why? Why would any town "need" a particular store?
Because, you see, the town five or ten miles down the road had gotten a Target. And so this town wanted to grab that tax revenue from its own Target.
(This is how America comes to look so depressingly the same at every highway exit ...)
In a *very* rare sound move, the state Lege passed a law that takings of private property couldn't be solely for private benefit.
*Ironically, they had moved there after their original homestead was taken some decades earlier, to build a lake in Dallas.
Yup! I was thinking that that was probably a large chunk of the motivation for doing all of these very fast and crude cuts. Many Thanks for the detailed scenarios.
Grr, the amount of collateral damage being done is astounding. Even setting aside all the damages to NSF, NIH, and CDC, one of the actions was to offer a buyout to everyone in the CIA. Umm - do they _want_ to lose the people who interpret spy satellite photos???
Yeah, there _are_ time constraints :-( but I'm really leery of how they are swinging the chainsaw. "Move fast and break things" is only sane for a _very_ specific kind of company, and even there, the idea is normally to _build_ a replacement service/product _first_, and let the competition break the legacy product.
EDIT: One other thing: I find it very ironic that the Trump administration is more-or-less following a "tear-it-all-down (maybe we'll build back later)" policy - which is typically one of the marks of left wing campus radicals. And not to their credit either.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Might work, might not. Depends partially on whether they can manage to filter and rehire before people find other jobs or move on in some other way.
By "administration" you mean Trump? By "ambition" you mean "occupying Greenland"? Sure, hire those people exclusively, what could possibly go wrong!
Historical side note: in Germany, public officials and soldiers swear an oath to the constitution. They explicitly do not swear an oath to the current administration, or the current chancellor, or the current president, because the last time that was required, ...let's just say "bad stuff happened".
We've occupied Greenland so long that there's been time for the DEI-ers to meditate the change of name of our operation there. Ironically, to something much less cool. (More ridiculous goes without saying.)
What actually is the goal here? Are you trying to set up an effective government that does good things but *doesnt* have institutional memory, a core of workers with experience and the ability to fight back when someone tries to cut it down? If so, I think you’re imagining something that doesn’t actually make any sense.
It's way richer, allowing for a much better standard of living. I do not attribute that to the competence of the government.
And among the countries that have a standard of living anywhere comparable, the US government might be the least intrusive by a long shot.
None of my criticisms should be taken to imply that there is anywhere on the face of the earth that is better. The comparison is only between America as it is, and America as it could be (and occasionally America as it once was).
I would say this is the optimal time for Republicans to cut programs, controlling all three branches of government. Surely if they think USAID has a lot of waste they must have specific programs in mind already? If they don't it's just shouting.
This is going to depend heavily on definitions. Is an authority without appropriations a program? Is letting appropriations lapse and not providing more funds a cancelation? Where does imposing new requirements become a new program?
Now congress definitely prefers to be seen as doing stuff not not doing stuff. If you want a specific (unsure on how representative example), the 2024 WRDA (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4367/text) has specific authorizations and deauthorizations as well as a bunch of modifications you could look at.
That's kinda besides the point isn't it? During the budget cycle the executive requests funding for specific programs and Congress provides them some amount of deference. Probably even more deference if they explicitly calling out 'we don't want funding for program X because it is wasteful for reasons A, B and C'
"'Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use'"
That would be an excellent argument if anyone were actually saying that. You'd be well advised to take it and put it on the shelf until you find somebody who is.
There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives." This isn't a "oops, we thought this was somewhat net-negative and it was actually slightly net-positive" situation. This was a "literally ANY amount of effort would have determined this particular program was a winner" situation.
To say it a little pithier, you're claiming the argument is "don't ever shoot unless you can hit a bullseye" when in fact the argument is "if one of your first shots hits a child in the face, maybe we should take your gun away."
Now, there's an open question about whether cancelling a program like this was a result of incompetence (i.e. not doing the bare minimum research to understand how useful it was) or malice (i.e. seeing these particular foreigners dying as a good thing). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which is more plausible. Any, y'know, which is scarier.
>There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives."
Not according to Scott's reasoning. His example is a program of high effectiveness, but his reasoning is that since the money from the program goes back to the general pool, you need to compare the program to that, which would imply that we keep even programs of low effectiveness since they are still more effective than the general pool. He just doesn't spell this out.
Well, yes, if your goal is to raise the median effectiveness of the programs you start with the bottom 50-th percentile and replace THOSE, hoping the new ones will do better. That way median go up.
If you start with the very best odds are you won't be able to do better and median go down.
This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning: "You say we should use criterion X to decide if we should do Y, but edge cases are hard to adjudicate, so you're basically saying we can't ever do Y; or you're saying we should grind through the data until all Knightian uncertainty is resolved and we can find the true utilitarian result."
Two issues with this:
1. Edge cases and acceptable risks are a pretty general feature of utilitarian reasoning, there are various ways of addressing them, there's no particular reason for Scott to spend time on them, and utilitarian reasoning doesn't commit you to a particular strategy for dealing with real-world uncertainty.
2. The examples Scott focused on are not edge cases, and he repeatedly made this point.
>This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning:
Sure.
If you don't distinguish between action and inaction, then plain EA-style utilitarianism implies that if you don't immediately spend all the money you have (except that necessary for survival, staying employed, etc.) on helping poor people around the world, you are a horrible person for being complicit in their suffering.
There are ways in which EA tries to get around this. I don't find them convincing, but convincing or not, Scott isn't using them here--his argument is basically taking seriously the EA reductio ad absurdum that says you have to give everything away. Of course this argument applies to any sort of utilitarian reasoning about helping people. And that's what's wrong with it.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Basically, there are two ways to cut waste/abuse
1. Pause/stop everything and then restart those programs that can be justified
2. Audit all activities and stop those that are wasteful
Note that both methods are used by private companies: the second as part of the normal functioning of a company and the first in times of crisis. Both methods are legitimate and depend on the scale of the abuse, available time and available resources. I don't really have an opinion which way is more appropriate for the US at the moment.
It's not a time of crisis. Trump thinks it's a crisis, because he really likes saying "I will declare an emergency" and "the worst X in history," but our fiscal situation is not so dire that you can't wait a couple months to take the obviously good programs out of the firing line first.
If nothing else, the current budget funds the government through March. No matter what insanity you force through with executive orders, you still have to wait until March for the money to actually get redirected to the hypothetical better programs. May as well use that time to check if you're accidentally going to kill thousands of people.
But isn't Scott's counter argument just: foreign aid is ~1% of the budget, so if you want to cut a lot of waste you can do so without touching foreign aid, which we now contains one of the best programs the government has (PEPFAR)? Now, obviously I see why it is politically toxic to say "we're going to cut a bunch of government programs but not foreign aid" but cutting foreign aid can still be bad even if it is politically convenient.
The answer to your first question is No, but your second is yes. Plenty of presidents have created commissions with the goal to investigate which programs were bad, then based on their recommendations, canceled those. This is the only time I can remember a president canceling more, than reinstating the funding later. And that’s assuming he actually plans on reinstating any of the.
? The point is, all we should be doing is taking away money from *bad* programs! Not taking away monry from unusually-good programs for reason, like PEPFAR!
The people canceling the programs literally have the philosophy that the government sucks at allocating money, so they don't believe at all that the money would end up in the actual best program.
There is this pattern I've seen a lot in business and marriages and the like where one person will say "we need to do both X and Y. I'm going to do X, and leave Y to you." Where X is the fun and easy thing and Y is the boring difficult thing.
Even dividing the programs into "good" and "bad" is generally wrong. Some are more effective than others, but they're also generally working on different problems.
that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground
Is not an option.
As a rule, after you fire people, and blow up their programs, some you need don't come back, and it takes significant amounts of time for them to get back to work, (potentially years), and to rehire people.
In short, cancelling a program and reinstating it is a great way of turning good programs into bad ones.
In the meantime, the problem they were facing goes uncontrolled and gets worse, and now if it was a real problem you need to dig out.
In short, cancelling programs that you actually need really is prohibitably expensive, and cancelling ones that you do not still might cost money now to save money later.
I expect many readers will make very incorrect guesses about this article based on that summary, so I feel I should clarify that it's not discussing some sort of legal earmarking process, it's talking about illegally refusing to pay your taxes.
I consider this clearly unethical (except ~in situations where it would be ethical to violently overthrow your government) and I think a large majority of people would broadly agree with me.
I read through this. I wouldnt say the "you" in this sentence actually applies to most people who read it.
There is one weird trick to not pay taxes if you dont work for an employer, have no us based interest bearing accounts, brokerage accounts or property.
> I doubt anyone has a specific finite foreigner-to-American ratio which is more than 1000x
I genuinely think that if you polled Americans, most people would value an American life at more than 1000 Africans. Hell, there's people who would say that number is infinite, seeing as they see those lives as having less than zero value. There's people saying that in this very blog's comments section, you can't just pretend they don't exist.
I think we're agreeing. You're saying many people would say the number is infinite, I'm saying few people would say it's finite but greater than 1000x.
Blockade of Africa cost 2K Brits, freeing 150K slaves back in the early to mid-1800s so he might not be. Then again there are far more Africans as a percentage of world population than ever before, and people are far less Christian.
I think the big problem here is conflating "how valuable is this?" with "how much should the US government spend on it?"
As a human, I believe that Coca-Cola shareholders and Pepsi shareholders are equally valuable and worthy of respect. However, as a shareholder in Coca-Cola, I believe that the Coca-Cola company should spend one hundred percent of its money trying to benefit Coca-Cola shareholders, and zero percent of its money trying to benefit Pepsi shareholders. I have nothing against Pepsi shareholders as people (and I might even be one myself) but doing nice things for them is just not the job of the Coca-Cola company.
It's the job of a country's government to serve the interests of the citizens of that country, nothing else.
This just questions the legitimacy of taxation. The enterprise of taxation presupposes the legitimacy of the collective imposing their will on the country and redistributing their assets as they see fit, rather than just independently paying for things, individually.
It's perfectly fine to question the legitimacy of the enterprise from first principles and adopt an alternative more libertarian perspective in which taxation is inherently evil and should be minimized to the greatest extent possible, but that's mostly orthogonal to the matter at hand.
If collective imposed redistribution to foreigners is illegitimate due to the mechanism, then using that mechanism to direct funds towards domestic causes is similarly illegitimate.
Yes, taxation inherently has legitimacy problems that voluntary donations lack. That's why it is commonly justified with the claim that individuals can't purchase national defense, being a public good. Charitable donations are not a public good however, and the existence of them shows it's possible without a government taxing to provide it.
No, that's not all there is to that position. One can concede the legitimacy of taxation but still question the legitimacy of things that the taxes go to pay for. I for example question where in the Constitution charity of any kind is authorized, let alone charity to foreigners.
I think there's a good argument for saying that the government needs to stop being an organisation that just does whatever random thing people want it to do and focuses on things only a government can do. The point* is that if you've got an all-singing all-dancing flailing omnistate, it may as well flap a tentacle in a direction that saves 250,000 Africans instead of flapping it in a direction that does nothing.
In fact, some of the money Coca-Cola spends does also benefit Pepsi. For instance, Coke and Pepsi both pay various trade groups and lobbying organizations to make the market and regulatory environments more favorable for soda generally. That this benefits their competitors is not a disincentive, since it makes the pie for both of them bigger than it otherwise would be.
The analogy to PEPFAR is that the United States buys several things that are in the interests of its citizens, such as "soft power," a better global reputation, a more stable world, and national pride, for what amounts to a very small amount of money. The fact that Africans also benefit doesn't make those things not in the national interest.
Is a State not supposed to ever do anything based on ethical principles of any kind? A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral. You could say it only values those as proxies for reputation and stability and pride but that's just the same argument you can make for individuals doing good. "Uhh I didn't do it for you, I did it because it makes ME look better!"
> A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral
Again we're getting confused between values and responsibilities.
The fact that a particular institution doesn't do a particular thing does not mean that any of the people in that institution think it's a worthless thing to do, just that it is outside the scope of that institution. Fixing potholes in Buenos Aires is a fine idea, but not something that the Moose Jaw Macrame Society should be spending its money on.
A state doesn't exist because of ethics. A state exists because some entity will claim a geographic monopoly on violence. In the US, that entity is subject to elections.
There are also many places where we put in lots of money and gained gratitude, like Germany and Japan. But in any case, the recipients of the aid are not the only people we build up goodwill with.
Yes, those countries are great allies (maybe until three weeks ago). Rebuilding a first-world country is more likely to result in people seeing and understanding your contributions.
Bush said the Iraqis would welcome us with sweets and flowers. I don't think that worked out. How do Iraq and Afghanistan feel about all the blood and treasure we spent on them? "Oh, no, those are bad foreign intervention programs, not good ones." Sorry, like Scott said, you can't make the money flow to just the good interventions. Everyone thinks the foreigners will be grateful, but that has more to do with their ability to be like us in the first place.
Let's ignore Africans' ability to help us out if we needed it. Do they even have the desire to? How many countries have America Day celebrations for all the lives we've saved?
I think it's good to spend the money to save the lives out of the basic Christian duty like Deiseach said. But I see no evidence besides hopium that we're actually buying good will among them. More likely they see us as a bunch of foreign moral busybodies nagging them about their sex lives.
The US occupied Germany and Japan for years and essentially rebuilt their societies along pro-American lines, which TBH I think had a bigger impact on their subsequent attitudes.
There is a myth of the Marshall Plan that Tyler Cowen has written about, that our assistance to the defeated is why they recovered. In fact, we gave much more money to the UK (and forgave most of their war loans), while Germany was still required to pay reparations. The Ordoliberals of West Germany just did a much better job of running their country in the postwar era than Labour did in the UK.
A cursory search doesn't reveal any surveys of PEPFAR recipients, but they are presumably at least somewhat grateful the US provides the aid. Note that women and children are the primary recipients, and the latter are not generally grateful *to anyone*, even those who help them.
> When asked which country they perceived to be the best model for their future development, 33% of respondents chose the United States, while 22% chose China. Out of 34 countries surveyed, the United States surpassed China in 23 countries. Only 4 African countries (Tanzania, Senegal, Tunisia, Eswatini, Malawi, and Mozambique) ranked both countries equally. Compared to the results of the same question in the previous survey period (2014/2015), preferences for China and the United States as development models remained unchanged. However, the U.S. advantage increased marginally from 6 to 9 percentage points.
> Younger Africans (36% of people aged 18- 25) were more likely than older Africans (26% of people above 55) to prefer the United States as a model for development. While men (25%) and women (19%) expressed equal preference for the United States as a development model, men preferred China more than women.
Note that Africans don't see US-China influence as zero-sum. They welcome both.
I don't know if they'd go to *bat* for the US, but distance matters a lot - Mexico can send people to help us when a hurricane hits while that's a longer distance for any African nation.
I'm willing to leave the *ability* for Africans to go to bat for us off the table. Who knows what future thing might happen where we suddenly wish they have a bunch of goodwill for us? One reason to invest in goodwill is that you don't know how it will be needed. (And if they become merely "slightly below average economically," at 1.5 billion people that's an awesome trading partner.)
PEPFAR is very much the motte justifying some completely absurd, and much less useful/stability-increasing/"soft power" providing NGOs dancing around in the bailey.
Interestingly, I think the Coca-Cola corporation might spend a higher percent of its intake on foreign aid than the US government (see https://www.coca-colacompany.com/social/coca-cola-foundation , I must be getting something wrong but it really does seem to be 2% vs. 1%). But see also anomie's reply.
This seems misguided. Coca cola is essentially payed by investors to increase their value, and accordingly, that's what they should do. Not due to some inherent rule about valuing one group over another group, but simply because it was on that condition that they were granted the money.
Using a strict parallel, taxation shouldn't be used for anything tax payers don't want. That doesn't necessarily preclude programs to benefit outsiders, since unlike the case of investors, it's hardly self-evident that taxpayers don't support that.
Of course, the parallel isn't strict, since individual taxpayers don't get to decide whether to pay taxes or on what condition they'll pay.
But that only makes the analogy even less appropriate.
If Coca-Cola shareholders voted a resolution at a general meeting to pay a dividend to Pepsi shareholders then such a dividend should be paid. The interests of the shareholders are whatever the shareholders say they are.
The American people's elected representatives voted for PEPFAR. That means that it is in the interests of the American people.
The American people also voted for Donald Trump to be President, therefore whatever he does as President is also in the interests of the American people.
There's a Separation of Powers question to be argued in terms of who exactly has the authority to do what, but that's not what we're talking about today.
This is one question that bothers me a lot in the arguments against Trump's actions. Almost everything he is trying to do is something the Executive was directly or indirectly empowered to do.
I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
I totally get why they don't want him to do that, but as Obama once said and conservatives have since run into the ground "Elections have consequences." Obama wasn't wrong, but just very shortsighted.
> I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
The reasonable argument is that it is illegal for the President to do so. PEPFAR was not setup by a previous President, it was authorized by the US congress. It is still authorized by the US congress and the executive branch, according to the laws of the United States, is obligated to spend the money appropriated by congress.
If the Trump administration believes this program is bad, then they need to work with Republicans in congress to not reauthorize it in March when its current authorization expires.
1. Does Trump have the power to shut down a program that was authorised by Congress (ie the Separation of Powers question you have).
2. Do the American people think that PEPFAR meets the goals that they have for government spending? I think that's what Scott is trying to answer here.
I don't think there is - or can be - some external absolute measure of "the interests of the American people" beyond "what the American people want". But then, I also think that shareholder lawsuits to impose some external legal standard on what management does are bullshit. Pass a resolution at a general meeting and if they don't comply, then fire them, or sue them. But the purpose of a corporation is to do what the shareholders desire. The purpose of a government is to do what the citizens desire. There can be limitations on how easily they can achieve certain things, on how big a majority may be required to do certain things. But if enough people want to do something, then the government or the management should be compelled to do it.
Foreign aid does serve national interests - it's a cheap way to buy influence with other countries. Being known as "those nice guys who helped cure our AIDS epidemic" is useful when we need to ask a favor from another country.
I find this style of argument in favor of foreign aid much more convincing than the utilitarian arguments where we give foreigners’ lives inherent value. Still, I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations. If they understood how much of a favor we are doing them by providing incredibly-good-value life-saving drugs, they would simply buy the drugs themselves.
Consistently acting like you consider lives to have inherent value, as opposed to making visible cynical Machiavellian calculations about who's more likely to be a worthwhile ally in the future, can be a useful strategy for building trust and gratitude.
Alice and Bob are going on a date at a restaurant. Bob is attentive to Alice's needs, but rude to Charlie the waiter. What can Alice infer about how Bob will act when Alice is in a less favorable negotiating position?
> I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations.
Given that the land exists and is populated, would there be greater marginal benefit to American interests if the people there were slightly more prosperous, thus able to participate in international trade more than they currently do? Or worse off, and functionally unable to export much of anything but plague-stricken refugees or desperate violence?
Probably stuff like "okay, we will drop the charges against the senator's nephew" or "we will release the Marine from police custody, but he better stay on the base from now on."
I think this is what people are thinking when they assign an infinite foreigner/domestic value ratio. They think that those African citizens should rely on their own government to create programs to benefit those citizens. They form the meta-level belief about relative value from this object-level belief about accountability.
If someone in Africa was concealing a biological weapon which had previously killed roughly three-quarters of a million Americans, a virus that clearly poses ongoing strategic danger since there's still no reliable cure or vaccine, would you say mitigating that threat is sufficiently relevant to shared interests of American citizens for government action? Assuming a proven, cost-effective way to do so, which doesn't incidentally create any "negotiating with terrorists" type messes.
But Coca Cola funds all sorts of non-directly profit maximizing pursuits (scholarships, sport games, physical renovations, art galleries, etc). Part of it is that shareholders believe that such pursuit have uncertain but positive ROI at some future date, or some indirect contribution to current ROI (through marketing, consumer franchise, "goodwill", etc.). But also because they think it's a good in itself.
Same for USAID. There might be indirect benefits (creating a bit of goodwill goes a long way and might be cheaper than sending in the marines/directly bribing some generalissimo to pursue geopolitical objectives, stimying the creation of new viral variants might be cheaper than curing US citizens when they get infected, the data generated are a public good benefiting US citizens, etc), but also is a good in itself, just like the Coca Cola program for disadvantaged youth or whatever.
There is also an element of "isolated demand for rigor" (or as commonly known online, hypocrisy): no, after spending so much blood and treasure to save the poor minorities oppresed by the Axis of Evil, make sure Israelis sleep safe and sound, indirectly funding missionary trips so that the souls of heathen foreigners might be saved, etc, you don't get to act all principled about how it's treason to cheapily saving Africans from preventable death. Clean your own house first if this is really what you believe and not just some convenient debate pose.
You can't handwave away the people who think the amount is infinite. And in terms of taxation, I think zero dollars should be spent on charity, since that is a matter of voluntary donations.
There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value. Pretty sure there's a few antinatalists around; there used to be.
Also the foreigner-to-American phrasing is better. If white Australians didn't speak English, Americans wouldn't care about them, either.
> There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value.
Well yes, I'm one of them. I'm not an antinatalist, mind you. A few people having less children isn't going to make the death of humanity come any sooner.
I agree with the literal thesis, and that PEPFAR is very good and shouldn’t be cancelled, but I’m not sure “flowing to other programs” is the best way to think of spending cuts
I think a better model of cancelling PEPFAR would be that it relaxes *real resource constraints* a little bit by taking a bunch of labor and everything involved in the medicine supply chain and such that was formerly involved in administering the program.
Financially, this looks like people getting fired, the price of labor going down a tiny bit, and former PEPFAR administrators etc selling their labor to the next highest bidder. Likewise for other resources: demand for gas and everything else in the supply chain drops a bit, price goes down, and some marginal uses of gas etc become profitable or just barely cheap enough for an arbitrary consumer somewhere to purchase.
Also, to reiterate, none of this changes the conclusion for me. I think it’s good for the government to basically take up a PEPFAR-sized batch of real resources to use for PEPFAR
Scott's approach has the merit that it's making an apples-to-apples comparison. Even if you favor the programs being cancelled and the unspent money being returned to taxpayers, you could still achieve those cuts by ranking government programs on usefulness, and cutting programs starting at the bottom of the list.
How would you operationalize your model? It seems like it requires us to imagine what the typical private sector company would have done with medically experienced labor being fractionally cheaper. I'm sure that provides some benefits, but I'm not sure how you would calculate it.
I think it would be better if the Trump administration did that rather than acting chaotically. But since I favor ending most government programs, I'm not going to object when the chaotic process results in an end to some random program.
There's an old saying in state economics, 'Whatever we can do, we can afford'.
Money and budgets are abstractions, what exists in the real world is labor and resources and how they are directed. If there is idle labor that could be used to some good purpose, printing money to pay for that labor to stop being idle and start producing something is not lost money, it's money creating new value. And the money itself will flow back into the economy, activating more labor as it increases demand.
If there are people who want to run PEPFAR and are qualified to run PEPFAR and are otherwise going to be doing much less useful things, then paying them to run PEPFAR isn't a deadweight loss. It's creating value where none would otherwise exist.
All this would hold if the government didn’t increase spending to compensate. But also, each unit of gas etc. getting cheaper comes because a different American isn’t getting to use it. You’d have to argue the program employees were using the gas worse than the average American. Maybe so, if the program employees are richer than average, but I’m not convinced it’s a big effect.
If another program gets funded as a result, then the govt will commandeer those real resources instead. So it still matters where the money goes in the counterfactual.
Your framing is most useful in the general case where the legislature debates and proposes a specific level of spending which may be higher or lower to some previous amount.
This haphazard freeze with no changes in budget is a different thing
I am very skeptical of altruism, and very skeptical of charities. Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else? What if their best bussines model to maximize their self-interested profit is basically moral entrepreneurship, lying and even aiding authoritarian governments to get donations while pretending they "help" people?
Self interest is not reducible to economic profit. A person can have any reasons to prioritize their self interest in ways that have nothing to do with, or may even even require sacrificing, their access to economic resources.
"Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else?"
...not trivially, no? Just to give an example, I know lots of people who could easily get eg $500K working for Big Tech, who instead make $100 - 200K working at a charity because they really believe in the cause. I think I've heard the standard is that charities pay 30% less than for-profits for the same quality of labor, so if that's true then everyone working at a nonprofit is by that fact alone not working in their self-interest.
I agree with Eric that they will still prioritize something like "internal benefits they're getting", but those internal benefits might be the warm feeling of doing good.
I worked at NPOs/NGOs that were mostly state-funded and supposed to do "good things". I am so grateful to all German taxpayers! Best salaries I ever got. Often tax-free. Easiest work and most fun work, too. And I was just a small cog, the people up made more and had even more fun. (One of them greatly enjoyed to tell the local staff: "You are fired". In contexts, where you could never fire someone under German law.) - It was "culture", but conversations with fellow aid-workers: just the same.
If your social circle consists of people who have the luxury of getting to choose between a $500K job and a more rewarding/inspiring/enjoyable $200K job, consider that you might not have a very good handle on what life looks like for the modal taxpayer. Plenty of people are legitimately financially struggling, as are their brothers -- not everybody's brother is a successful real estate agent in Des Moines, even if all the brothers of all the people you know are.
Because of diminishing marginal utility of money, somebody deciding to sacrifice an additional $300K on top of the $200K they're getting either way, is arguably less impressive than somebody putting $50 in a collection box when that $50 is basically their entire discretionary spending for this month, after rent and food and basic necessities. Which is great if they're choosing to put that money in that collection box of their own free will, but it makes it a morally dubious act to argue that the government should take that $50 from them and spend it on a charity not of their choice.
Sure, that's perfectly valid and a great reason to not take $50 from poor people.
But not as an argument against those charity workers being generally less interested in maximizing profit for themselves which is what this comment thread is about, no?
They aren't as pure as heart as an impoverished person who gives away the shirt off his back, but nobody's saying they're Jesus... just that they are likely satisfied with the life quality they have and not grasping for more. In a world where many well-off people are decidedly not that, I think it's reasonable to believe they are genuinely trying to help people and not secretly get richer. Just because they don't have to give up their house and car to help people doesn't mean they can't be helping people at all. Yes, it's easier to be content with what you've got when you've got a decent life, but so many people who have decent lives are grasping and envious and not content at all.
Agree, it's tangential to the main point of the top comment of this thread.
But Scott's dismissing of the "don't we have a responsibility to help those close to us first" point by saying basically "nah, nobody close to you is actually in need of help, that's just fiction" rubbed me the wrong way a bit. So I wanted to respond to that, and a comment where he casually mentions his many friends who are either making $500k or voluntarily choosing to prefer their dream job at $200K instead, seemed like a good place to put that response.
So your aim was to talk directly to Scott, and you felt like responding to a comment of his was more effective than posting a comment on the essay, so you picked the comment to which it could be least tangential and tried to connect it?
“Self interest” includes more than salary—self righteous moral preening has a value as well…
Especially for a social circle where people’s Hobson’s Choice is between making $500k as an evil Meta PM or $200k + the Warm Glow of Self Satisfaction(tm) for maintaining some charity’s IT stack.
Do you have an actual set of reasoned or empirical arguments as to your position, or are you just trying to make yourself feel better about not helping others by casting people who do as just as selfish but dishonest?
Genuine question.
Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Well, there's public choice theory. We have to assume everyone works for their self-interest and therefore organizations work more for their own continued existence and socioeconomic gains of its members than any causes, therefore if there any perverse incentives, like bussiness model I mentioned, they act accordingly. See the Rescue Industry, for example, and plenty of goverment programs that have long outlived their purpose.
Why do we have to assume that? Because there's a lot of obvious examples of people doing the opposite. For example, I'm arguing with you rather than doing the work I should be. That's obviously against my socioeconomic interest, and yet, here I am. Otherwise smart people buy lottery tickets. People buy games on Steam they never play and they know this.
So you can twist the evidence to suit your theory, or you can update your theory to fit the evidence.
Either way, I'm concluding you have no actual basis and are just trying to make yourself feel better.
The people PEPFAR is supposed to help are the American people. Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste. Maybe the mechanism by which PEPFAR helps the American people is by helping foreign people, but this is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.
“Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste.”
That may be true according to your philosophy of government, but it certainly doesn’t say that anywhere in the US constitution. You can debate whether “promote the general welfare” in the preamble of the constitution actually means “promote our own welfare”, but nothing in the actually effective parts of the constitution is designed to prevent the government from engaging in foreign projects with the goal of helping non-Americans.
“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and GENERAL WELFARE OF THE UNITED STATES; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”
Emphasis mine of course. I did check this before making my original comment.
Anecdotal data point: my wife spent a year in Tanzania to get a village school going. Salary: 1000€/ month. Does that sound like "self-interested profit" was at the top of her list of priorities?
I think you should just move to Tanzania? I mean, I don't know you or your life. But immigration to Tanzania seems pretty easy, and the pound goes really far there. Probably it would cost much less than 1000 pounds a month!
I suppose my comment was too oblique? It was heartfelt - I've been planning to go to Tanzania for about a decade (as you might guess from my user name), and given the likely duration of my trip, it will probably cost > 1000€/ month.
But beyond that, my comment answered the rhetorical question "Does [getting paid 1000€/ month to work in Tanzania] sound like 'self-interested profit' was at the top of her list of priorities?" No shade on FluffyBuffalo's wife, but my answer is a resounding "uh, yes", at least to me.
You’ve got one hypothetical but I’ve got another. What if the best business model to maximize self-interested profit is to honestly identify suffering people and propose effective means to help them? Did you ever think about that possibility?
I don't think such business model exists. Because charities want donations, they don't necessarily have to help people to get them, they could just pretend they do and get more publicity and power.
I believe The Wealth of Nations is where he gives the famous “invisible hand” argument that the profit motive can in many circumstances direct many people to do the thing that is most sociallly beneficial.
The profit motive can direct people in such a way, but not by first identifying "suffering people". The price system doesn't require that a producer know about suffering, but instead what people will pay.
Charities that only wish to serve their own interests do so best by spending tons of money on publicity, so that everyone knows their name and thinks of them when a charitable topic comes up, and goes to them first when they want to make donations or find a partner to work with.
Thus, the charities that everyone has heard about, are definitionally the worst ones who spend the most on publicity and influence instead of charitable work.
It's easy to get that filtered evidence and think that all charities are bad.
But there are lots of great ones that don't spend their money on publicity, so you don't know anything about them.
The money saved would not "go into the federal discretionary fund budget... from there, it would be go to the same kinds of programs the rest of the budget goes to". Mechanically that is just not a correct explanation of what would happen to the money. If Trump and Musk simply withheld all PEPFAR payments, the money would simply sit in a federal account doing nothing at all*. Economically, its value would flow through to Americans broadly in the form of reduced inflation (and consequently reduced interest rates).
At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit. (The same thing would happen if, instead of an improper cancellation by Trump, Congress simply repealed the program.)
You might quite reasonably believe that Congress will not choose to allocate this money to the best possible use, but the next use of the money *would* be deliberated, and it would *not* be some kind of automatic flow through to other discretionary spending. At the present time, the most likely use would be to offset a small part of the extension of the 2017 tax bill (TCJA), parts of which are due to expire this year. Congress would therefore need to find fewer other spending cuts or fewer other tax hikes in order to meet whatever deficit target they set during the tax negotiations.
* I realized this might be insufficiently forceful. The money would sit in an account *and would not be legally available for any other spending*. Trump (unless he broke the law) would not be able to simply move the funds to some other part of the "discretionary" budget. The discretionary budget is not called that because the president has discretion to assign the funds willy-nilly, it's just called that by contrast with Social Security and Medicare, where the spending amounts are determined by the program formula and not by a statutory authorization of a specific total $ amount.
I grant that you're right about the Trump/Musk situation, but "At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit." sounds to me like they would in every meaningful go into the discretionary budget. Am I misunderstanding something?
Yes. They could also go to tax cuts or deficit reduction. And not only could, but it's extremely likely that they *would* go to a mix of those two things.
They could also be used to pay for program changes to entitlement spending, although that is considerably less likely.
Under ~no circumstances would they flow to a program like BEAD which has already been allocated a specific pool of money that is unlikely to be increased.
I've changed the wording from "discretionary budget" to "pot of spending", which hopefully makes it clearer that the pot could also be used for tax cuts.
But I want to make sure this is just a semantic distinction - would you agree that if the government spent $1.5T this year and $1.4T next year, then you should think of 93% of PEPFAR as being used in spending rather than the tax cuts/deficit reduction, and the other two things are only important if the size of the federal budget changes in an unprecedented way?
The reason the distinction is important is that the merits of tax cuts, and separately the merits of deficit reduction, are unlikely to be similar to the merits of the average discretionary spending program. (Different individuals will likely disagree as to whether tax cuts are better or worse than the spending.)
Doesn’t this just come back to the point that out of all the things to cut, PEPFAR should probably be pretty low on the list? Not to mention I think you’re vastly overstating the “inflation benefits” you get from this money not being spent. Not only is a lot of this money going to foreign countries, but the Fed is doing monetary offset anyways. I’m thinking like a 1 basis point effect on interest rates at the most lol.
Depends no? If they cancelled $100B of spending and then didn't touch anything else I'd say 100% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts. If they cut $500B of spending then only 20% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts.
Foreign aid is one of the less inflationary forms of spending, given that it's spent overseas by/helping foreigners and it's a small percentage of total spending.
Money "not spent" in Africa, reduces inflation in Africa and slightly affects exchange rates. It does not (for the most part) reduce inflation in America.
The AIDS drug for Africa seems extremely cheap per life saved.
As a citizenist, I put a higher priority on my fellow American citizens' lives and well-being, but I'm not an ideologue about it. We can save a whole lot of foreign lives for not much money, so that's a good thing to do.
It would be nice if the unpleasant and unhealthy Southeast African male penchant for "dry sex" was also somehow deterred, but letting their poor wives die from AIDS is too high of a price and doesn't seem to have been very effective of a deterrent.
Presumably, Musk and Trump are canceling stuff willy-nilly and then seeing which policies are most vociferously defended and which ones aren't.
I strongly agree with your presumption here, particularly given that Musk has had about two weeks to look over things from the inside, which is a laughably short period of time to consider an agency with tems of billions in funding (i.e, equivalent to a Fortune 500 company).
Well, *someone* tried to cut all federal grants at once, and did cut the entire foreign aid program, including medications for hundreds of thousands of people.
I don't want to sound bad, what exactly do we earn by spending billions saving poor 60 IQ people on another continent from their own terrible practices? People have a point when they say money could be used to improve the lives of millions of americans which are more productive, if only government was way more efficient at least.
I am not saying nobody should help them, I am just thinking if we assume that if the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans, either directly or indirectly, spending billions on saving Africans from themselves doesn't make that much sense to me
You're arguing that people should only work to their specific self interest, which brings me to the question I raised above. For convenience:
> Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Or alternatively, let us posit this scenario: let us assume that A Country could increase the general wealth of its citizenry by 1% by, say, burning the Kuwait oil fields and thus improving the price of oil that the US exports at the cost of devastating the local environment and Kuwaiti economy.
Or, if you like, the Kuwaiti oilfields have already been set alight, should A Country intervene to mitigate the damage if the outcome is the same as the above scenario?
Have you never heard of reputational effects? The U.S. takes a great many actions in the world that are unpopular but (in its judgement) advance its self interest. Other countries often have choices about whether to help, stay neutral or oppose such actions. Insofar as people other than you DO care about human lives (and I assure you that some of us do), spending a small amount of money to save a large amount of lives seems like the kind of thing likely to pay for itself many times over, in terms of reduced costs derived from general goodwill.
I've seen this argument advanced a lot recently, but I've not seen any examples given of this goodwill having manifested in the real world. Granted there may be a few here and there, but I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much
Honest question, have you been looking? Perhaps read up on your history and learn a bit about how international politics went from about 5000 BC up through the 1940s or so. The U.S. position in the international order is really, REALLY exceptional, and it's not just because of having the biggest economy or the biggest military:
"I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much"
How much do various U.S. military operations cost? How much are its trade agreements worth? How about its intelligence services? Diplomatic corps? The collective budget (and value in the case of trade) of all of that is HUGE. Even slightly more friction in a few places--worse trade agreements, less efficient military ops, bad intelligence causing poor decisions--could add up to billions easily. Counterfactuals--bad things that DON'T happen because of goodwill--harder to account for, but given how many capital-T Trillions the U.S. spent because of ONE terrorist attack when a handful of militants in the Middle East got mad enough to actually do something, even small likelihood reductions for things like terrorism and war come out to pretty good deals.
"if we assume that the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans" there is the assumption though!
I think when your country is the richest country on the planet, you can think about whether to help other, poorer countries rather than just your own citizens. A company should be interested in its own growth and profitability all the way until it becomes extremely successful, but that at that point, it should consider giving some of its money to charity, and many do. I think of the US government the same way. Our foreign aid budget is like 1% of what we spend money on. When you're the richest country in the world, you should start thinking about helping other, less fortunate countries. Your primary concern should still be your own citizens, but you can afford to spare some thought and money for others.
I agree with Milton Friedman on corporations: they should disburse their money to their shareholders, and then let those shareholders donate to charity if they want to.
'General Welfare' can mean a lot of things. I don't know that this is so obvious a point.
If a large percentage of Americans want us to help other countries, and I think they do, would it not be to their "General Welfare" to have the government do that? And, can you not say it promotes positive relationships with other countries to provide them AID, which promotes the general welfare of the united states?
A quick google shows we provided foreign aid to Venezuela in 1812 to recover from an earthquake. Surely if this was some constitutional issue the founders would have cared about it at that time, since many of them were still alive.
Forty years ago I used to be strongly in favor of stockholders over stakeholders (e.g., workers, the community that grew up around the factory, etc.), but then I saw what first Michael Milken and then the outsourcers to China could do when unrestrained by anything other than the letter of the law (and sometimes not that in Milken's case). So, now I have more mixed views on the topic.
Is just perpetuating something more valuable than other possible uses, like say - within Africa - actually curing river blindness or something?
Or if HIV is a permanent part of human experience, is it good for a program to have no possibility of ever ending, no way that responsibility can be transferred so that it will not be reliant on the fortunes of one country?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is an effective use of the US treasury. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it is concerning, perhaps, to an effective altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?uses, like say actually curing river blindness or something?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is a great use of dollars since everyone says so. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it perhaps ought to concern the altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?
I don't think the reason people in Africa rely on the US for AIDS medicine is that they don't care about each other enough, I think it's more about how the US is insanely prosperous compared to Africa (and uniquely so for a country of its size).
PEPFAR costs something like $21 per year per US citizen, which is pretty trivial for a country with a per capital GDP of $80k but less so in, say, Zimbabwe, which has a particularly high HIV rate (22%) and a particularly low GDP ($2.5k).
Also the entire world population with HIV is around 39 million, which is only like 12% of the population of the US. So it's about 58 times easier for the US to pay for HIV treatment for the entire world than it is for Zimbabwe to pay for it for their citizens.
Firstly, it looks really nice. Even if everyone is ultra-cynical, no one seems to want to stop being a hypocrite. They all dress themselves up as democracies or supporters of world peace and welfare. Saying you saved millions of lives from a disease in a foreign nation is status-raising.
Secondly, it buys influence and networks with local leaders. If the US had an Africa strategy to bring the nations into alignment with it, this would absolutely be a part of such a thing. I don't think it does, but it does generate positive feelings and counteracts China's influence. If you are an American citizen, you benefit from Pax Americana for every country that subscribes to it, even if you see dollars going out each year.
"... the average respondent thinks that the United States is a meddlesome busy-body that only occasionally considers the needs of other countries…and that the United States is thus a force for good and peace and they like it very much, thank you."
The above article discusses the fact that, historically, superpowers tend to wind up opposed by large chunks of the world in a logical balancing response, but the US is military allies with a huge chunk of the world, trades with a huge chunk of the world, and can throw its weight around powerfully against e.g. the Russian economy.
This has tremendous benefits for US citizens, and I would argue that purely out of self-interest it's definitely worth 1% of federal expenditures
The Copenhagem Consensus has developed a easily understood cost benefit analysis and made specific recommendations for enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost. It might pay to explore the website.
He developed it to argue for ways " enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost". Sorry, if you favorite project did not make it to the top. As you are not the only one who believes it should so very obviously be on top, Lomborg wrote some books explaining how to address climate change - and how not to. You may also read this blog and Scott`s writing in other places to see why not everyone here believes in "I want you to panic".
My answer got out a bit too early. Anyways: Scott is “Rationalist”, to a large part, ie part of a community that worries about AI becoming an existential risk. Climate change is seen as real (by me too, also by Lomborg, also by Matt Ridley) and as a serious issue to consider (by those 3 guys, too), but NOT as an existential risk to humanity or even modern human civilisation (same here +BL +MR). Scott rarely touches the issue directly, as lots of other cover it competently (eg: BL +MR). And he is wise enough not to claim warmer winters are on average better than colder winters. His posts about why more people die in winter did touch the topic a little, but he came up with seasonality of flu as the most plausible reason. Nor did he ever wrote - Greta forbid - “more CO2 has lead to a greener planet earth”. He DID write recently he does not really care deeply whether there are 97 kinds of squirrel in the Americas or 79. Matt Ridley would loudly disagree!
Or maybe he first drank tea. What matters: are his conclusions broadly correct. Epistemic helpless, but they make much more sense to me than what I got to hear from the other side. Which is: what we got on TV, what we heard at school, what was and is written in text-books for teenagers I had to work with - and Greta/Last Generation/ Klimakleber on and over the top.
When you are several trillion in the hole with blowout deficits each year, doesn’t all money saved (unless it cuts directly into revenues) automatically go into the worthy cause of pointing the ship in a smarter direction than furiously digging yourself into a bigger hole? Mix them metaphors!
You’re talking about spending money you don’t have - it’s all money you can’t afford that you’re borrowing.
I’m highly pessimistic about politicians and spending also - but I would have had the same assumption about Javier Milei before I saw what he did. That shocked me enough to realise that my previous assumption that political systems were so broken they had no chance for course correction wasn’t always going to hold.
It’s pretty grim when clear thinkers like yourself can’t even conceive of the possibility that the most indebted nation on earth could possible stop spending and start cutting without catastrophe forcing it on them. It’s like it’s not even on your table of possibilities.
Its like an alcoholic open to any solution to his problem that doesn’t involve changing his exponential intake trajectory.
In this specific case, house Republicans have said that they intend to pass a budget extending Trump's existing tax cut (TCJA), cutting other taxes, and adding new spending (e.g. on border security). Extending the TCJA costs ~500 billion per year by itself; the other stuff is expected to be expensive but the details aren't negotiated yet. Conceivably they will find enough pay-fors to offset all of this but it isn't expected.
The US isn't Argentina. It's biggest budget slices are for Social Security and the military. Not surprisingly, these also have very large and powerful constituencies who will electorally punish anyone who tries to reign them in. It's not impossible to fight them, but you need a lot of political capital to try. Republicans do not seem particularly interested in cutting spending on either, and I suspect Trump isn't going to break on that.
Foreign non-military aid is a very small amount of the overall US budget. You could double it to account for military aid or whatever and that would still be true (and not for nothing, but most people would not consider sending aging weapons overseas to count, so it's less than any nominal dollar amount you'd see).
The only way any of this makes sense is for DOGE to say to Congress in 8 months "look, we cut a trillion a year of spending and the world blamed Elon for it and thinks it's already done. Now all you have to do is ratify it by passing a reduced budget"
This way, Congress avoids most of the incentives that normally make it politically dangerous to cut programs, because Elon already did it.
The programs being cut currently are irrelevant on the scale of the US federal budget. There is absolutely no way that Musk can cut $1T dollars from the budget without major cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and/or defense. And if any of those are cut you better believe Congress will not "ratify" it because a LOT of voters depend on those programs and will be very upset if they are cut.
Should I link to the US debt clock? If your conclusion is “this is fine and will continue to work well indefinitely” when you look at it, then our perceptions are too far apart to reconcile.
Or maybe you think “it’s a lil high, I’m sure we’ll ease up before disaster strikes”? Either way we’re poles apart.
The U.S. is 237 years old. To the best of my recollection, the national debt has been a number than most people would consider large for every single one of those years. Even among the earliest policy thinkers of the U.S. there were those that argued that it *should* be large.
So if you think the U.S. is headed towards immanent disaster because of its debt, could you please provide more specifics than "hey, look, big number?" What size of number will cause the disaster? What form will the disaster take? Will it be sudden or gradual?
Yep. Republicans are going to do their best to collect as little tax as possible without actually touching big ticket items. Unless you think DOGE are about to be getting into any military systems any time soon?
I don't have specific answers to those questions and I doubt anyone truly does since the exact context of the current world economy has never occurred in history.
Basic theory of MMT: government debt for any large Fiat currency is not the same as your credit card debt. Modern governments don't collect taxes and then then spend what they collect. They create as much money as they think should be spent, them they delete some of the currently circulating money by taxing circulation.
There has literally never been a government who could print currency and who didn't have debt, because without debt there is no money. Government debt bt is literally just all the money ever created, plus interest, minus all taxes ever collected. Unless you want a straight up contraction of total currency, the number will keep growing.
“Basic theory of MMT” this is like barging into a medical argument and saying “basic argument of homeopathy”. There is not a single serious person who should be convinced by arguments from MMT… particularly after 2020-2022.
-It answers the question of why national debt can be dangerous, but not the way people think.
-Why do you think the pandemic era challenges MMT? A huge amount of money was printed, it wasn't used to build productive capacity, taxes remained low, and then we got inflation.
-Are you confusing MMT with the policy preferences of MMT advocates? To use your tortured medical analogy, it's like arguing against medication because you dislike pharma lobbyists.
Jefferson paid off the US government's debt. This did not eliminate currency, although of course we weren't on a fiat system then. If the current government decided to pay off all its debt, it would probably take a long while, but that wouldn't eliminate currency either.
It took me a while to figure out the answer to this question! People don't talk about it much, they usually leave it as a sort of vague disaster.
(TLDR: if debt climbs out of control, governments have to choose between a "debt crisis" and "hyperinflation", both of which are serious disasters for citizens.)
The first problem is that the more debt an entity already has, the riskier it is to lend them more money. So the higher US debt-to-GDP rises, the higher interest rates investors demand to convince them to buy US bonds. Those bonds backstop other investments (since nobody will give you a 2.5% 30-year mortgage when they could get a 4.75% 30-year T-bill), which is a direct cost paid by citizens. Homeowners literally pay more to the bank each month, the higher debt-to-GDP goes.
The specific disaster that happens when debt-to-GDP rises too high is that the country has to spend most of its incoming tax money on servicing the debt (paying interest to the folks who hold treasury bonds). Which means they have to issue even more bonds to get the money to actually pay for stuff. This cycle compounds. It's paying off one credit card with another credit card, basically. Eventually, there is no longer anybody who wants to buy US treasury bonds, no matter how high the interest rate. The market "bottoms out".
At this point the US must simply stop paying some bills. Maybe they stop repaying T bills, in which case their rating tanks and they can no longer raise money that way. Maybe they stop paying the military, or social security. This is one possible disaster. (Right now, the US spends as much to service the debt as we do on the whole military, if you want a sense of how far along this process we are.)
There's a way to get out of this bad cycle, though! The Federal Reserve can buy the T bills. And they don't care what the interest rate is on them, since they print money for free. (They don't actually print the money for this; they increment one bank account without decrementing another one, which they're allowed to do because they're the Federal Reserve. Anybody else who did it, jail.)
But this makes all the other dollars in existence less valuable. Which also helps the interest rate / bond problem, since all the US debt is denominated in dollars. You can "inflate it away". But this kind of inflation is essentially a tax, since you're debasing all the dollars your citizens hold.
So, basically, if the debt gets big enough, policymakers have to choose between two disasters. Either "the government can't pay its bills" (ie debt crisis) or "everybody's money is worthless" (ie hyperinflation).
The debt is mostly held by the US citizens and companies and the debt/gdp ratio has been pretty stable post-covid. It's still a good idea to reduce deficits somewhat but it's not a catastrophic situation.
At what point does it become a catastrophic situation, and how many decades away is that?
If debt of 125% of GDP is not too bad, what about 250? 500? 1000? There must a limit somewhere beyond which you run out of people willing to lend you money cheaply.
I don't think it's a helpful framing of the problem. It's just not the right KPI to track. Japan's ratio is over 200% and it's still not a failed state. It's not exactly a success either but so are many countries with 50-100% ratio.
The inflation on the other hand is a real constraint, and it's caused by extensive spending as we saw in the last few years.
Step 1. Allow the TCJA tax cuts to expire this year, like the Republicans who passed them intended.
Bam, $500 billion off the deficit in one shot, starting this year. All the Republicans have to do is keep a promise from Trump's previous term - that these tax cuts were just a temporary stimulus and not a permanent loss to the government's revenue.
If the budget is in such a crisis, why are Republicans still trying to cut taxes further? What reasoning puts "cut PEPFAR" or "give Elon Musk root access to the Treasury computers" higher on the list of things we should try than this?
So rather than reducing the deficit by cutting spending, the plan is to just keep increasing taxes forever? And then one day the income tax rate will be 100%, and the government will deign to give some tiny fraction of that money back in the form of inefficient government programs that exist mainly as sinecures for the friends and family of government bureaucrats?
If spending cuts are impossible and spending increases are inevitable, then spending will increase until it consumes all available resources. Since living under the boot of a parasitic bureaucracy that sucks you dry for all eternity would be very bad, it stands to reason that any policy that cuts spending in any way is worth doing.
The blob has had decades to do this responsibly and they've made negative progress. Clearly the only path forward is to do it irresponsibly.
"If your household is over budget, you can address that problem either by spending less or by earning more income. It is tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that by analogy, the government can address its budget problems either by spending less or by raising taxes. But the analogy fails because raising taxes is not like earning more income; it’s more like visiting the ATM.
The government is an agent of the taxpayers. Raising taxes to pay for government spending depletes our assets just as visiting the ATM to pay for household spending depletes our assets. That’s not at all like earning income, which adds to our assets. "
This form of argument feels like an all-purpose argument against ever doing anything at all. Someone tries to raise taxes and you can say "Why raise taxes instead of cutting spending?" Someone tries to cut spending and you can say "Why cut spending when you could raise taxes?"
The proposition on the table right now is cutting spending, and that's a great idea. Raising taxes may also be necessary at some point, but that's a different discussion.
One thing I do think is that the goal should be to cut down the Government to a size where it's doing its actual job efficiently, and then figure out how much tax needs to be raised in order to fund that government, rather than to see how much money can possibly be squeezed out of the people and then try to think of ways to spend that money.
A few days ago, the online Right was in favor of the government hiring more Air Traffic Controllers. Eventually, somebody on the Right will realize that instead of canceling programs, we can put our guys in charge of them!
It's not enough to put "our guys" in charge of them, you also have to purge them of any potential dissenters. When most of the people working at these agencies have liberal/establishment sympathies, it makes more sense to just shut down the entire agency and rebuild it from the ground up.
That makes sense, the problem is with stuff like the FAA planes can fall out of the sky in the meantime, making your administration much less popular.
Not that that's what happened with the recent crash--those were all Biden appointees. I think the thing is you just don't have enough conservatives who really want to work for the FAA or HHS to actually staff those agencies. Frankly working in government has been so left-coded within living memory that I doubt you could find enough conservatives to staff those agencies--smart, competent people with right-leaning sympathies tend to go into the private sector where the incomes are much higher and the ideology's more friendly.
I don't think government work is actually "left-coded". It's just that constantly attacking government tends to make government employees not like you, regardless of their politics. A lot of the people Trump is purging are Republicans, just not full-Trumpist Republicans.
Political appointees are a small part of the federal workforce. Most of the permanent bureaucracy is staffed by careerists who are hostile to the right. Left-wing employees are attracted to work in governments & non-profit organizations, right-wingers are drawn to other fields. In our electoral system the parties tend to trade off power, so any temporary Republican appointee will eventually be replaced.
If this had anything to do with deficit reduction, maybe I’d agree with you, but the deficit is not going to decrease. Republicans are in power currently, and they have been ideologically opposed to deficit reduction for forty years (because that money could instead be used for tax cuts). Congress plans to greatly increase the deficit this year.
And when it crashes and burns - the analysis will still favor the “we can’t do anything and should never try to retrench” crowd. Because those expressing the view that you just did, were “the naive” ones.
Yes, all cancellation of spending goes into deficit reduction, and deficit reduction is not the worst possible goal. But is $6 billion of deficit reduction actually as valuable as several hundred thousand lives? You might think that most congresspeople and most voters have drastically undervalued deficit reduction, but that’s still a very different question from whether PEPFAR itself is less valuable than deficit reduction.
This would be a much more convincing argument if the current administration were working towards some sort of fiscal tightening more generally. But in reality almost everything else they are planning is making the the US fiscal position much worse (by orders of magnitude more than what we are spending in foreign aid).
Congressional Republicans (with the administration's fervent support) are working on extending the TCJA, adding a projected $4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years
If this aid is really effective, maybe people who share your view and private charities will step in to fill the funding gap in the absence of sending tax dollars.
Yes, but this makes the counterfactual of the US Government cutting the program less bad, because it effectively sucks money from causes that are significantly less good (as Scott himself noted, charities have extreme disparities in effectiveness).
You can use that argument anytime anyone stops doing some good. If I stop feeding my children, you could respond it's not as bad as it seems, because someone else might step up to feed them.
Scott insists on the actual counterfactual of where the money would go. I think it's reasonable to symmetrically insist on the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from, because in this specific instance there is common knowledge that there's an issue here and AIUI sufficient interested charity throughput to actually replace this 100% (in many cases there's not, which is the key difference between this and your generalised form).
Is the actual counterfactual of where the money would go still worse than the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from? Entirely possible! To use Scott's numbers, one charity is typically 100x as efficient as another, so if this is 1000x the marginal government spend, and it's one of the most efficient charities, the marginal charity getting pulled to pay for this is probably still 10x the marginal government spend! But I like being fair, hence insistence on applying the same scrutiny to "where it'd be taken from" as to "where it'd be going".
It's less bad to the extent that private charitable giving is efficient, always going to the charity that is most worthwhile and most badly in need of money. Since we know it's actually very inefficient, we should expect private giving to only make up a small fraction of the difference.
Presumably the life-saved/dollar ratio isn't as good for AIDS charities as it is for malaria charities, since the EA recommendations are usually about malaria.
Malaria charities in terms of the literal bednets are probably much less regulation-intensive than medicine that may need to be taken on a particular schedule, so that could be one component of the difference.
Excellent argument. So excellent that it can prove quite a bit more than you appear to have intended. Let's apply it elsewhere:
Some people say the U.S. military budget is absolutely vital for national security. I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero? I'm sure you can fill in the blanks for every other item in every other budget (federal or otherwise) and draw the correct conclusion.
None of this is necessarily incoherent, BTW. If you want to be an anarcho-capitalist, that is certainly a thing you can be. But if that's what you want, you ought to do so with courage, consistency and forthrightness.
>I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero?
Because then you have to legalise private citizens having thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, which won't end well.
Military and police are actually much more of a problem to substitute with private entities than anything else on the table. There is a reason that people who want to take chainsaws to the government usually don't want to take chainsaws to *that*.
Not so. You could cut the (tax allocation for its) budget to zero, leave it legally under the government control, but solicit charitable contributions to pay for the program. Which isn't quite full ancap, but it still matches the original argument well enough.
There is a fairly-significant difference between "cut a government program, let private actors do it independently" and "keep a government program, but make taxation for it voluntary". Among other things, willingness to pay for stuff tends to correlate with control over that stuff.
There's more of a risk of some military taking over and then setting taxation to whatever it wants. If we cut the governments charity budget to zero, there isn't an equivalent risk that the government will be taken over and the charitable budget reset.
- Gun manufacturers - $100M in inducements (this might be state-level)
Many of these are things that some folks on the political spectrum might disagree with their tax dollars being spent on. Their arguments for disagreeing may be very similar to the arguments against foreign aid ("it's not the job of the federal government to distort the free market system through subsidies"). And they could also argue that if these are so valuable, charity would step in.
So - imagine a Democratic president deputizing a businessman (say, Mark Cuban) to go in and, without congressional approval, halt distribution of these funds because we need to stop the spending and we might as well start somewhere. Would you consider that lawful?
I wasn't making an argument for or against any use of government funds. I was suggesting to Scott that the people he is worried about due to the lack of government-funded aid might still get help from another source.
Yes, you were. Again, your argument Proved to Much. Anyone could say the same about any government program at any time for any reason, and it would be every bit as valid as what you said. You like it, you fund it.
But then again, the opposite is equally untrue. We obviously wouldn't want the government to intrude on every possible cause. Therefore there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handled by the government" and there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handed by individual citizens". You are not arguing principles, you are arguing which category this particular thing should belong to.
My bet is that people would actually pay for it willingly because the alternative is to be taken over by China and Russia. I'm ~99% sure it would be fully covered by voluntary "donations" by citizens who's tax bill is now $0.
Yeah, I agree, but instead of PEPFAR, it's specifically about funding the police wherever you live. If we just cut all the funding to them, then surely private citizens will step in to fund it.
My comment is about something that is happening already - PEPFAR funding is paused.
I’m not advocating for or against funding it, or for or against libertarianism. I’m not advocating anything.
I’m speculating that if this is really a great cause then maybe other charities or even the people who currently work for PEPFAR might find a way to keep it going without federal funds.
Wouldn’t great causes that need funds attract more donations than others?
No, that's not how the real world works, just as in the real world, even though the police are a worthy and important way to spend government money - that provide a value sufficiently high it might even beat out PEPFAR! - if we cut it then it just gets cut and not replaced.
I have no idea how you would even go about transferring all PEPFAR employees and medical supplies from the government to a private charity, and even if people figured it out, it would take a bunch of time, during which those babies would still get AIDS.
Transaction costs are a thing! It takes time to spin up a website saying "we need X money to meet a surprise shortfall," it takes time to find interested donors, it takes time to re-hire the staff who got fired, and that may not even happen because some people are going to say "fuck this I'm going to work a job where my paycheck isn't at risk when a billionaire throws a tantrum."
And Elon Musk can hack off bits of budget much faster than you can spin up replacement private organizations. Are you going to propose an emergency fundraising drive for every single good government program to get cut? What if it's something that's still good but not as attention-getting as lifesaving AIDS drugs?
Yes, they would in fact do so, as proven by hundreds of years of precedent in places without organized police forces. Just look at how early American settlers defended themselves against various bandits.
Settlers versus bandits isn't the same as urban crime. A city is an insanely dense region full of strangers; a bandit is one of the handful of strangers you'll see in the nearest few kilometers. There's a reason we transitioned away from mob justice to police departments alongside the spike in urbanization, and it's that police departments are much, much better at handling "find the guy who did this" and "stop the guy from doing this" when there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people within a few kilometers of you.
If Jeff Bezos woke up tomorrow and said "fuck Amazon, I'm firing everyone and deleting all the code off our servers and leaving everyone's packages stranded in random warehouses," you wouldn't go "this is fine, Amazon is very profitable, so someone will step in to build a new online everything store."
(And, uh, also in this hypothetical Walmart.com doesn't exist.)
Probably someone would eventually build a new everything store! But that would take years, and it would probably be more expensive and less good than Amazon for a very long time. You definitely couldn't just pick back up where Amazon left off: key people would have already gotten a different job; the servers would have been rented to someone else; neither the vendors nor the customers trust your new Nile.com.
PEPFAR is really good not because helping with HIV/AIDS is a particularly good thing to do; actually, it's kind of mid, and a lot of economists complained back in 2004 that it was a waste of money. PEPFAR is really good because it's an unusually well-run program, because it was George W. Bush's pet project and he really, really, really wanted to make it work. "End PEPFAR, private charity will do it" is like saying "end Amazon, someone will eventually make Nile.com"-- except that capitalism is beautifully efficient and someone will make Nile.com, but rich charity donors keep going "save millions from a horrible death? Nah, I'd rather buy my alma mater a really ugly new dorm."
Also, the U.S. government actually does have an advantage at working with other governments, as PEPFAR does. It is called "diplomacy" and the State Department, which houses PEPFAR, specializes in it. Some large funders, like the Gates Foundation, are basically countries, but the vast majority of private charity doesn't have the level of soft power the U.S. does.
Bezos/Amazon is WAY above replacement. He/it is unusually successful for a reason. This isn't true for all tech CEOs though, Ballmer was below replacement and once he stopped running Microsoft they started doing better.
But the question isn't whether we should replace the head of PEPFAR. The question is whether, if you completely destroy an organization, it doesn't matter because someone else can start a new organization to do the same thing.
> It’s a little unfair to focus on BEAD or other especially bad programs, because money gained by canceling a good program will on average be redirected to a merely average program.
I disagree. The government isn't great at keeping their priorities in order. In fact, I'd say they're pretty terrible at it. But I still think they do better than chance. With the money they have now, they're trying to fund the most important things. They're failing horribly at it, but the things they're funding are still better than the things they're not funding. The fruit they've taken is, on average, lower hanging, so if you give them extra money, the fruit they use it to pick probably be higher than the average one they picked so far.
In short, the money will be redirected to a somewhat worse than average program.
Look. The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. That's a card you have played too many times. If we didn't vote for Obama/Biden/Kamala Trump/McCain was going to nuke the earth. We've heard it. If we didn't pass the Green New Day / Diversity Enhancement the Nazis were going to resurrect and invade Poland. We heard you. Any minute now.
But we no longer believe. That's the crux of it. We no longer believe you mean the things you say, when you tell us that, conveniently enough, the world is arranged in such a way that after we finally win the right to run stuff we have to do the things you want us to do or we are monsters. We are over it.
The problem of lying to us is not that we stop believing 'that specific lie'. It isn't even that we stop believing some percentage of a lie, such that the next lie can become 10x bigger and have the same effect. It is deeper than that.
Y'all said Trump had a piss tape and you were going to show it to us. You said he was in the KGB, and conveniently fell silent when Putin waited till losing control of one of the two countries he was ruling to attack the Ukraine. You said he was (somehow) also a Nazi (one of those communist nazis I guess) and would attack China. You said he watched 7 hours of tv every day, and had lost the ability to tell if it was real or not. Just an absolute firehose of lies.
Your team says a lot of stuff. I'm not gonna make the abortion comparison, but obviously you see where that goes, as far as us believing your motivations.
So we get a turn to be in charge, right? The bullet is blocked by a miracle and our guy gets to be the leader. He immediately is like 'lets not give billions to democratic grifters, shut it all down'. And what we expect from the guys who have proven, over and over, that they lie in order to become more powerful, is that a lie will happen such that he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
So, sure. He can't cut the gov or millions of babies will die. He can't not do green stuff or Mumbai will flood and millions of babies will die. He can't stop paying the Ukraine army or Russia will win and millions will die. Nothing stops you from saying that. Kamala didn't get to win but Trump has to do everything she would have done.
But, if you mean it. If you've always meant it. Then show us the piss tape. Show us his Russian spy badge. Roll up his sleeve and show the Dark Mark. Like, you endorsed the bad guys from your IRB nightmare post, I credit you with believing what they say. So in your world there is a piss tape, yeah?
Or, if your position is more nuanced, then say that. Say that you guys lie for power, and that this particular statement isn't one such lie. It is different from how we have to pay for the people to who hate us and think they are better than us in a billion other ways. This one is real. It goes to something that matters.
Like, you've always struck me as sincere. You have, I dunno, capital, here? Like, if you mean it. If you mean it this time, and you'll admit that the rest is tactical, but you genuinely think that if we don't obey you this time there will be seven figures of death, then say so do the betting market thing, and I'll buy it.
Because, like, take a sec and become us for a sec, and this is bullshit, yeah? The gov is doing something with millions of dollars that saves millions of lives? Pull the other one, right? The gov can't make a train station with a hundred times that money. There are liberals with that money from hell to breakfast, and they are somehow stopped form doing it privately (Cuz, like, if this was real, the whole maleria net thing doesn't make any sense)? Like, EAs would have been all over this.
I don't think you are insincere. You've always been a straight shooter. But I think you are being fooled. Can you genuinely look into it? Like, you get that, from someone outside of your POV, this is exactly what your team WOULD say, just to keep our money flowing to your pockets for a few months longer? "Yup yup, working folks gotta keep on paying the rich guys or they'll stop saving poor babies."
I don't believe them. They are always lying in order to hurt people and enrich themselves. But I might believe you.
From some kind of abstract perspective where all liberals are a perfectly coordinated team, you're not wrong. I've said basically this same thing in some of my posts.
Still, I will say, with 100% sincerity, and am happy to bet you via any mechanism you want if you can come up with this, that I think 100,000s of people will die if they actually cancel this one. (if you don't believe me, believe Trump/Musk, who apparently figured out that they made a mistake and restarted).
I think these two facts (liberals often like, PEPFAR is genuinely good) are both true. So what do you do about it?
I think there are two ways you could interpret your concern.
First, conservatives literally have no way to sort through the film of lies. They're in a state of total epistemic uncertainty and they should just assume everything is a lie. I think this is false. There are plenty of smart conservative doctors and epidemiologists - some of Trump's recent appointees are in that category. Or they could notice that PEPFAR was started by GW Bush - hardly a bleeding heart liberal. All of these things would have taken a few days to check.
Second, you could interpret it as karma coming home to roost for liberals. I think the people who suffer when you cancel a program that saves millions of Africans mostly isn't liberals, it's Africans. I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane, and also all of those liberals have nice jobs and are still sipping champagne regardless.
Thanks for responding OP. I have read your stuff since the livejournal days. I used to give money when the NYT doxxed you. I stopped as we got more different, but I remember you fondly. That's why I answered instead of just rolling my eyes.
If you are saying this, and Trump and Musk came around, then I guess it's true. I can't claim that that's why Trump/Musk changed their minds, but I think the bigger version of this (the truth saying liberals said they really meant it) is probably what got through to them. It is important to have voices like you on the other side who aren't liars. If you'd destroyed your reputation doing piss tape stuff I wouldn't be here. I don't matter, but I mean I as in guys like me.
About your two ways, it's the first one. I've worked ten hour shifts in a gas station. I don't have the time to sort out what liberal is lying about what. I know you guys, as a team, will lie for power, and the ones that don't do it go along with those who do. I'm not judging, that's how we work too.
So what I do is I trust our leaders to work it out. It sounds like in this case they did. I hope you will keep on trying to make sure they don't get stuff wrong, and I hope they will stop all the waste that's going on but keep doing good stuff like this thing.
I appreciate you - I hate preaching to the choir because it's useless, but everyone speaks such a different language these days that I don't know how to get people with really different starting assumptions from me to listen. I guess keeping in touch with some of them are still around from when people were closer to being on the same page is the best I can hope for. Thanks again for commenting.
You shouldn't. They didn't reassess because they were convinced by sound argument, they got scared by the bad press and cucked on the ruthless dismantling of the administrative state they initially embarked on.
They dropped Matt Gaetz based on the same kind of bullshit, and the woman they replaced him with will be nowhere near as effective as he would have been.
No, I agree they're doing far more than I expected, but I'm not going to pretend that when they're forced to walk back a move, that it was part of an unseen grand strategy, or that they changed their minds after Liberals convincing argued for their side: they retreated because their enemy successfully repelled their attack. That's fine, they're fighting powerful opponents, well-entrenched over decades, and it's unreasonable to expect flawless victories.
But I agree it's a retreat, not a rout, so "cucked" might be too harsh.
I think you shouldn't discount this being part of the plan.
> On Jan. 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, ostensibly allowing for the distribution of H.I.V. medicines. But the waiver did not name PEPFAR, leaving recipient organizations awaiting clarity.
On Sunday, another State Department waiver said more explicitly that it would cover H.I.V. testing and treatment as well as prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. The memo did not include H.I.V. prevention — except for pregnant and breastfeeding women — or support for orphaned and vulnerable children.
Although PEPFAR is funded by the State Department, roughly two-thirds of its grants are implemented through U.S.A.I.D. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neither organization has released funds to grantees since the freeze was initiated.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Rubio appeared to blame the recipient organizations for not acting on the waiver, saying he had “real questions about the competence” of the groups. “I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” he said.
I don't think Trump is worthy of any trust. He has shown himself repeatedly to be a liar so shameless that even the professional lying class (politicians) was outcompeted by him.
PEPFAR played into GW Bush's "Compassionate Conversative™" Evangelical persona. His was economically liberal in his spending (e.g. Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, Healthy Marriage Initiative).
Spending money on saving innocent third world victims of AIDS plays into the White American Evangelical worldview similar to how Abortion is about how women and babies (fetuses) are the innocent victims of the abortionists or society who should be saved.
It's just one of many Conservatisms (e.g. fiscal conservatism, moral conservatism).
>I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane
I think they *do* recognize it as insane, but that cuts from both sides. Either they get held hostage by infinite debts and people without skin in the game (they'll have their cozy jobs and champagne regardless), or they call the bluff and let the people they *can* hurt be hurt. If there was a more direct mechanism that didn't look like an endless, grinding civil war, they'd take it. If there was a direct system of compromises and tradeoffs- "we'll approve funding to save X African lives if you send Y DEI admins to work in the salt mines and gulags," they'd take it.
The African lives are as much pawns to the champagne liberal as they are to the heartless conservative.
I agree that liberals cry wolf way too much. The reason that crying wolf is bad, though, is that occasionally a real wolf shows up, and if you don't have credibility no one will believe your warnings until it is too late. In the case of PEPFAR, there is indeed a wolf at the door. There's a lot of good evidence that it is an effective program that has saved a lot of lives.
PEPFAR is also a bipartisan program, it was started by Bush, and Obama, Trump (the first term), and Biden each saw no reason to mess with it. So this isn't a case of Democrats demanding Trump implement a Democratic agenda, it's a case of them asking him to leave a Republican program in place.
If you want me to establish that I have a nuanced and credible position on this, I am happy to denounce other times that liberal/leftist/Democrats have used histrionic language about stuff. For example, the Green New Deal was a terrible idea, there are many ways to ameliorate climate change that are friendlier to the economy. Reopening schools after the vaccine became widely available was a no-brainer and it's ridiculous how much resistance it received in the name of "saving lives." "Defund the police" was just stupid.
Their slippery slope argument turned out to be at least somewhat true, but I admit the trans nonsense is more of a culture war distraction than a real problem in society. And it seems to be losing influence. It was just so insane that it's gone on for so long, and part of the reason is that post-vibe shift, gay marriage culture warriors were a movement without a cause.
"The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. "
Well, yes, clearly. I suspect you have not quite thought this all the way through though. Because the result of this reasoning isn't "we're awesome and perfect and nothing ever goes wrong." The result of this reasoning is "we *consistently*, *predictably* do dumb things that kill millions of people, because we've decided that ignoring anyone outside the group who warns us about ANYTHING is the One Absolutely Indispensable Badge of Group Membership." See, some fraction of people on the liberal side DO listen when sober and sensible analysis says "hey, this is a big danger that will kill a lot of people." And you know what they do once they've listened. They REPEAT IT. And then you hear "wow, the liberals are saying something will kill millions of people again" and not only do you ignore it, you assume anyone who doesn't ignore it, and assume they're one of the liberals.
I mean, not to point too fine a point on it, but we literally saw this play out EXACTLY five years ago. A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible. Conservatives saw the liberals saying stuff, screamed "FUCK YOU, YOU CAN'T TELL US WHAT TO DO!" and did pretty much the opposite of everything that was expected to have helped. A million Americans died. A million AMERICANS. The people you loudly claim to care most about. Some of them would have died anyway, of course: other countries with more unity and better leadership still lost people. But the U.S. got hit disproportionately hard. *Especially* the red areas.
I didn't want those people do die. Nobody I know wanted those people to die. But when you decide that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for anyone outside your circle to communicate important things with you (which is what you have basically said), then any important knowledge that doesn't *start* in your circle can never, ever get in. Including new things that we learn about the world, even important, urgent things like "hey, this plane is going to crash."
I'm scared, Walter. I'm scared because it feels like tens of millions of people are living in an entirely different reality than me, and because when I try to talk to them about basic, simple, bedrock pieces of reality to try to establish some common ground, they repeat utter nonsense, or call me names, or stick their fingers in their ears or whatever. Sometimes they crow and revel about the utterly stupid things they've done. Sometimes they gloat and smirk about how they're going to harm my friends and family. I don't know what happened to this people, but I sure wish I could reach them. Probably you feel the same way (if about different people), but insisting "I will never, ever so much as consider what anyone even slightly aligned with them tells me under any circumstances" certainly isn't going to fix it.
Reality always has the last word. You can't win an argument with reality. No matter how aggrieved, how hurt, how righteously angry you FEEL, no matter how stridently you argue against reality, it will not budge. The BEST possible outcome is that you get nowhere and look foolish. The worst possible outcomes get entire chapters in history books, with somber memorials and days of remembrance.
>A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible.
No. Neither side came out looking great, but the progressive blob has a greater counterfactual death toll to answer for.
Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid. *That* would have saved a lot more people than any lockdown after accounting for the whole "yes, welding everyone into their homes would stop transmission, but it would also lead to everyone dying of starvation" issue. And the misery of losing international transit would have been far less than the misery of lockdowns; ditto the economic costs.
I remember. When it mattered most, the conservatives were the ones taking things seriously and the progressives were the ones ignoring reality. Their blob gets a better grade than yours.
The masks I was considering and are still strictly less of an issue than the quarantine. Quarantine would have saved everyone; masks and other NPIs saved some, by spreading the infections out to unburden hospitals and to move some infections after the vaccine, but not all (I don't think bringing R under 1 was ever feasible, in hindsight - not without the shit the PRC got up to, at least, and even they eventually fell short), and at greater cost (including in deaths, because of the drug overdoses).
The correct immediate reaction would have been to call President Xi and say in suitably diplomatic language, “In an autocracy, bad news can travel slowly up the chain of command, but this virus is a serious threat and it is in both our interests to get it quickly contained. We will happily send our best virologists to assist you.” Just because that’s what Obama would have done if he were still President doesn’t make it a bad idea.
I don’t know which progressives called shutting down international transit Sinophobic and paranoid. A web search suggests that any who did did not use the word “Sinophobic.” In any case, I would think that the person to answer for the death toll would be Trump, not unnamed progressives. After all, progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opposed Trump’s corporate tax cuts, but that didn’t stop Trump.
I remember Pelosi visiting SF's Chinatown in early (Feb?) 2020 because the Republicans were saying anyone traveling from China is more likely to have been carrying the new virus. I think they said "racist" in general though, and not specifically "Sinophobic."
She visited Chinatown on Feb. 24, saying that people shouldn’t stay away from Chinatown due to the virus. She seems to have stuck to a positive message, not criticizing Republicans at all, and saying nothing about Trump’s travel restrictions.
Sample quote: “We want to be vigilant about what might be on the horizon -- what is out there in other places. We want to be careful how we deal with it (coronavirus). But we do want to say to people, come to Chinatown. Here we are, again, careful, safe, and come join us.”
For context, here is what Trump tweeted the same day: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
And who was President in early 2020 with the power to do this? How exactly is it the fault of progressives that Trump didn't do the thing you think was called for at the time.
"serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid."
Hmm.
I was living and working deep in the heart of "blue" America throughout 2020, and was/am well networked in progressive circles due to the work that I do as well as my family background. Literally no one I knew was opposing shutting down international travel at that time. Also they were all canceling all international travel personally/professionally -- I knew multiple people who took significant $ losses backing out of previously-booked international trips during that year.
So I'm puzzled...progressives during 2020 "balked at" shutting down international travel? Which progressives?
Also -- wasn't Donald Trump the president throughout 2020? With Republican majorities in the Senate and on the Supreme Court? And a slight Dem majority in the House having zero self-identifying progressives in its leadership?
If formally shutting down international travel was the serious and correct reaction...which party during 2020 had the capacity and hence responsibility to make it happen?
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
Possibly, but I think the devil’s in the details here.
What date are you talking about? Would such a shutdown include Canada and Mexico if they didn’t follow suit? How long would you give them to adjust?
Covid started adding up in early March 2020 – if you had timed this too early (reports from China started late December, I think), you would have a lot of angry people and little to show for it for a pretty long time…
Late or early January? Late January would already be stretching it, but early January seems frankly unsustainable given the mood at the time.
Businesses would have been yelling their heads off (remember how North America is very integrated economically), and no one would have bought the cost-benefit analysis.
I doubt that it would have been politically feasible to contain an outcry that big for even a month without clear rationale, let alone more.
I agree, disagreements about what seems like pieces of bedrock reality can be unsettling. There's a much more unsettling thing however: when tens of millions of people seem to forget what opinion they had and vehemently argued for about said pieces of bedrock reality just months ago. It's one thing to realize that some piece of reality is not as bedrock as you thought and change your mind about it, but what were your expressed and recorded beliefs about it should really not be debatable, and yet...
In that case the liberal opinion did a 180 degree reversal (complemented by complete retrograde amnesia) in literally less than a week, Pelosi hugged Chinamen on Feb 24, on Feb 28 everyone got upset about Trump calling Corona a hoax (fake news btw, he did not) and suddenly it was a big deal.
Again, it's one thing to believe that the fact that masks don't work against Covid is a piece of bedrock reality. It is even understandable to get morally outraged at people who insist on wearing masks in the time of shortage and kill someone's grandma by doing so. Maybe even do a little harassment for the greater good. And, separately, it's understandable to change your mind and come to believe that you're killing a grandma by *not* wearing a mask outside and that's bedrock reality, bud.
But the amnesia accompanying this shift in progressive opinions is genuinely scary. How can you have a real discussion about what is true or not and what is likely true versus bedrock-reality true with people who genuinely don't remember their own beliefs from a week ago? Who believe that certain things are true because it's a moral thing to do, and since they have always been morally correct, their memories of their past beliefs change as necessary?
From Europe here, but it's the same: the amount of political, media and public amnesia around all things COVID disturb me a lot, at least as much as how quickly and deeply democratic governments went authoritarian without any noticeable institutional resistance (make you wonder what distinguish liberal democracy from authoritarian regimes deep down....).
I sorted the 3 in term of more and more surprising: politicians doing 180° is no surprise, kind of part of the job. Traditional Media not that surprising, not after their full support of government message during the first peak. Public, that's more surprising, I guess I was naive about the percentage of people still exerting a modicum of self-honesty and critical thinking. I knew it was likely small, but that small? I don't think they do not exists, but it's clear they do not exist enough to be visible even on non-traditional media.
I think at least part of the explanation (for the almost complete media support, and initial public support) is not only fear, it's the World savior mentality, especially the variant "we can save the world from apocalypse if we accept suffering a little now" mentality that is a hallmark of western thinking since the beginning of Christianity, at least. Media jumped on this nice story, maybe because encouraged by power in place, but also because it's just the kind of feel-good story they just love (we will win against an inhuman enemy with the strength of our altruism, resilience and unity - basically the plot of any apocalypse-porn blockbuster)
Still, I think Public amnesia is largely unwillingness to explicitely discuss what happened, rather than true amnesia, and that the COVID episode significantly hit the "suffer now to save the world" western meme. Because global warming and ecology is largely using this meme, and it's popularity is in free fall...
Watching the two sides both 180 in regards to quarantine was disheartening, because it feels like everyone just wants to make whatever political argument is most convenient for them in the moment. About the only consistent thing was the left crying racism as per usual...
Numerous cost-benefit analyses have been done since showing that "do nothing at all" was in fact the right approach. You would've been right if the pandemic was at least 3-5x more deadly, but COVID simply wasn't deadly enough to warrant doing anything about it.
This is a great comment and anyone from the left wing who is still going “but how could ANYONE vote for TRUMP” (most of my family lol) would do well to read it.
I do think though that we as the conservative team should try and sort out truth from lies. Just because the mainstream media etc bullshits constantly and distorts in order to mislead, doesn’t mean that literally everything they say is false. This is a trap that conservatives can fall into. For example, I am a doctor and I can tell you with some confidence that Covid vaccines work to prevent severe Covid infection. I am also confident that climate change is real, although exaggerated.
With the PEPFAR thing, it’s early days but it seems like it’s the one decent program in all these billions of dollars of waste, fraud and corruption that the government has been up to - so obviously the media are harping on it constantly. Fine, OK, if it’s a good use of taxpayer money hopefully Trump/Musk will reinstate it. But talking about it is a distraction from USAID funding Internet censorship or gain of function research in the Wuhan lab or torture training for repressive Latin American regimes backed by the CIA or Islamist terrorist groups.
Tucker Carlson tried that with the Daily Caller early on, believe it or not. He couldn't make any money and it wound up doing the usual report-lots-of-crap-and-the-occasional-actual-liberal-malfeasance conservative-media thing.
This is kind of what Richard Hanania was getting at with the Elite Human Capital thing (though his exact definition of it sounds suspiciously similar to himself). Liberals read, conservatives watch TV. There just aren't enough people on the conservative team who care enough or want to work for it to make a right-wing New York Times with strong journalistic standards (outside of their usual ideological blindspots, of course) a viable entity.
Some of it's ideological capture and assortment over the years, but I honestly think too many bright conservatives are busy raising kids. Which, I mean, obviously is necessary for there to be a next generation, but it gives the left an asymmetric ideological advantage.
Conservatives also have the largely unacknowledged problem that their intellectual tradition no longer has a strong basis underneath. God has been dead for more than a century now, nobody seriously thinks that there's a coherent universal ontology with religious dogma at its center, and separate magisteria/god-of-the-gaps replacements are clearly inadequate. Until this is acknowledged and dealt with, conservatives have nothing to entice secular intellectuals with.
That is a good point. I think some are trying to do it with various forms of nationalism or fascism under another name, even if it was kind of a flop in 1945.
I think pre-2020 Jordan Peterson had a potential to create a new foundation for modern conservatism... but then he went to Russia and got his brain replaced, and he just isn't the same person anymore. :(
What other conservative intellectuals are there? Theodore Dalrymple comes to my mind; any other examples? My rule of thumb is "a person who could write a guest post on ACX without dramatically lowering its quality level".
Hanania, kind of? But all of them have been reluctant to explicitly come to terms with the problem I pointed at. Of course, doing so isn't easy - replacing the basis of your ideology is about the most anti-conservative thing imaginable! But still necessary, I claim, if conservatism has any intention to provide serious challenge to progressivism/utopianism.
I don't think the problem is a lack of human capital for conservatives. The problem is that a conservative who doesn't support Trump 100% in every way is called a "Democrat" nowadays.
Republicans *had* a lot of human capital pre-2016, but they were all excommunicated or silenced.
Who is y'all? I never made that claim, or any of the other claims you list in that paragraph. To the best of my recollection, neither did Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
On the other hand, it was Trump himself who claimed on November 21, 2015: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering. So something’s going on. We’ve got to find out what it is.”
He later claimed explicitly (on ABC’s This Week) that he saw this on television. If this were true, the footage would have been saved on video. I’m still waiting for the video tape.
For that matter, I’m still waiting for the Weapons of Mass Destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
I know there are a bunch of nuts on the political left; mostly I ignore them. You should, too, rather than dismissing an entire half of the political spectrum.
On the other hand, honest conservatives like Daniel Larison during the Bush years or Liz Cheney more recently, are the fringe conservatives.
I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis; you said Mexico was going to pay for the wall; you said covid was going to kill a negligible number of people; etc, etc. (Those last two "you"s were specifically Trump.) Hell, I could go farther back: Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I appreciate Scott's efforts (and willingness, and ability) to talk sense across these lines. But I think that part of that is recognizing that the amount of lying on BOTH sides has been crazy. Obviously we have different views about the balance: I think there's been more lying on the conservative side, you'd probably say the reverse, so let's just say it's both and remind ourselves of the fundamental attribution error (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
That said, I don think that there is a distinction worth making: namely, distinguishing mainstream voices from fringe ones. On my side, neither major politicians (Biden/Pelosi/Obama/etc) nor journalist voices (your pick of NYT columnists) said anything about a piss tape. But it was Reagan who said medicare would end American freedom, Bush who said Iraq had WMDs and Trump who said Mexico would pay for his wall. I am not saying that all liberal lies are from fringe voices (the covid messaging was pretty deceptive at times, although not always), and am certainly not saying you couldn't find lunacy on the fringe right far beyond what even Trump says. But it's an important distinction to make, I'd argue.
But fundamentally, we live in a polarized society in which each side sees the other as fundamentally unconcerned with the truth. The response to this should not be to dismiss everything the other side says, but to read/listen to both sides, and decide each individual issue on the merits as best as we can (with, of course, a recognition that there are also both genuine mistakes and reasonable beliefs which change with new data as well as lies at play.)
>I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis;
I think this strengthens their point: The cons had a string of failures that discredited them back then, the libs became ascendant, and had their own string of failures and now we're here
>Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I mean, if you add Social Security to that, I'd say you shouldn't count it out yet.
The sad thing is that the Clinton emails fiasco really was a disqualification; but our standards have dropped so much since. Never thought I’d find myself wishing we could go back to Bush.
PEPFAR's not our team! It's your team! George W. Bush is not a liberal!
Until Trump noticed PEPFAR, PEPFAR was a bipartisan program because it was extremely popular among conservative evangelicals, because it was created by a conservative evangelical president in response to conservative evangelical concerns about the global poor. The liberals haven't done anything a tenth as good. I don't know why evangelicals have gone insane, but the liberals are just stewarding the program until the evangelicals return to their senses and start gloating about how the conservative concern for government efficiency saved millions of babies while the libs were fussing around with DEI for shrimp.
The Republican base has become increasingly isolationist since the 2010s at the least. RINO is not a new insult.
My point is, if you squint your eyes to see things how the populists would, you can understand why they regard PEPFAR as liberals spending money to help foreigners instead of Americans.
If you say "PEPFAR is not a populist program," then I'm not going to write a long screed complaining about that. But it's insane to have a definition of "liberal" in which George W. Bush is a liberal. Especially if you're also (correctly!) criticizing liberal fearmongering about McCain and Romney. There is no world where Mitt Romney is a true conservative non-RINO and Bush is basically a Democrat.
What? Romney is a RINO too. You have to realize that Trump (and by extension, the new Republican party) aren't conservative, they're revolutionaries. Anyone seeking to protect the old order is an enemy.
First, I will just point out that "people make overstated and hyperbolic claims about the policies of their political opposition" is not some unique pathology of the left. Everyone does it, all the time, throughput human history.
But to respond to one specific point
> he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
He was not elected to have this power. He was elected President of the United States, which under our constitutional system does not have the power of the purse. PEPFAR is a program authorized by the US Congress and the President does not have the legal power in our system to just decide he doesn't like the program and refuse to spend the money. It's current authorization expires in March, if he believes its a bad program then fine, he can use his influence to get congress to not reauthorize it. But what he is doing now is very clearly illegal.
No, he was elected President in the normal way that people are elected President. People had all sorts of reasons for voting for him, but the question on the ballot was definitely not “Should we give Donald Trump dictatorial power not beholden to any law” If that WAS the question on the ballot and a majority said yes then that would something different.
It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not. Democracy is a system of compromise, not justice. It prevents conflict by making sure the minority does not needlessly waste their lives fighting fights they cannot win. Thus, the majority always has the final say.
Just to be pedantic, a majority of Americans actually voted for someone other than Trump for President.
> It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not.
Of course it matters. People were voting for a President, a job which is supposed to be defined by our laws and have limited powers. If he is doing things that are explicitly not within legal power of a President then that is not what people voted for. Imagine you voted for someone to be the treasurer of your town. If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
Wait what? He won the polular vote this time. Are you saying that the vote was rigged?
Edit: Huh, apparently he was a minority majority. Well, third party votes are equivalent to not voting, so I don't see it as particularly relevant. If they wanted a voice, they could've had it.
> If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
If doing that was part of his political campaign, yes, yes I would.
This is a helluva comment which has way more salience than I (as a firm Never Trumper) would like. Any objection if I share it to my Notes feed and -- maybe, if I have the nerve -- with a few close relatives?
I think the best way to think about that is that reducing the debt is a federal program that we could spend money on. It’s not the least valuable program to spend money on, but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
>but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
I think there's plenty of indication:
* Debt to GDP ratio is the highest it's been in a long time
* Interest on debt is becoming the largest item in the US Budget
* This, if unadressed, is likely to trigger a debt crisis which would, at best, greatly reduce Americans' purchasing power, through debasement of their currency.
Unless, by virtue of them being the biggest, you consider the average federal program to be Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense Spending, it does seem better than average (and even then, I definitely think you could do with some cuts to social security, but that's very unlikely to happen)
Given the benefits of reducing the debt, I agree it’s quite valuable. But again, you have to compare the cost. It’s not cheap to reduce the debt by a trillion dollars a year. And is it *so* beneficial that it’s worth cutting a trillion dollars of other programs? Some of those programs, yes. But again, this is one priority among many.
Convincing Rebublicans that they should do that would be a good first step. Right now their plans are to massively explode the deficit, and the only disagreement is "how high?"
It’s useful to think of cutting debt as just another program to fund. It’s a better program than some, but not the very best program to fund. I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’s better than the average government program, even though it’s surely better than some.
Does it bother you even a little bit that PEPFAR was yoked to a lot of idiocy so it could be used as a distractor to prevent the idiocy from being threatened?
Is it really the right response to such a thing to acquiesce to this trick in order to avoid a potential temporary slowdown in the good aid programs in order to separate them from the bad ones they have been yoked to?
Do the tricksters who do this bear the moral fault or do Elon and Trump bear the moral fault for not respecting the PEPFAR human shields? (And whose fault was it that those PEPFAR human shields had been corralled into such an extremely time-dependently sensitive relationship to USAID that their health was actually threatened by a few days of administrative confusion?)
If you mean that the same government that did PEPFAR also did lots of idiotic things, trust me, the government that's canceling PEPFAR is also going to do a lot of idiotic things.
If it were me, instead of canceling everything the first week, I would take two months to ask people which things were idiotic, then cancel the idiotic ones (doesn't have to be some kind of sinister hard-to-interpret experts - I could have told them this one myself). I'd even be fine if they erred on the side of canceling too much, as long as it's an error and not the intended outcome!
Not just “the same government”, but the same AGENCY (USAID), which was a slush fund for things like color revolutions and laundering money to politicians’ cronies, AND WHICH TRIED TO block access to information about its own disbursements to Trump’s incoming auditors (the only reason an immediate *suspension* of USAID activity was needed was that mutinous resistance was occurring, a thing Trump had vowed would be immediately nipped in the bud this time around).
Man, you parse this differently from me. To me, color revolutions seem like a CIA/DoD project meant to help the American people by screwing over its enemies. I think it's slightly dangerous to the charity arm to force it to also prop up our country's own selfish interests, but I hardly think it's treason or anything.
I strongly disagree with this statement about "color revolutions". The two I saw closest (in Ukraine) had not much CIA/DoD/xyz in it - esp. not direct and not directly relevant. Oh, one of my friends taught some of the students who started a demonstration on Maidan. Oh, his salary was mostly paid by a western NGO? So what? Your politology-students are angry about their gov. - you let them have a discussion, they ask for advice, you shrug and tell them: One option is to do a protest (fun fact: they knew anyways). - To twist that into "CIA staged 2014" is ... stinky BS. What I see from far - Belorus or Georgia - looks same.
Also, I doubt US-agencies are competent to do relevant stuff there - just far too slow moving. It has been some decades: how much CIA involvement in the protest in East-Germany 1954 (or 1989/90) ? How much DoD in Prague 1968? In Budapest? Even Solidarnosc? Even the Arab spring - oh sure, facebook and phones were invented by the CIA. (Edit: US-agencies was "USAID", slip of mind)
The CIA used to help overthrow socialist governments in Latin America all the time. The point was to win the Cold War. That ultimately did happen, though was it caused by the CIA? Eh, who knows?
Not an expert, but heard it often and sounds likely to me. Monroe-doctrine and all. "Indochina" is obviously also a clear and - not so subtle - example, though outside the Americas the US agencies famously blundered their "help" (similar: Africa). We can assume the US tried as hard as it could in Iraq before and after occupying/liberating it - no one seems to care to tell THAT story, as nothing had come out of it (similar: Iran). - In modern day Europe, they seem to have learned not to mess things up. Sending peace-corps volunteers to Ukraine did not "trigger" any revolution - it's what you do; my country sent me to Russia and Ukraine to help teaching German. Made me a spy or an agent for system-change? Wished it did. ;)
I think that people in Eastern Europe are quite capable of hating Russia even without CIA involvement. It may sound weird to edgy right-wing Americans who take their information about the world from Russia Today, but maybe reading about Holodomor on Wikipedia could be a good starting point.
Some fraction of USAID money (on the order of ~$500 million? So a lot to a normal person; not a lot in the scale of the US government) was going to NGOs that promoted illegal immigration, teaching them the magic words, etc.
I wasn't arguing that the DOGE shut it all down and restart method was correct; my comment was aimed just at Scott's, that some fraction of the "charitable arm" is acting against American interests and in ways many Americans might call treasonous.
I think he's taking an overly-rosy view and it doesn't help his case.
In left wing spaces right now all the news is "PEPFAR gone, millions will die!" In right wing spaces the news is "USAID paid $1.5 million to a Serbian NGO to promote DEI in Serbian workplaces, $70,000 to produce a DEI musical in Ireland, $2.5 million for electric vehicle subsidies in Vietnam, $47,000 for a 'transgender opera' in Columbia, $32,000 for a 'transgender comic book' in Peru, $2 million for transgender clinics and 'LGBT activisin' in Guatemala, etc". It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire. Definitely a point in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down, but the Trump admin seems to be going with a "move fast and break things" strategy.
> in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down
I don't see it. If you care about cutting off patronage funds to your enemies' allies, and don't care about PEPFAR one way or the other, what's the problem? Of course the other side will wail about PEPFAR, because they want both, and it's not politically advantageous to publicize the patronage.
The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans. Even if you don't care about PEPFAR including it in the blast radius give your opponent's ammunition to use against you. I can see the advantages of moving fast and broad, but one of the disadvantages is that it takes media focus away from the patronage funds and towards programs that are more popular and you weren't planning on cutting anyway.
It's also a problem that delays in funding might actually "kill someone" at which point your political opponents now have martyrs to try to beat you over the head with. (It would also be a moral problem to do something that results in people dying when you could have done it in a way where they don't die, but I wanted to focus on the political problems. Especially as we don't know if anyone is likely to die from doing it the fast and broad way.)
> The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans.
And again, why would Trump's base care about this? They already have majority power, they have no reason to care what the minority thinks of them. If they do resort to violence, well... Now you have an opportunity to purge the opposition.
Trumps base may not care, but many Americans will care and their votes count to. The Democrats want the average American to see Trump as causing chaos and disaster, and PEPFAR disruption is a decent weapon for that purpose. The Republican's have a small majority in the House and an alright majority in the Senate because the average American currently prefers Republicans. Giving your opponents ammunition to change the average American's mind about that is always a problem. It may be worth the cost, but it's still a problem.
Some of the chaos has been bad enough that even congressional Republicans criticized it. And I'm sure there's a lot more they're too afraid to say.
People who signed up for "boo trans people" or "boo inflation" aren't going to like it when the checks stop going out. It might be fashionable to hate on government in the abstract, but when confronted with the actual reality of destroying government, you're going to lose support VERY fast.
They were going to accuse you of something like that whatever you did. The details don't seem that relevant. I actually heard a lot more about his DOGE team accessing the Treasury's database than about PEPFAR, so they seem to have assessed (correctly, imo) that their target audience cares more about that than the deaths of "hundreds of thousands of Africans."
I don't think them getting martyrs to use as a weapon helps them all that much. They seem to have made a lot of hay out of the physical appearance of his DOGE team, and I think that's hard to top.
Yes, the enemy will always attack you. That doesn't mean that you should make it easier for them, or that making it easier for them to attack you isn't a problem.
> It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire
Why is that obvious? The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
> In right wing spaces the news is
I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible. Like I remember awhile back someone saying they were spending money on, like, "the sex lives of worms" or something, and it was really a program to figure out how to sterilize some invasive species that was killing crops, or something like that.
>The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
I agree: the best explanation for why they are making sure PEPFAR isn't canceled with the rest of them is because they didn't want to cancel PEPFAR.
>I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible.
Everything listed could be a lie but the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff". Even if it's not true it tells us what the Republican focus is on the whole funding freeze.
My understanding is they un-cancelled PEPFAR because a bunch of evangelical Christian groups actually do care and raised a big stink and that's their constituents.
> the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff"
"The Republicans" could mean various things. If it means the rank-and-file ... perhaps it's what they're focusing on, but rank-and-file partisan types tend to, in the first instance, ignore negative news about their side. And given my point about evangelical groups at least some Republicans are pro-PEPFAR. But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
>But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
The Republican's in charge are the ones who are crowing about the "dumb stuff": that list I quoted earlier is from a White House press release, and Republican congress-critters have been repeating the same list of items in speeches for the last few days. What evidence do you have that what the Republicans really wanted to do was cancel PEPFAR? The only evidence you've presented is that PEPFAR funds were frozen along with all other funds in USAID. The fact that PEPFAR has been cleared to keep existing while all the "dumb stuff" is getting cancelled is strong evidence that the "dumb stuff" was their aim and PEPFAR wasn't.
This is about on par with saying "occasionally cops kill innocent people, so we should completely defund all of law enforcement, and maybe hire some of them back in a few months"
That seems to be what the Trump admin is doing. They froze everything and are now vetting one by one. Programs like PEPFAR have passed and won't be shut down.
Like you said, they froze *everything*. Musk bragged about feeding USAID "into the woodchipper", and they've shut down many other things too, like most science funding, even completely non-objectionable stuff.
At some point, they might try to restart some of that, but shutting something down for weeks causes irreparable damage even if you *don't* lock everyone out and try to destroy the whole organization. When you stop paying people, they're forced to look for new jobs so they can eat and pay rent. When you stop paying for medicine, people die. Food aid rots in the ports (this is something a REPUBLICAN senator criticized Trump for) etc.
Something similar is playing out with the deportations (which I totally support, so I'm not even endorsing the should-be-criminals-only view).
A local reporter actually did some actual reporting - went down to Home Depot where the illegals stand at the edge of the parking lot under what little shade there is, and hope to get picked up for day labor. They all said there had not been much work the past few months; that was what they worry about. Asked if they were worried about being picked up by ICE, they said (in Spanish) no, that they believe ICE would focus on criminals, and since they weren't criminals, they didn't feel they would be in its sights.
Meanwhile, the high schools are letting the kids out to protest, probably permanently; and there's a protest at the Capitol, and much hand-wringing because deportations are such an existential threat to the entire Hispanic population lol.
I'd like them to be more specific: tell us the names of Tren de Aragua members, for instance, that they wish to remain here. Or which Chinese traffickers of indentured slaves.
Are you asking why Trump and Musk yoked PEPFAR to other programs in their cuts? Or why PEPFAR is run out of an agency that does foreign aid?
As for your last question about whose fault it is that PEOFAR recipients are in a time-sensitive relationship with medication, I think it’s the HIV virus’s fault. No human decided that you have to take the medication regularly - everyone would rather have a medication that works long term and allows big gaps between doses.
That’s a strange way to misrepresent what I am saying.
I am NOT SAYING that PEPFAR aid recipients don’t have to take their medication every day!
I am ONLY SAYING that it’s extremely unusual for patients who have to take a medication every day to be vulnerable to a few days of administrative confusion-normally they BOTH have a reserve of spare pills available, AND their doctor or clinic doesn’t suddenly lose access to all drug supplies from all suppliers if some faraway organization has a change in leadership.
This isn’t a few days - it’s supposed to be a 90 day pause, and the officials were told to stop sending supplies. The clinic probably has supplies for a week or two, but if the staff isn’t supposed to come into the clinic that’ll cause problems.
It was fully resolved within a few days. And the USAID is not the only supplier of those medications, they are available everywhere for people who can afford them, and doctors and pharmacies everywhere are used to dealing with insurance changes and administrative changes and other hiccups in such a way that it takes much more than a few days for any patients to “run out” of necessary meds.
The 'idiocy' as you call it is the entire point of foreign aid.
Foreign aid is not about deadloss charity, as Scott frames it here.
Foreign aid is about soft power projection across impoverished nations around the globe.
It always is and always has been a tool for statecraft, either by being used directly as leverage in negotiations to get favorable deals and considerations from poor nations, or as you say as a mask for more sinister operations that need to move a lot of money in foreign areas without a lot of scrutiny.
We can talk about whether the US should be projecting soft power in these ways, but if we want that discussion we should have it openly. Pretending that PEPFAR being associated with such things is a knock against the program is missing the point; that is what it was created to do in the first place.
One day you're going to be diabetic, and your insurance company will say they're pausing your insulin for six months to "review, validate, and prioritize", and then six months later they'll send your corpse a nice letter saying "we decided insulin was necessary after all!"
I think probably what they actually did (pause it for one day, realize they made a huge mistake when everyone screamed really loud, restart it) was fine (though I'm not sure! Probably there were real disruptions to a program that 100,000s of lives depend on!). But this only worked because lots of people screamed really loud, and I am proud to be one of those people.
My point was that you do this once when you discover that, in among the wonderful things you’re doing, there is some serious amount of very dubious, wasteful, even damaging activity as well. Given the fungibility of all the resources that are going into this scheme if you don’t pause, etc., then you’ll never have the opportunity to fix anything. It rather looks like DOGE has revealed a specific trigger point with regard to USAID that deserves this kind of once-in-a-lifetime response.
The question remains: Why do you have to just pause everything while you review, when you can't even spend the money the pause presumably saves until the next budget decision? The disruption and uncertainty the pause causes cannot possibly be worth whatever its benefits are, especially if the reviewers are that uninformed about what the stuff they're reviewing is doing.
Because of enemy action, obviously. You can't review hostile bureaucracy in a timely manner while it runs as usual, as it will obfuscate and frustrate you at every turn.
How? Why does pausing the programs magically make the "hostile bureaucracy" unable to stymie your efforts? Are you just going to fire everyone while you review? If so, how do you plan to restart the good programs with nobody to run them. None of this makes sense
You put everyone on paid leave, lock them out of their paperwork and computer systems so they won't be able to interfere with the review, then fire those who deserve it, and everybody else resumes work. Also, people will scream with righteous indignation particularly loudly about actually valuable programs (as we witness here), which would also provide useful evidence.
That's a fully generalized counterargument to any institutional or policy change that can potentially cost lives in the short term. Including, say, a hypothetical scheme to replace insurance with whatever policy that ends up lowering the cost of and increasing the availability of insulin in the long run.
This matches very well with my intuition, which has long maintained when someone utters a sentence of the form of "we should stop funding X and give that money to Y instead," the only correct way to interpret that sentence is "we should stop funding X." They do not care about Y. If they cared about Y, they would just be advocating for Y. The only reason Y is in that sentence at all is to try to make X look worse by comparison.
Also I'm no expert but I don't think government processes (outside of *maybe* two items both in the discretionary budget of a single agency) actually allow you to just take money from one place and move it to another. You can argue for funding Y. You can argue for cutting funding to X. But they are separate arguments which stand or fall independently (which is as it should be).
The analysis about what would happen with this hypothetical unspent money is essentially incorrect.
If the US did not spend that $6 billion dollars, that would not result in the federal government spending that $6 billion elsewhere, because congress hasn't authorized more money for those other programs. The marginal effect would be to reduce the federal deficit by $6 billion dollars. This means that the treasury would borrow $6 billion less that year in order to have enough money to fund what it does spend money on.
This means that investors who buy treasury bonds in order to finance the US' deficit spending will instead invest their $6 billion elsewhere. Who are these investors buying treasury bonds? Some of them are:
- The Federal Reserve. If the Federal Reserve buys $6 billion less in treasury bonds in a year, that means that the money supply is effectively reduced by $6 billion, resulting in a tiny amount less inflation. This means that everyone who holds cash sees the value of their cash increase (or, decrease less) ever-so-slightly.
- Institutional investors like banks, mutual funds, pensions. If these investors buy $6 billion less in treasury bonds, that means they're investing their money elsewhere. Then the marginal change is to increase the amount of money invested in other similar low-risk investments in the US. Think more loans for (and thus lower interest rates for) mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, etc.
- Foreign investors. They will invest their money in something else, possibly not in America.
So, in summary, the actual marginal consequence of not spending that $6 billion dollars is that that $6 billion will be invested elsewhere, in similar low-risk investments such as mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, and foreign government bonds, by investors who would have otherwise invested purchased treasury bonds. There may also be a slight rise in consumption if interest rates on investments are lowered some. You may or may not think that those uses of the money are more valuable that PEPFAR.
I'm assuming that Congress has some idea how big the existing deficit is when they decide whether or not to pass new bills, and that eventually cutting old programs makes them think they have room to pass new ones.
I think this is the right way to think about all government spending. But unless you’re someone who thinks that this alternative is better than almost *any* government spending, it would be surprising if it turned out to be better than PEPFAR.
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Niger is 5.79, its population has increased from 11m to 27m in 25 years and and the country imports 41% of its food.
Thus, while canceling PEPFAR and allowing people to die of AIDS now seems harsh, one could argue that the demographic landscape is already incredibly unsustainable, and all PEPFAR may be doing is kicking the demographic can down the road slightly until extreme civil strife and/or famine absolutely ravage the region, and enormous numbers of people die in various nasty and brutish ways.
It could be argued, that in the long run (generations), that if we feel we must interfere - lowering the fertility, raising the drought resistant food output, and letting AIDS run its course might be a more pragmatic approach.
If Niger has a food supply problem, why not address that, without touching PEPFAR spending? The idea that, because there's a risk of famine, one should hope for a plague to forestall it is pretty wild. There isn't a famine now, so it's like if Scrooge had said, "If they are not going to die, they had better do it."
You've glanced up against a controversial take here :
Implementing agricultural reforms, administering health care, fostering cultural change in family planning - it all sounds a lot like we're taking over Niger?
I didn’t say anything about fostering cultural change in family planning. And we’ve helped many countries, including with technical innovations, without “taking them over.” I don’t even know if Niger is at risk of famine as you say. What I’m saying is that “if a famine is coming let AIDS run its course” simply makes no sense, because the reason to prevent famine is to prevent people from dying horribly and needlessly, which is the same reason to prevent plague.
(4) DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE? I think this is false for places like India and South America, which have below replacement fertility rates. It's more true in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are still above replacement, but getting less so - their TFR will be below breakeven in about a generation.
I think in the sub-Saharan African case, there are two opposite effects. First, giving an individual more money causes them to have more kids. Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04). All charity is some combination of helping individuals and making a country richer. Even curing disease is like this, partly because its long term goal is to eliminate the disease (which would be great for the country) and partly because raising a potential worker to age 25 is a big investment, having that worker die at age 25 means you have to write the whole thing off as a loss, and that's as bad for GDP as losing any other big investment. I don't know for sure whether these two effects cancel out, or which one is more important.
If you told me the pro-fertility effect was stronger, I would count that as mark against global health programs, but not an infinitely large one. A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much. If I can prevent that at the cost of pushing back the sub-Saharan African fertility breakeven point six months or five years or whatever, I still think that's a good trade. If you disagree, there are lots of non-sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
>A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much
That seems like a dubious assumption for numerous reasons. But a steelman version would be something like:
>Imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents at least a tenth as much.
You can make arguments about the extreme effectiveness in PEPFAR, even with significant adjustments for differences between populations.
>DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE?
That claim also sneaks in the assumption that life as a poor person is so bad as to be not worth living. Why exactly is more poor people a bad thing, if they live happy lives and only cost a trivial amount of resources? If the population of Africa was 4x what is is now, and PEPFAR cost 0.4% of the federal budget, it would be...still a pretty good deal?
Maybe the "vast swaths of poor people" argument would make sense if foreign aid was on the verge of crippling the American economy, and we just couldn't bear the cost, but come on. PEPFAR is like $10-20 per year per American! The demographic explosion that's going to bankrupt is, unfortunately, well-off geriatrics in Florida collecting social security checks and using Medicare.
Most of the starvation in Africa happens in conflict prone regions where it is difficult to import food. In relatively peaceful areas, people in general are not starving.
It will be very interesting to see how the demographic transition plays out in SSA considering the association in many SSA cultures between fecundity and social status. It would be wildly interesting if the TFR there ever went as low as South Korea's.
"Many studies (n = 48) found that having many children can bring social status and prestige to families and communities."
"Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04)."
The non-3rd world did not have children in a negative resource environment for decades. It is immoral behavior toward their own children, stop enabling it. If you disagree, there are lots of sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
...and Niger's per-capita GDP is also up 4.4x from 25 years ago. It may be hard for you to believe, but most of Africa is on the same upward economic trajectory as much of Asia in the mid-20th century.
Plus, if you were truly humanitarian-minded and worried about population growth, you'd advocate for additional funding for family planning, not mass death and suffering. "Letting AIDS run its course" is ghoulish and sadistic when it can be treated for a trivial amount of money.
Malthusian arguments have just never been proven true in reality.
Every person who survives is another laborer with the potential to contribute to the economy.
If you randomly kill 10% of the population, you don't suddenly make everyone else 10% richer because now there is more to go around. You at teh very least shrink the economy by 10% because you killed 10% of the workers, and more likely you shrink it by 40% because critical people in a pipeline or supply chain being lost disrupts the entire chain, and people are displaced because their family lost a breadwinner or they are leaving work to go into mourning, or etc.
And this is only exacerbated if instead of killing them immediately, you give them a slow wasting disease that kills them over years during which their family has to care for them and provide for them.
So, no, letting people die to avoid famine does not work, and making people healthy and strong does not create famine. It is just straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly good to save people from death and disease.
My family is in danger from the national debt. So's yours. 60-80% is a safe debt-to-GDP ratio. The US is at 123%. This article reads like it comes from an alternate universe where governments never have debt crises. Where interest rates don't affect anybody's lives. Where no country has ever played chicken with macroeconomic forces and ditched just a smidge too late.
Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts. If I thought there was any hope of decreasing the debt, I'd . . . well, I'd hope it would go for the worst government programs first, but I'd understand if they wanted to give everything a haircut. Getting rid of the best ones first, not touching lots of the stupid ones, and we all know they'll increase the debt anyway just seems dumb.
Trump would do the tax cuts whether or not PEPFAR or USAID or whatever is defunded. When/if the debt goes up it would go up by an amount less the amount of whatever is defunded
I should be less flippant. Your ethical calculus ought to account for the fact that government spending influences macroeconomic reality, and that macroeconomics poses real danger to real people. There is an actual, real, not-hyperbolic trade-off between spending money on foreign aid and reducing the danger of economic catastrophe for US citizens by paying down the national debt instead. In the case of PEPFAR, it seems like the trade-off is obviously worth it.
"Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts." Many who are right of center believe that tax rate cuts can improve the debt, (in specific situations and in general; in short term and long term contexts). If you have some specific reason to believe that those crowds are wrong, or that Trump is not amongst them, do tell. Otherwise this seems to be a bit unfair, no?
The Laffer Curve is real, but I don't think even Art Laffer himself is claiming that we're on the right side of it (admittedly, the tax code is complicated so some tax/benefit combos might be).
The only time we balanced the budget in my lifetime happened after Clinton raised taxes in 1993. He got punished for that in the midterms and no president since has dared taken a similar risk.
Taxes are not the only reason it went down, but GOP appeals to the Laffer Curve always ignore this one spectacular exception.
Interest rates were much higher then too, as was interest as a share of GDP.
I disagree. I believe Trump cares about debts. I even believe that Scott believes Trump cares about debt. I believe it is a rhetorical excess to say otherwise. Of course, there's a long list of priorities, and caring about debt (or changing debt by a marginal dollar) may be differently prioritized for him than for others, but to say he doesn't care (at all) strikes me as disingenuous. I mention it because Scott seems to want to evangelize to "the other side" and rhetorical excess that impugns the motivations of other side strike me as counterproductively divisive. One way for me to have indirectly made that point would be the Laffer curve. There's a nice article written by a Trump senior policy advisor arguing we are on the inefficient side, suggesting that the concept may be resonant with at least parts of Trump's circle. But the Laffer curve is just a tool to have made the point, and a bit beside the point. Incidentally, to clarify - I do believe that for many prospective marginal proposed changes in tax policy that we are on the right side of the Laffer curve (particularly when adjusting for effects after including growth), and that is not a rhetorical excess on my side.
FWIW Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio is over 250% and they seem to be muddling along okay.
The thing about debt to GDP is the context in which it occurs. If there were a a large country out there with a huge surplus, I'd be more worried. But China, India and pretty much of all of Europe have ratios above 75%.
The only countries with low ratios are economic weaklings like Russia and Afghanistan.
Japan is an interesting case! They get away with it because people there save a ton of money, much of it in the form of government bonds, and international investors use them as a stability hedge. They've also got a ton of deflationary pressure, so interest rates stay really low despite super inflationary monetary policy.
But other countries can't get away with that kind of thing. Even developed nations like Greece, for example. When the 2008 crisis hit, they were running a 129% debt-to-gdp ratio and had a huge unaccountable public sector. They went into a recession, lost a quarter of their GDP over 4 years, unemployment went to 25% and they had to be bailed out 3 times in a row.
So the interesting question is, how much leeway does being the world's reserve currency actually get us? And will we continue to be able to maintain that advantage in the face of BRICS? When the next economic downturn comes, are we going to be like Japan or like Greece?
I just think the chance that we're the next Greece is non-zero, and so it's wrong and bad to treat government spending programs as though they only trade off against other government spending programs. By all accounts, macroeconomic trends are cyclical, which means another 2008 is coming at some point; and every dollar of government deficit spending, no matter which program it funds, trades off very concretely against my personal safety from that coming crisis.
Goldman Sachs predicts a 15% chance of recession in the US this year.
Your family is also in danger from HIV taking over the world, and also from climate change, and also from asteroids. It’s true that the government debt poses *some* danger, but it would be strange to think that *this* danger is more pressing than several hundred thousand lives per year, especially when you are only averting $6 billion a year of the debt.
No, we in the US are not in danger from HIV taking over. Decades ago health authorities scared Americans into believing it would crossover to the majority population who didn't engage in IV drug use or sex between men, but it never did outside of sub-Saharan Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fumento#Heterosexual_AIDS Infectious diseases have more externalities than other health issues, but HIV specifically has limitations which prevent it from becoming endemic in the larger US population.
First of all, people have been making that exact argument for my entire life and probably before that, close to a half century at this point. No one has ever done anything to address the 'problem, and no crisis has ever emerged. It's a bunk argument that doesn't understand how the finances of a sovereign nation with fiat currency works, especially not if that nation is the US with all its unique advantages and relationships.
Second, as Scott says in the article - if what you cared about is the national debt, you'd be arguing to cut huge amounts in military spending or etc., not chiming in when someone says foreign aid is good.
We should cut huge amounts of military spending. I'm chiming in because I think Scott's ethical calculus should account for the risk of the US not being uniquely invincible to macroeconomic forces, as you both seem to think it is. 2008 seemed to showcase a distinct lack of US macroeconomic invincibility, to my memory.
And Clinton worked really hard to address the problem of the national debt. It was one of the signature achievements of his presidency. Look it up. It's not something Rush Limbaugh invented to scare you.
"I am happy to “concede” that if you face a choice between saving a stranger and saving your brother, save your brother! Or your cousin, or your great-uncle, or your seven-times-great-nephew-twice-removed. I’ll “concede” all of this, immediately, because it’s all fake; none of your relatives were ever in any danger. The only point of this whole style of philosophical discussion is so that you can sound wise as you say “Ah, but is not saving your brother more important than saving a complete stranger?” then doom five million complete strangers to death for basically no benefit while your brother continues to be a successful real estate agent in Des Moines."
This a million times over. Most debates with the "intellectual" right could be entirely dismissed by some version of this paragraph.
Right. But most people are not effective altruists. Most people are selfish. They care about their brother in Des Moines (assuming he didn't beat them up growing up or marry a much hotter spouse) but caring about people halfway across the world or shrimp is really much more something you do when you've got enough to spread around.
What if your brother has a passport and a libido? What if viruses are contagious? PEPFAR tamps down a global pandemic, which benefits everyone on the globe. Also, since what has happened here is political smoke and mirrors and zero actual change to the foreign aid budget (since Rubio is taking over their budget and absorbing it into State Department) we have near zero information about what Rubio will decide to do with PEPFAR in 90 days. Since PEPFAR buys the political support of African nations, and since Rubio and the administration remain interested in the deployment of power and influence internationally, my guess is that after missing three months worth of doses, little if anything about PEPFAR will change. The USAID “closure” is bureaucratic reorganization not shrinkage.
I'm saying why few people care, not why I don't. Your argument is excellent on the actual merits. I just think most people are too stupid or self-absorbed to care. We just got a president elected who promised to control inflation with tariffs.
A million times not this. How can anyone possibly on the same page advance that Singer point about the drowning child, and condemn another hypothetical as "all fake"? Have you ever seen a child drowning in a river, and do you realistically ever expect to? Whereas this is really about spending money on PEPFAR vs spending money on something else, and I can easily see myself spending money on life saving medical treatment for my children. So it turns out not to be all fake at all.
I'm pro PEPFAR, I donate monthly to an African children facing charity, but good causes are not helped by bad logic
Scott is a doctor, and his other lifesaving credentials are well-established. I know I've personally physically intervened to save a few lives (and many other, more minor acts of goodness towards strangers).
None of them were literally drowning children, but I don't take that to be your point.
None of that detracts from my point that there's a proximity element to moral obligations whether that's genetic or physical or (in the medical case) physical plus professional. We can argue that there shouldn't be, and about whether this principle justifies ending pepfar (it doesn't). My objection is purely and simply to shouty moral philosophers like Singer inserting fallacious analogies into the argument and getting away with it.
Are there any people who would be buying life-saving medication for their children if it weren’t for the dastardly use of a tiny fraction of the federal budget to save lives in Africa?
I could imagine there are people who would be buying life saving medication if they didn’t have to pay for social security, or for the military, but the amount they are paying for PEOFAR isn’t realistically affecting this.
I am that winner of life's lottery, a rich Englishman, so my share of PEPFAR is £0.00. But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok because what difference can it make to Walmarts bottom line?
As to your "hypothetical" point my children might not be ill yet but there's no guarantee they won't be, so perhaps I am building a contingency fund. Secondly I and most people would if necessary sell my house to save a child. As you don't seem to buy the proximity argument, have you already done that for the sake of these African children?
You're literally making Scott's point for him in answer to the key paragraph. Americans have made the reasonable decision, through their reps, to spend something like 0.3% of the budget of the richest nation in history to save the lives of 100s and 100s of thousands of poor people, mostly children, in destitute countries. Your dumb philosophical intellectual games and feeling of superiority are just you masturbating to your small mind in the corner. And Trump doesn't get to undo that decision by himself. He's not king.
So how does that work? President George W Bush initiating the scheme was a reasonable decision made by the American people via their reps, but President Donald Trump putting it on hold is something completely different? Was Bush king to a greater extent than Trump?
>But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok
Moving goalposts generally means you've conceded that your first argument was wrong.
We were talking about saving a foreign life vs saving your child's life, and whether this argument falls to Matt's objection about hypothetical vs. real-life harm.
If you agree that your objection to Matt's point was invalid for the reasons I gave, and instead want to start arguing that all taxation is theft so all government programs are immoral, then we can do that but I'm literally just going to link you to Scott's Non-Libertarian FAQ.
Both rude,and illogical. I wasn't making a new point, I was responding to your claim that there is not very much money at stake.
Which raises another issue. I donate, completely outside the tax system, to charities which benefit African children. You can claim not to believe that, but then we can have a bet about it under which the loser makes a large donation to a charity which benefits African children. I suspect that you would find that bet unappealing. Being an arse on the internet is not a substitute for putting your hand in your own pocket.
I think "taxation for foreign aid is theft" is a much more defensible claim than "all taxation is theft". With taxation for something like national defence, there's a plausible reason why all citizens have a moral duty to pay -- namely, that all who choose to live in a territory are choosing to benefit from their defence. Whereas if a program is used exclusively by Africans, then there isn't a clear reason why the obligation to pay for it should fall on people living in the US.
I feel like this accounting relies on much more paternalism than we should be comfortable in a democracy, and certainly much more than the type of libertarian who thinks any taxation is theft should accept from their government.
My formation is that in a democracy, the government largely does things that the citizens want it to do. And we judge what the government does by how much it satisfies the citizen's preferences about what it should do, rather than by some set of proxy measures of who it helps and how. In that sense, a preference to help citizen and a preference to help non-citizen are not qualitatively different from each other, they're just preferences to trade off with everything else.
I think that your formation relies on a sense that how it actually works is government takes you money and then uses it to care for you. This is more paternalistic because it implies that you are not a party to deciding how the government operates or what you it to do - the government succeeds if it uses your money to benefit you materially, and fails if it uses your money in ways that don't benefit you. To me this removes the role of democracy and citizen's preferences.
TBH, I immediately start by questioning the estimates of "lives saved" by any of these programs, or foreign aid (occurring private efforts) generally. The sources of the data are exactly the same NGOs and foreign governments who are receiving the stream of spending and goods. In areas where corruption is a way of life and no one can really audit the books.
So it works out to
1. NGO with a stake in the whole system does a small study in one area, reports some number that may or may not generalize (spoiler: it never does) about lives saved per dollar spent.
2. More NGOs, aid organizations, etc multiply that estimate by the top line spending number, not counting the 90+% "overhead" (ie bribes, kickbacks, normal overhead, political donations (I repeat myself)) and come up with BIG-NUMBER of lives saved, which is why no one can ever think of doing anything about these funding streams, including looking into them too deeply, because "think of the children".
Forgive me for being cynical, but all the incentives and evidence I've seen points to this being another Washington Monument strategy.
Such numbers (“25 million lives saved!”) — which this author cites without an ounce of skepticism — are no doubt cooked up in the same manner a methhead concocts his drug of choice. How in the world would such an organization ascertain this figure in the first place? HIV doesn’t always lead to AIDS, and even AIDS does not exactly kill one instantly… Anti-virals, moreover, don’t cure anyone of HIV or AIDS last I checked. Is this organization simply administering anti-viral drugs to symptomless HIV-positive Africans and then patting themselves on the back for saving black lives? I wouldn’t be surprised. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if in reality this much vaunted program doesn’t take more African lives than it saves. A disturbing thought, certainly, but there’s no end to the disturbing realities one can find these days if one goes looking with open eyes.
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
A quick look at the ungated pieces (FOX and wapo, both opinion pieces) reveals that they make assertive statements without actually citing primary sources. Credibility: 0. Those sources that are cited are exactly the same groups that have large, even existential incentives to...round up...their numbers. I'm not accusing anyone of actual malfeasance, just "too good to check" + it being extremely hard to actually get accurate data.
Beyond that--if this is such a great program, the pharmaceutical companies can make a really easy PR win by voluntarily continuing it. It's not like USAID actually was doing the actual production or administration of the drugs--they just provided money and facilitation, while siphoning off overhead.
If a hospital were considering whether to lay off an expensive surgeon, and someone pointed out that the surgeon was scheduled to perform a life-saving operation on a child tomorrow, it would be ridiculous and evil of the hospital board to say "well, it's just one afternoon of work, if saving the kid's life is so essential and the operation is such a good bet then if the surgeon has a heart he'll do it for free even after we fire him".
Your apparent notion that we have good data coming from large parts of Africa on overall mortality let alone cause of death is amusing but depressing. Are you concerned with the facts of the matter — ie in establishing what we can know that we know — or with propaganda and/or the suppression of your own intellectual curiosity in favor of some preexisting emotional attachment? I cite a pandemic-era NYT article as evidence of the poor state of affairs in regards to mortality data collection from Africa: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html
By the way, apart from the sheer problem of “counting the dead” throughout large and remote swathes of Africa, there are significant issues with determining causes of death, especially in connection to AIDS/HIV, which, might I remind you, does not itself cause death but can only be associated with death; that is, to put it another way, HIV/AIDS does not result in a universal set of mortality-causing symptoms that allows one to say unequivocally that it was the primary causeof death. See this paper for an overciew of the variety of causes of death associated with AIDS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7590652/#:~:text=In%20particular%2C%20malignancy%2Drelated%20death,2)
Given the considerable uncertainty surrounding these issues, and the immense technical difficulties involved with determining the facts of the matter in a way that would satisfy even a slightly conscientious observer, the mere hour of research you recommend hardly seems sufficient. Did you yourself spend more than an hour or were the George W. Bush speeches and newspaper articles you cited enough to slay all doubt?
"*Even* Republicans have never denied that the Republican Party saved millions of lives" is a statement that implies a very strange world-model. Did you mean "not even Democrats have ever tried to deny it"?
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
This was a program entirely done by George W Bush. For years, liberals were trying to figure out ways to say it was ineffective. But reality won out and the conservatives were right - this was a highly effective program.
It wasn't entirely Bush. 2006 was still under Bush when it switched to generic drugs, increasing efficiency 10x, and effectiveness much more. But if Bush wanted to be effective, he would have done so from the start, rather than waiting to be embarrassed by Clinton and WHO using them.
They could, but in practice I have yet to meet such a person IRL.
In general, it turns out that wanting to help people and wanting the democratic government that you elect and pay for to help people is hugely correlated.
I understand that many people have no qualms about spending other people's money on their preferred projects. I just don't think the government should be empowered to take their citizens' money to use on causes that don't explicitly benefit their respective nationals no matter how many vote to do it (except maybe if it's 100% of the voters)
First of all, why should that be a principle? We're in a democracy, the principle is 'the government does things that the citizens want it to do'. I can see a principled position for 'all taxation is theft, you can't take money from anyone for anything they don't want.' But 'you can't take money from people for things they do want if those things help foreigners only'? Why?
Second, what do you mean by 'explicitly benefits'? By a strict enough definitions, lots of domestic programs don't fit that description. By a nuanced definition, all foreign aid including PEPFAR meets that description.
Of course, any right wing policies that voters want is "populism" and "antidemocratic" and "against norms" etc etc etc and any left wing policies are just democracy
>for anything they don't want
You thought I wouldn't notice you sneaking that part in there?
Anyways, I'll copy paste something I wrote in another comment:
I'm not a libertarian, but one thing I agree with them on is that it should not just be assumed that we should be okay with governments taking our money. This is the root of why many libertarians believe that taxation is theft - they question why we should be okay with governments taking our money, and reject the validity of the justifications given. The last bit is where I part from libertarians, at least the tax=theft kind
I recognize there are some things beneficial to members of our society that requires us to be compelled to collectively pay for them. Given that this is how I and similarly thinking people justify taxes, it is hopefully clearer to you why we are far more skeptical of the spending of public funds on foreigners - the funds are compelled from us in the name of our own benefit, not in the name of benefitting others some place else - and why spending public money on things like AIDS treatments for Africans looks to us like our money is being stolen to pay for your preferred charities
Utilitarian logic just doesn't work. That's why SBF is in prison. It's wrong to take action to kill anyone foreigners or not, with only very unusual exceptions. It doesn't matter whether killing someone increases net utility. Similarly on taxes, they are involuntary. Arguments that can be applied to voluntary charities don't apply to taxes, because taxes are a violation of property rights. Any use of taxes should be decided based on democratic decision or an overriding emergency necessity. These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
I think this is a reasonable and consistent position, and it's not really the one I'm arguing against (it sounds like you think taxes to help foreigners and taxes to help countrymen are about equally bad).
"it's true that government charity is very inefficient, but government non-charity is also very inefficient"
There is good reason to think it's less efficient. It's Milton Friedman's distinction between buying your own lunch vs buying someone else's lunch vs buying someone else's lunch with someone else's money.
> These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
How is it not democratic? The people elected their congresspeople, collectively delegating decision-making authority to them, and those congresspeople then collectively agreed to fund PEPFAR in 2003, and then did so again in 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024.
You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
When I say democratically I mean whatever the current political process is. Thats for two reasons: (1) You can't clearly define democracy because it means too many different things in different countries, and even different things to different people in thr same country and (2) the only reason I care about democracy with regards to taxes that it makes revolt less likely, so the specific form doesnt matter. Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy. Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so. In the past democracy was robber barons telling people what to do in the newspaper. Then we had the agency media complex, where the agencies tell people through the media what to vote for. Now it's social media algorithms.
The FDR agency based post ww2 era of democracy is over. PEPFAR is a relic of a different time.
> You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
No. You choose who your representative is; you have to delegate your votes to Congress for all the myriad reasons the founding fathers opposed direct democracy. They also opposed a tyrannical executive too, incidentally. Alas.
> Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy.
The "deep state" is a horrifically bad mind-killing heuristic. Maybe Bush 2 actually thought, "Hey, things in Africa are really bad, I want to do something that can help Africans," spoke to Condeleezza Rice about the issue, who explained the biggest issue facing Africa was AIDS, and thus helped pass a bill which helped with AIDS, which became really successful? Like he wrote in his memoirs? If anything, a serious reading suggests that he was annoyed with "the deep state," since he repeatedly pushed for a better process over what was then being done, eventually giving highly specific orders about a focused, specific program with actionable goals and real measuring of the outcomes, rather than just bloating up the budget for bureaucrats.
Instead of, I don't know, the Deep State firing its mind control rays at him and Congress to convince them that saving babies from AIDS was good. There's an anecdote about the Nazis giving the Japanese a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Japanese going, "wow, these guys seem pretty badass, can we ally with them instead?" and that's me with all these imagined conspiracies. The world seems to be going pretty well, all in all - if the source of this isn't markets, rule of law, and democracy, but instead a shadowy cabal of ubermensch secretly pulling all the levers of power, then I'll have to reevaluate all my political opinions!
> Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so.
So, you think that Congress would not pass a renewal of PEPFAR if it was put up to a vote in 2029? You think that they would vote for a bill to kill it if it were put to a vote now, in 2025? I can tell you that I have written to my Congresspeople to maintain PEPFAR, both now and in 2023 when there was a kerfuffle about the Mexico City policy. I actually even posted about it here and other places, to encourage others to do so as well. I certainly hope my Congresspeople would not vote for such a thing, and I would commit to permanently voting against them, and whoever they endorse, in both primaries and generals, if they did so.
But, to be clear, they haven't done so. All you guys constantly refer back to "oh, actually, this is just the will of the people." Okay. Then get Congress to vote to kill babies with AIDS, rather than having the President unilaterally do it.
You don't delegate your vote to congress. When you vote, you're voting for a representative. That representative gets the same amount of power no matter how many votes they got. 51%? 90%? Doesn't matter. If instead it was a delegation, then the amount of power the representative would have would depend on the share of votes.
I don't really care whether it's called a deep state. Personally Id prefer to call our previous system agentic democracy, because of the importance state agencies played.
Frankly I don't take memoirs seriously and you shouldn't either. The writer has a huge incentive to assign themselves more agency than the agencies gave them. And to make themselves look better.
What drugs are you smoking?!? Mind control rays? Zionist Aids babies? Japanese Nazis?!? Where did you get the idea I believe in those things? Reign in your imagination a bit please, the world is not that exciting. Conspiracies are rather dull.
Okay, so you just can't read. I guess I should have figured you were thinking at a significantly lower cognitive level when you first proposed that the Deep State passed PEPFAR. My mistake.
Let me put it in simple words for you:
PEPFAR is good.
Killing PEPFAR is bad. It would cause a bunch of people to die of AIDS.
Killing PEPFAR is extra bad if you break the law to do it, since following the law is a useful bright line to keep society working.
Killing PEPFAR quickly, rather than slowly, is extra bad because nobody can do anything to help the people PEPFAR helped. For example, babies don't get HIV meds to keep them from getting AIDS.
Therefore, Trump is an extremely evil person for this, specific, act. If the Christian God is real, he will burn in hell for this (Matthew 25:41-46). I don't care about your stupid ideas about democracy or the deep state.
No one is preventing you from using your own time and money towards the issues you care about. Taxes are taken by force, so not everyone who pays taxes is going to agree about how those funds should be used. Personally, I don't believe taxes should be used for anything except public security because the use of force can only be justified by preventing a worse use of force.
I understand you have deeply held Christian beliefs about Hell, but many people don't believe in Hell even many Christians. You can't use your belief in Hell to justify how tax funds are used.
Yes, they also elected a Republican Congress. It would be a bitter pill to swallow if the Republican Congress decided to kill PEPFAR, but that is not what is actually happening.
They elected a Republican congress with the expectation that they would serve Trump. If they could elect a clone of Trump to occupy every one of those seats, they would have.
...Everyone always underestimates the hold that he has on people. You don't get people calling you the second coming of Jesus without some level of unholy charisma.
Is it so hard to believe that this is what the people want? That doesn't necessarily justify their actions, of course. Maybe the majority is actually just evil from your point of view. But what the hell are you going to do about it?
The simplest answer of course is likely to be the correct one, and that is that some people have negative value for the lives of foreigners. A program that saves one such life is worse than any fraction of a broadband boondoggle.
That also explains the continued support of the rolling genocide in Palestine.
Admirable, but it seems clear to me that the operational plan is cutting programs wherever there won’t be too much resistance in order to “shrink the government” which in practice means tax cuts. That’s the only consideration.
If they cared about effectiveness, they’d talk about that instead of calling USAID an evil ball of worms.
I'm always shocked on these types of articles at how many of the top-level comments argue that giving even the tiniest amount to life-saving charities is bad. Is this really a majority view or do the few people who think this just feel really compelled to comment a lot?
The discussion is (mostly) not about whether giving money to charities is bad. It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do. As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
> It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do.
That may be your view, but it's a small fraction of the complaints in this comment section.
> As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
If you read the comments on any of the articles from this blog on giving to charity, you'll see that's not true. I don't think any of the other articles on charity involved government spending, but they garner just as many complaints. Even this article has a few people arguing that Africans shouldn't be protected from AIDS.
I'd applaud you if you donated your money to your preferred charity. I do not applaud people using the power of the state to spend other people's money on their preferred charity
Whatever extreme view is expressed in the comments is unlikely to be the majority one, because people with non-extreme views don't feel compelled to comment. The recent survey demonstrated that.
I do think there is a strong effect where the people with “extreme” opinions are more likely to comment. On the other hand, last November was a pretty comprehensive measurement of the revealed preference of the American people.
This is a regular occurrence in the comments section, yes. You can browse the comments section of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian to see like 50 people arguing it's good and right to care about British people, and close to zero disputing the ratio of effectiveness.
I personally donate to charities dedicating to the third world (specifically sub-Saharan Africa tends to be the focus). But I oppose any tax dollars being spent that way.
I am wearing of hearing the "moral" arguments I hear from many people. My legal-immigrant wife was cheated by USCIS. My congresswomen failed her, as did the rest of the "do-gooders" now coming out in opposition to deportations. When I raise the issue I have been called "selfish", "racist" (?), and many other things. My wife gets no sympathy (her "value" is "literally zero" to many even if not to you), and gets caught up in the inverse of Stalin's alleged "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." And if you never cared about the one person, why should I trust that you actually care about the many? If my wife has zero value to you, why should I care about the people you want to help?
If people didn't let these systems rot--if legal immigrants were cared for, and foreign aid programs regularly reviewed for their value--we would not get to the Trump stage. Don't expect your house to remain standing if you can't do needed repairs. I have seen how the State department functions; it is an embarrassment, as is the mentioned USCIS.
I have literally never met a person who thinks that illegal immigrants should get rights and be allowed to stay, who doesn't also think the legal immigration system should be reformed and expanded to be less punitive and awful.
It kinda sounds like you are setting these two things in opposition to each other in the way you frame the question, and I'm not surprised if people react negatively to that and tell you you're doing it wrong. I'm betting if you instead framed it as 'everything the US does about immigration is bad, even legal immigrants get screwed over and we need to fix the whole system' then you would not get pushback.
Has anyone estimated the number of HIV/AIDS cases outside of Africa that PEPFAR prevented by reducing the transmission of HIV in Africa? (Per year, or over the ~20 years of the program, or even projected to 2050).
Public health is/was concerned with ending transmission chains as well as saving individuals. The 26 million number is bound to be an undercount of the total lives saved.
My dad works on HIV/AIDS tracking and prevention in the US, and a big part of the reason it's impossible to eradicate it in the US population is because of people from countries with high rates coming here not knowing they are infected. It's definitely true that fighting diseases like this globally is an effective way to fight it at home.
We wouldn't be able to accomplish any other objectives of ours if we killed everyone on the planet. Whereas we can do plenty while not letting such people in.
People from countries with extremely high HIV rates have on average extremely low economic value (not to be confused with moral value, which we're assuming to be equal across all humanity, but broadly irrelevant to governments). The cost of not admitting them is, as such, roughly zero.
I'm sure that you will point out and find amusing that such a policy would probably have excluded Elon Musk, though I'm not sure how high the rate was at the time he fled.
Arguments can be made for providing aid without a commensurate allowance of admittance.
Does something about PEPFAR's work require that it be done by the government? This argument makes a lot more sense if the situation is "either the US government funds this or it can't get done" rather than "this could run with private donations, but it's a government project because individual donors are bad at decisions so their money needs to be taxed away for this."
Especially since this is basically just a giveaway to big pharma plus some coordination with existing groups actually administering the doses. If it's such an unambiguous win, the pharma companies could pick it back up for a massive PR win at very little overall cost.
Framing this as killing people seems misleading. It’s like analysing any tax reform through of the lens of who is “winning” and “losing”, rather than, what makes policy sense. The ultimate status quo is nothing, so it does seem reasonable to seek a policy justification for spending the money, rather than needing a justification to cut it.
Under US law, there is no actual authority for Trump to engage in the spending freeze. The money for PEPFAR was lawfully appropriated by Congress, and under the Impoundment Act of 1974, the only way he can rescind spending is by telling Congress why, on the same day he does so. Thus, his decision to cut the funding is itself illegal. Illegally preventing someone from receiving medical attention is ~killing - if you purposefully blocked an EMT from getting a patient into the hospital and receiving life-saving medical care, that would be prosecuted as murder here in Texas (as you knowingly and intentionally caused their death). In this case I think it would be closer to manslaughter, as Trump merely recklessly caused the death.
I was more making a philosophical comment, that a person is not positively obligated to spend any of their money to save people outside of their circle of concern, or you end up at infinite charity. Agree once you have extended care to someone, they are in that circle. But there seems a meaningful distinction between stopping money allocated to some spending program (where the death caused is remote) and say switching off someone’s life support (where it is direct). Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
> Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
Sure. And PEPFAR is good, that's why it has been passed by Congress five times, in 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024. There are, I'm sure, lots of foreign aid programs that turned out not to be worth the money, and presumably Congress quietly stopped funding them.
Ok then. My objection is just framing. Seems like a rhetorical trick to benefit from most people’s assumption that the current status quo is correct, rather than justifying the position from first principles. Like when people say tax cuts disproportionately favor the wealthy, instead of thinking about whether the level of tax is optimal or sensible.
Do you have the specific citation, because my guess is that the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” gives lots of implementation latitude to the President, such that he is not required to spend a single dime in any particular two-week period if he decides on a funding freeze to audit the program.
I agree that this is against the spirit of the law, but congress should stop giving the president so much authority over spending if they want the president to have less authority over spending.
>(A) withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority (whether by establishing reserves or otherwise) provided for projects or activities; or
>(B) any other type of Executive action or inaction which effectively precludes the obligation or expenditure of budget authority, including authority to obligate by contract in advance of appropriations as specifically authorized by law
>[...]
> Whenever the President, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the head of any department or agency of the United States, or any officer or employee of the United States proposes to defer any budget authority provided for a specific purpose or project, the President shall transmit to the House of Representatives and the Senate a special message specifying [a bunch of shit]
The 90 day pause is very clearly a "deferral of budgetary authority." One might imagine that in the normal day-to-day of governance, some days there's just no money spent on a particular program, but I don't think any reasonable person could think this isn't "withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority".
I know about the anti-deficiency act. That particular statute has been cited quite a bit recently. What I am interested in is the specific text of the appropriation made by congress for the PEPFAR program. I’m not an expert, but the citations I found cite back to 22 U.S.C. 2151b-2, which states in part:
“(1) In general
Consistent with section 2151b(c) of this title, the President is authorized to furnish assistance, on such terms and conditions as the President may determine, for HIV/AIDS”
If the terms and conditions the president determines are, “everyone needs to come back to the US now while we figure the budget out,” it’s not clear that any budgetary authority has been deferred, because the authority was given within the appropriation for the president to determine the terms and conditions under which to furnish assistance.
I am not a professional auditor, but it seems like stopping a program to audit it is pretty overkill and probably detrimental to being able to execute a thorough audit of all the moving parts. Also, Trump isn't bringing in auditors, he's letting Elon Musk and his DOGE team (that has no audit related qualifications) dig through payment histories and concoct lies saying that the spending was secret and funneled to partisan left wing orgs like... Politico for their political tracking subscription service. It's glaringly obvious this is illegal, breaks precedent, and is just Trump being corrupt by handing someone sensitive government access to lie on his behalf.
So imagine a world where you find a young deer next to its dead mother, take it into your house and hand feed it for 5 years, and then are considering whether or not to release it into the wild again.
If you had ignored it in the first place, maybe it would have died, or maybe it would have learned to fend for itself and been ok. But at this point it is dependent on you and doesn't know howto survive without you, and will definitely die if you cut off that support now.
If you created a framework that people need to live, and they accepted that framework instead of building their own alternatives based on assurances from you that it would stay in place and be stable to rely on in the future, then yeah it's reasonable to say you are killing them if you suddenly shut it down without warning.
Analogy is inapt. The deer can’t now learn to fend for itself. But a human - any human - can learn to obtain anything that money could have bought them. So many more things can intervene before withdrawing money directly causes death. Not so in the deer case, or for turning off life support.
I'm sure *normal* people don't hate African children enough to value their lives at 0.
But if anyone did value African lives at 0, the billionaire throwing Sieg Heils and rooting for the far right in Germany seems the most likely candidate, no?
I'm sure normal people don't explicitly value African children at zero, but if you examine the donations they give, you'll find that they by revealed preference value the lives of African children at zero.
Might actually be less than 0 for some people. The more of them there are, the more of them will eventually come here, and if they do they'll join the other side in the current culture war.
"Realistically I think it’s even worse than this, because in practice the government levies as many taxes as it feels like levying, spends as much money as it feels like spending, and turns the difference into deficit, so it’s not obvious that canceling PEPFAR gives any more money to American programs. I’m writing this assuming that we want to keep the deficit fixed, which is a laughably fake assumption for the real government."
This footnote is actually at the heart of the issue. Congress spends however much money it decides to spend, on whatever it decides to spend it on, and sets taxes wherever it wants to (paying the difference with debt). The only way to get more money back to people or to redirect it to other programs (well, in a normal world, where Congress actually does things, instead of sitting around letting the president trample all over the Constitution) is to convince them to vote to spend less or spend money on different things. Same thing with e.g. a small or narrow tax cut; any shortfall is made up with a different tax or with debt (which becomes tomorrow's taxes).
I think this is looking too deeply into the assumptions MAGA types are making – they simply don't care about children in Africa, and would rather save $6 billion in taxes. They don't want that money in the hands of the government at all.
My initial position was that we should find a way to transfer PEPFAR to private hands. This would be done in a way as to not "pause" the program(which obviously would cost lives). I still think this would be an ideal solution, since this would preserve the program while cutting government spending.
Now, I think PEPFAR is just to good and cheap of a program ,and so I don't really care where the money comes from. There are better places to cut money from, anyone serious about cutting government spending should not have cutting PEPFAR as a priority.
NOTE: When talking to right-wingers, don't forget to point that the number of children with HIV in Africa is decreasing. It is a worry among us Chuds that programs like PEPFAR are just subsidizing reckless behaviour by Africans, that is, we worry that the people will just start having more HIV babies knowing that they will survive thanks to meds. The data shows that there isn't any HIV baby boom, to the contrary, babies with HIV will be thing of the past soon.
> Valuing a foreigner at less than 1/100th of an American would put them somewhere between a cow and a chicken, which if nothing else seems like an awkward thing to have to bring up at UN meetings.
Most Americans aren't vegan, so a revealed preference argument for showing that they value foreigners less than 1/100th of an American would also show that they value animals much much less than 1/100th of an American.
Is there any way to take money from bad programs and redirecting them to less bad programs that does not involve cancelling programs?
And is there any way to cancel bad programs, in the current situation, that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground?
Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use" is another way of saying, "you can't cancel any programs", which is another way of saying, "you can't fix this, give up, stop trying".
Even when you say it.
If a program is net-negative, assuming you’re prioritizing the most harmful programs first, canceling it will lead to the money being better spent.
The point is, if you want to improve government efficiency, focus on the actual bad programs, not the ones that save millions of lives.
Or, burn the entire field, then replant with only good programs.
What makes you think that replanting will result in “good” programs? Why cut good programs? Seems arbitrary, especially when establishing a good government program is non-trivial.
The same reasons you think "tell Congress and the people Congress and the executive branch appoints to sort out what the good programs are ahead of time" will result in the good programs being kept.
If one is feasible, the other is feasible, because you'd be using the same sets of people to make the distinction. If neither is feasible...
I guess I am confused by your comment.
Removing programs one by one just requires that the government can slowly change. Burn and replant requires the government can quickly change.
If one thinks the government cannot effectively quickly change (that is that ~600 decision makers their 300 million stakeholders will struggle with alignment the more complex the ask per moment) then it should bias one towards more incremental approaches.
I think it's plausibly easier to quickly change than slowly change the government, due to new bureaucracies being less ossified than old ones, although the transition costs are also higher.
Will the fire that burns the field also take all the terrible straw men with it? If so, it does sound a little tempting.
It's a safe assumption that the government of a country of 330 million people is going to be very complicated, have a lot of moving parts, and it's going to have quite a lot of parts that look bad to any given person. This is because 330 million is a LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE. They have different perspectives, different interests, different valuations of what's good and bad and every single one of them is working from a substantially different set of information.
A government full of programs that grew up organically, bit by bit, is certainly going to be messy and confusing and unpretty. But a government that results from burning everything to the ground and replanting[1] is going to represent exactly one small set of interests, perspectives and valuations. You'd better have really, REALLY high confidence that those interests are extremely well in-line with yours, and that the perspectives and valuations result from accurate information and sound judgement. Because if they don't, if they're hostile to you and yours or out of touch with reality, you literally just torched your safety net.
[1] Taking it on faith that the replanting happens.
A government opening to replanting promises to hear the concerns of people wanting programs reopened and to let them make their case. This would also weed out many programs with very weak cases.
"the nature of the Constitution is simply such that there is a better case for the president being able to spend less money than appropriated than more"
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/trumps-executive-branch-revolution
Both are "feasible".
All around us are examples of success being achieved by pruning net negative options, redirecting, and slowly honing in on the optimal outcome – business, horticulture, evolution, science, navigation, health, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, that is not to say that there's never a place for catastrophic change – revolutions, forest fires, demolition, creative destruction. But the cost of that is enormous, total, and it takes a painfully long time to build back, and even longer to get to something like "thriving".
Like everything else, it's a tradeoff, and if you care about the outcome, you have to understand both sides of the ledger. It's not enough to be displeased with the status quo, and with the unbearable patience and work required to improve slowly. You have to understand the costs – not least in terms of patience and work – of burning it all down, building it back, and going without it in the meantime. If you want to get to success faster, you also need a crystal clear vision for what you're trying to achieve, that you can share with people and get buy-in for. Otherwise it'll just be more burning.
I don't know how you, personally, make that calculation. What worries me, however, is that I don't see a lot of evidence of people in charge making the calculation at all, nor sharing a vision or direction other than "not this".
The PEPFAR issue is a good example, as it looks very much like someone taking a torch to something they don't understand, with no clear goal other than to burn things down. Feels a lot like the summer of 2020, TBH, just with different players and methods. Just dumb iconoclasm.
>Feels a lot like the summer of 2020, TBH, just with different players and methods. Just dumb iconoclasm.
Same methods, really, just dumber and less surgical. Defund EVERYTHING! Cancel culture but it's the FCC doing it!
I don't think it is feasible to expect our government to prioritize good programs. The best we can do is probably indeed to torch programs on the assumption that they tend to be bad and thus nothing is better than something.
PEPFAR was not established during the Continental Congress, as an inviolable part of the foundation of the nation, it was established in 2003 by George Bush during his first term. So if it is possible to create a good programme in the 00s it should also be possible to create good programmes in the 20s.
What sense I can make out of it is that there are complaints about creep, that it has expanded from "treating AIDS" to other areas and gone beyond its original remit. I can't speak as to how accurate that is.
But if I go by Wikipedia, PEPFAR itself was a replacement for previous efforts considered less effective. I'm sure the people involved in those programmes also complained hat they were doing good and closing them down would be a terrible idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief
"[Condoleeza Rice] also told [Bush] that HIV/AIDS was a central problem in Africa but that the United States was spending only $500 million per year on global AIDS, with the money spread across six federal agencies, without a clear strategy for curbing the epidemic."
So it seems possible at least theoretically to shut down one or more programmes and replace them with something better suited to the situation as it now is. PEPFAR itself has undergone that change, with a reorganisation in 2008 and expansion into new countries:
"When PEPFAR was signed into law 15 resource-limited countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates were designated to receive the majority of the funding. The 15 "focus countries" were Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia. Most of the $15 billion for the program was to be spent on these focus countries, $4 billion was allocated for programs elsewhere, and for HIV/AIDS research (the other $1 billion was contributed to the Global Fund).
With the reauthorization of PEPFAR in 2008 there was a shift away from the "focus country" approach by authorizing the development of a Partnership Framework model for regions and countries, with the aim of ensuring long-term sustainability and country leadership. Through bilaterally-funded programs, PEPFAR works in partnership with host nations to support treatment, prevention and care for millions of people in more than 85 countries. Partnership Frameworks provide a 5-year joint strategic framework for cooperation between the U.S. Government, the partner government, and other partners to combat HIV/AIDS in the host country through service delivery, policy reform, and coordinated financial commitments."
Maybe a shakeup *is* needed, who knows?
I mean it is possible, but as Scott points out, is it a priority? What are the odds and the marginal gains of picking a program in the top 1% of success and improving it *further* rather than picking some completely disastrous bottom 1% shitshow that you literally couldn't make worse if you try?
Realistically, this is not a "we can make this better" thing, it's a "we don't care shit about some Africans dying of AIDS, we'd rather save the money even if it means then wasting on something completely inefficient".
Why can't the Gates or Novo Nordisk Foundation take over PEPFAR?
What if we crispie crittered all the rage-thinkers instead?
If you wanted to do that, your party should have taken full control of the country before the opposition did. Too late for that now, obviously.
1) replanting comes with massive overhead - most likely, most of the institutional knowledge is lost, and the knowledgeable and dedicated people no longer available, when you decide to "replant". Especially since the stated goal of Project 2025 is to replace employees dedicated to their respective institution (the so-called "deep state") with ones dedicated to the current president, so the best people wouldn't even be eligible.
2) who do you expect to do that? The current administration obviously doesn't bother to find out in advance what's worth saving, so why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
>why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
Presumably because people would notice that shit is hitting the fan, as they did in this instance, and because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains.
"because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains" - forgive me if I don't have a lot of confidence in that motivation, after Trump has threatened to invade a NATO ally and suggested to occupy Gaza (after expelling the Palestinians).
To build casinos, no less. That honestly IS cartoonish villainy.
Eh, if expulsion were realistic, it would probably be preferable to slow strangulation by Israel, which is the inevitable default.
Expelling the Palestinians would be the humanitarian option compared to keeping them under Israel's control.
Do you...not suppose there might be some *downsides* to burning the entire field? Should you perhaps weigh those in the calculus?
If anyone knew how to reliably create good organizations that infallibly and efficiently pursue their goal from scratch the world would be a very different place. "See how they go, weed out the bad and keep the good" is pretty much the state of the art.
That is an open goal for bias...our programmes are good because we are good, their programmes are bad because they are bad.
The problems with trying to do a massive overhaul of an airplane mid-flight are pretty easy to understand. If you cancelled Medicaid tomorrow and it took you even a few months to stand up the new Good Medicaid, incredible amounts of suffering would happen in the interim. As we're seeing right now, the same goes for research spending, overseas deployments, etc. etc. etc.
This plane you can’t land, or at least you really really shouldn’t. And not even trying to fix things (i.e. “don’t do that while in mid-air”) is going to result in uncontrolled involuntary landing.
It’s a horrible set of choices, but sometimes you get those.
It would be nice to have a gang of maintenance people who could carefully and quickly swap out only the parts that need it, and a long term expert crew who could be trusted to advise and assist in good faith. Unfortunately the only maintenance gang the passengers are in the mood to give access, tools and materiel are ones that have never been anywhere near most of the crew, because the crew seem to have made a living out of getting the plane into this state and have no intention of stopping unless forced.
That particular maintenance gang are good at angle grinders and plasma cutters, and figure you can just wed back bits after determining they were necessary after all. But they don’t know what the long term expert crew know and they listen to the latter with skepticism and a jaundiced look at the written logs.
But the alternative isn’t some hypothetical better nicer maintenance gang from the Land of Counterfactuals, it’s no maintenance until the crash. Just look at the trend graphs.
Everyone is going to argue "But my program is a good program, not one of the bad ones!"
PEPFAR seems to be one of the good ones, and I think there is an obligation to help others. But I'm a Christian and I get that from divine guidance, something which has been sneered at as a source of moral authority and instruction. So if we're now asking the questions "Why am I obligated to help people who are complete strangers?" that's not a bad thing; when was the last debate about public morality? Just saying "Because we should" is not good enough: what are your reasons?
It would be wild if Trump, of all people, was responsible for kicking off a public debate about "why should we do good?" and getting agreement on a system of ethics for the state.
Well then you get into the question of “why try to be a good person if not because of the fear of divine punishment”? Which is a problem if you don’t believe in some sort of objective morality to ground everything.
The answer I’ve arrived that is that (most) people have a conscience either pre-installed through selection for prosocial behavior or socially conditioned into them, and said conscience must be appeased to remain psychologically stable. To do this, you can either do good (as defined in your own particular worldview but hopefully having something to do with reducing suffering) or you can do non-good and try to convince yourself it is good via a series of “copes” ie. faulty arguments that are intentionally under-scrutinized because they serve to appease the conscience. Copes are an inferior strategy for appeasing your conscience because deep down you probably are aware it’s cope. So the best way to live is to genuinely try to be a good person, and to do so in a logically consistent fashion, while avoiding “copes”.
Pretty much any argument one could deploy against PEPFAR strongly seems like cope.
I admit that the problem with this is there’s no known solution for convincing the general population to behave this way, but that applies to pretty much every framework.
Why be a good person without fear of divine punishment? Because cooperation beats defection as a long term survival strategy, as groups are stronger than individuals. That's your objective morality, if you need one. It isn't complicated, it predates religion, and it's almost certainly why we evolved to have the prosocial behaviors you mention in the first place. Apes together strong.
And then we hit the disparity between what is good for the survival of the species, and what is good for the survival of the individual, and bad actors arise and punishment has to come into play to ensure people keep playing nice.
The real problem is scarcity, as usual. Specifically scarcity of information. In a tribal society it's easy to watch for bad actors defecting and punish them accordingly, and unfortunately all our social mechanisms for dealing with bad actors revolve around that small scale paradigm. In a country of hundreds of millions and systems of endlessly increasing complexity, those social mechanisms collapse and bad actors run rampant without consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
> what are your reasons?
I would say with AIDS, like with many other diseases, there is also a general selfish reason: because we want diseases to generally have as little a chance to spread and mutate as possible.
But the altruistic reason can very well be "because human life and prosperity is a terminal goal in and of itself". You don't really need any particular justification or rationalization for it. I like being healthy, I imagine everyone else in the world is also a sentient being like me since we're all built the same, I imagine everyone else also wants to be healthy internally. If I am in a position to make someone else healthy at tiny expense to me, why not do it?
It would be wild. It's also not going to happen.
If your aim is to cut all foreign aid programs, because their effect is net-negative, you gotta prioritize the most obviously net-positive programs first.
It's about divide and conquer. All programs involve the corrupt running net-negative/harmful/detrimental programs and the virtuous running their beneficial/net-positive programs. The corrupt will only care about their net-negative programs and not help the virtuous. Once all the net-positives are gone, you can then move on to remove all of them. The corrupt will not get any protection from those annoying, virtuous, altruistic saints, as they're no longer invested in protecting the rest of the foreign aid.
Then maybe once they're are all gone, their political power entirely broken, you could try rehiring the best of the saints and your entire foreign aid department might actually become a net-positive, trustworthy institution. Which at the moment it obviously is not, since it funds net-negative programs and everyone knows it. Obviously someone should go to hell for this, but since this is a democracy, sending them there before their natural death is not an option.
Imagine, you tried going after the net-negatives first. You're falsely assuming that those don't do anything and that you've got infinite political power to do whatever you like, in whatever order you like. But those programs convert money into clout and connections. Instead of saints, now you're fucking with a bunch of sociopath pull peddlers now. The first thing they do, is instrumentalise the saints for their PR.
And, no, you're not allowed to assume Hypothetical Optimised Congress where a majority, or even a plurality, of both houses is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Or rather, feel free to assume whatever you want and do whatever you want with that, but it won't move me, or get me or the millions like me to listen, or believe you're trying anything but feel good about... feel good about what, exactly? Noting that someone will have to put PEPFAR back? Claiming that hypotheticals in moral reasoning don't matter because "it's all fake"?
This has been disappointing.
Too bad, I was kind of hoping to discuss the pluses and minuses of the CATGIRL Act.
Seriously, I think the red team-blue team culture war is so ingrained at this point it's just going to swing back and forth until the Chinese eat our lunch.
I don't know, I have a feeling this will be the last swing in a while, one way or another...
Why do you think the White House will stop changing hands to the other party every 4-12 years? It's not Trump won in a true landslide. It was still a close election, just less close than is typical these days.
There are more or less stupid ways to cut government. The last time anything even halfway reasonable was attempted was in the 90s. It involved government audits and was headed by Congress and supported by the President. After that, we had a President who waged two massive wars that blew up the deficit (Bush), and then we had a half-hearted attempt by Obama in his second term to do the same thing that was done in the 90s. (the Republicans didn’t bite and Obama didn’t try particularly hard.) Neither Trump 1.0 nor Biden had any interest in taking on the deficit. What makes you think that haphazard cuts to government are the only, much less “best” way to cut government, when we have an approach from the 90s that worked well and has mostly just been left untried since then?
Who was it you thought would be trying it now? The minority party, who are too busy rabidly attacking everything they can reach in the majority party? Or the majority party, who haven't managed to even try this since the 90s? (And are also, with less urgency, busy attacking anything they can reach in the minority party.)
"Yes, we have this method, but it's impossible for any of the people who would have to try it to try it, any more than the second through ninth-best, so we shouldn't try this tenth-best method that does have a constituency and support and should give up instead."
Why does it have to happen this second? I’m not an arsonist; ensure the conditions are right (austerity Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader, austerity President) and one of the better methods will be viable. There’s already a reasonable constituency for this in Congress, we just don’t have a good President. I don’t want to torch the government right this second just because we don’t have the right conditions. Since these conditions have been achieved in the past (and probably will be again when Trump is out of office), I think it’s perfectly reasonable to achieve these conditions rather than flamethrower the government. You should try to explain why this needs to be done now in such a slapdash way, rather than being done later in the way I’ve described.
In the past, when those conditions were achieved, did the government shrink, and stay shrunk? And how often do the stars align for that?
And, if you had to put names to the people who are the constituency in *the current* Congress for this, who would the top... eh... twenty be? ("You don't know 20" isn't a disqualifier, by the way. But one Rand Paul and a half dozen fellow travellers doesn't qualify the careful-scalpel method as viable.)
Last time you made your bed, did it stay made?
Some things require constant attention - hot stoves and government deficits in a democratic society, for example. Neither one requires a flamethrower.
Freedom Caucus + New Democrat Coalition + Blue Dogs are a reasonable start, since these caucuses have a history of working for cuts to the deficit. These are about a quarter to a third of Congress depending on the year; non-caucus members have also joined these efforts when the conditions are right (that is to say, when they’re badgered by a Speaker of the House or a President of their party to vote for an austerity bill). Since many Republican and Democratic speakers have come out of these caucuses and tried pushing for austerity bills, I would say that the major missing piece is a President who can push for this and enlist his counterparts in the opposite party. Trump can’t do this because he’s polarizing, and Biden didn’t have any interest in deficit reduction, but it’s likely that if we elect a President who isn’t a warmonger, we have a reasonable chance of getting someone who’ll cut the deficit like Clinton and Gingrich did in the 90s. Not as fun as watching the world blow up, but green shade budget balancing rarely is.
One wonders if there a reason the feuding parties can not produce a candidate like Clinton.
Nothing is ever going to "stay shrunk". That's just not how it works. You have to keep doing laundry. You have to keep doing dishes. You have to keep brushing your teeth. And the government has to rebalance its budget.
Burning and replanting, as people suggest, certainly is a method, but even then you're not creating a new system that's going to be infallible forever - at best you're paving the way to have to burn and replant again later on.
I'm not going to claim to know that it's better or worse, but the argument that it doesn't "permanently fix" anything is invalid for every possible change.
I'm not an arsonist in the literal sense that I don't burn down buildings (after all, most buildings are privately owned rather than government buildings). But the government is not like a civilian owner of a building, it is based on taxation of the governed and only exists with out support, and is thus subject to the results of elections. The analogy would thus not be to torching someone else's property, but demolishing some of your own, which is an entirely standard thing to do over time.
Why is it impossible to figure out which programs are bad, then take a flamethrower to them? Even people who disagree about whether a program to bring broadband to the rural US is a worthwhile program can agree on whether it is an is an effective program.
The plan for progra would include a budget and a timeline .. You could use simple criteria for torching: torch programs that are both over budget and more than 40% behind where timeline said they would be. Those guidelines are imperfect, but certainly better than torching everything.
Maybe you're just somebody who thinks great big fires are really cool and thrilling?
Happily, they're not torching everything, and never have been. Pausing a lot of stuff. Pausing implies the strong possibility of unpausing, which is the difference.
Now tell me about how your method has less collateral damage, i.e. less PEPFARs cut (and then reinstated after enough screaming and/or lobbying for it before Congress) than the one they're using.
You are suffering a lapse of logic here. My proposal is not an alternative to what is being done now. It is also not a method I think is great. It is an alternative to your proposal of taking a flamethrower to everything. I made my counter-proposal because you said eliminating programs by identifying the bad ones was impossible in practice so we'd have to just resort to torching everything. Coming up with something better than torching everything's a pretty low bar to clear.
The core problem is that data may inform politics, but can't supplant it. The attempt otherwise can just create workarounds.
They said “pause” but then have started firing all the people whose job it would be to restart it.
The pause has not been unpaused. Their lawyers have said all these programs have been cut.
It'd take too long, and you might lose the House in two years.
If you don't burn the whole thing down, the agencies will simply stonewall you on every level, and can easily drag the process out long enough. A rough sketch of a strategy an agency could employ: first, the head of the agency simply refuses to follow orders to cut the programs. And when fired, will file suit against you saying you don't have the right to fire him. Some Liberal court, say, the Ninth Circuit, will rule in his favor, and reinstate him, and then he'll stay in place until the Supreme Court weighs in. If you have appointed an Acting head in the interim, he'd be hamstrung by someone filing suit declaring that he has no authority to issue any orders. The Democrats then drag out the confirmation process for your replacement nominee. Maybe get him "credibly accused" of gang rape or something, and have a long show trial. If you manage to get your guy confirmed, then the lower-level members of the agency don't implement his directives. Maybe someone leaks a damaging story about him to the press, and get him to resign (and then you have to go through the whole confirmation thing again). If they DO start cutting a program or two, they do it in gradual and easily reversed way that will take years to fully wind down. And you have to do something like this at every single agency you want to implement changes in. And when the administration changes, every last one of them moves quickly to undo all your changes in less than a month.
The deep state is better thought of as a leaderless resistance with many independent cells, rather than a strictly hierarchical organization that can be decapitated. It takes … cruder methods to fight such a foe.
That makes sense. But if we start by torching everything wouldn’t there be the same massive bullshit phenomena at work in setting up sparser and better programs, so that nothing much gets set up? Also it seems like a lot of the cleared ground and freed up money could end going to new “programs” that are really just little oligarchies run by Trump favorites. Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit.
> so that nothing much gets set up
Oh no. How terrible.
If some individual program is really that good, Congress can legislate for it directly instead of setting up "independent" administrative agencies that inexorably go rogue to manage a whole bunch of them at once, the majority of which are bad.
Okay, yeah, that kind of thing could happen, but when the other guys take office, they're not going to pretend the Florida Seaside Improvement Program is a nonpartisan independent agency run by career civil servants the President cannot fire at will. They'll promptly remove him, and put their own guys in charge. That regular churn will keep it from becoming too much of a nuisance. They would be bad, certainly, but the alternative looks like permanent oligarchies telling you you can't build on your land because the puddles on it are "navigable waterways" or something (see Sackett v. EPA). The "fat profit" they make is negligible; if you like, you can think of the election as a bet that you profit from when your guy wins. In expectation, it basically evens out.
> same massive bullshit phenomena at work in setting up sparser and better programs,
trump apparently took the assassination attempt to heart and named protental successors
fdr needed 12 years to make this era of american government, its been weeks
Im still not optimistic about the future but drastic, cruel, action raises my estimation we can delay and weaken the coming darkage by allot
Or make it come a lot faster!
A stable america will slow the collapse drastically.
Nation states are decaying, but if the middle east drops the charade, then russia then china but it takes 100 years for europe and america to balkanize it will be allot less violence and maybe segments of international trade still work and we get to have chips to store all the ebooks.
"Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit."
While horribly corrupt, that (ironically) would be better than the infamous eminent domain cases where property was seized in the name of civic development, then nothing happened (save that some people made a tidy profit). At least flipping derelict properties means that those properties are now either repaired and improved, or demolished so building on the site can go forward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
"Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
...After the Court's decision, the city allowed a private developer to proceed with its plans; however, the developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the project, and the contested land remained an undeveloped empty lot.
...In spite of repeated efforts, the redeveloper (who stood to get a 91-acre (370,000 m2) waterfront tract of land for $1 per year) was unable to obtain financing, and the redevelopment project was abandoned. As of the beginning of 2010, the original Kelo property was a vacant lot, generating no tax revenue for the city. In the aftermath of 2011's Hurricane Irene, the now-closed New London redevelopment area was turned into a dump for storm debris such as tree branches and other vegetation. However, as of May 2022, a private developer was building 100 apartments, a 100-unit hotel, and a community center on the property.
Pfizer, whose employees were supposed to be the clientele of the Fort Trumbull redevelopment project, completed its merger with Wyeth, resulting in a consolidation of research facilities of the two companies. Pfizer chose to retain the Groton campus on the east side of the Thames River, closing its New London facility in late 2010 with a loss of over 1,000 jobs. That coincided with the expiration of tax breaks on the New London site that would have increased Pfizer's property tax bill by almost 400 percent.
After the Pfizer announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle, in November 2009, in its lead editorial called the Kelo decision infamous:
The well-laid plans of redevelopers, however, did not pan out. The land where Susette Kelo's little pink house once stood remains undeveloped. The proposed hotel-retail-condo "urban village" has not been built. And earlier this month, Pfizer Inc. announced that it is closing the $350 million research center in New London that was the anchor for the New London redevelopment plan, and will be relocating some 1,500 jobs."
Again ironically, the dissent on the Supreme Court decision included some of the infamous horrible conservative judges:
"The principal dissent was issued on June 25, 2005, by Justice O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas. The dissenting opinion suggested that the use of this taking power in a reverse Robin Hood fashion — take from the poor, give to the rich — would become the norm, not the exception"
Shortly thereafter (after Kelo), a little town in Texas boldly tried to take the farm/home, its acreage fronting the highway, of an elderly mother and daughter we knew* (which homestead was incidentally protected by a conservation easement) - because here was some undeveloped land and the town "decided" it needed a ...
Target.
Why? Why would any town "need" a particular store?
Because, you see, the town five or ten miles down the road had gotten a Target. And so this town wanted to grab that tax revenue from its own Target.
(This is how America comes to look so depressingly the same at every highway exit ...)
In a *very* rare sound move, the state Lege passed a law that takings of private property couldn't be solely for private benefit.
*Ironically, they had moved there after their original homestead was taken some decades earlier, to build a lake in Dallas.
>and you might lose the House in two years.
Yup! I was thinking that that was probably a large chunk of the motivation for doing all of these very fast and crude cuts. Many Thanks for the detailed scenarios.
Grr, the amount of collateral damage being done is astounding. Even setting aside all the damages to NSF, NIH, and CDC, one of the actions was to offer a buyout to everyone in the CIA. Umm - do they _want_ to lose the people who interpret spy satellite photos???
Yeah, there _are_ time constraints :-( but I'm really leery of how they are swinging the chainsaw. "Move fast and break things" is only sane for a _very_ specific kind of company, and even there, the idea is normally to _build_ a replacement service/product _first_, and let the competition break the legacy product.
EDIT: One other thing: I find it very ironic that the Trump administration is more-or-less following a "tear-it-all-down (maybe we'll build back later)" policy - which is typically one of the marks of left wing campus radicals. And not to their credit either.
> do they _want_ to lose the people who interpret spy satellite photos???
I'm sure they'll rehire the people who are loyal to the administration and its ambitions.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Might work, might not. Depends partially on whether they can manage to filter and rehire before people find other jobs or move on in some other way.
By "administration" you mean Trump? By "ambition" you mean "occupying Greenland"? Sure, hire those people exclusively, what could possibly go wrong!
Historical side note: in Germany, public officials and soldiers swear an oath to the constitution. They explicitly do not swear an oath to the current administration, or the current chancellor, or the current president, because the last time that was required, ...let's just say "bad stuff happened".
So does everyone in the US government. Turns out oaths aren't worth a damn.
Trump is not the first president who was interested in acquiring Greenland.
We've occupied Greenland so long that there's been time for the DEI-ers to meditate the change of name of our operation there. Ironically, to something much less cool. (More ridiculous goes without saying.)
What actually is the goal here? Are you trying to set up an effective government that does good things but *doesnt* have institutional memory, a core of workers with experience and the ability to fight back when someone tries to cut it down? If so, I think you’re imagining something that doesn’t actually make any sense.
No, I recognize that a government "effective" enough to be able to do good things is going to do mostly bad things. The goal is Norquist's bathtub.
Ok. I think that is an unusual view, and a massively misguided one, but it is not logically incoherent.
Is there a reason you live in the United States rather than Somalia or Syria if you prefer ineffective governments?
It's way richer, allowing for a much better standard of living. I do not attribute that to the competence of the government.
And among the countries that have a standard of living anywhere comparable, the US government might be the least intrusive by a long shot.
None of my criticisms should be taken to imply that there is anywhere on the face of the earth that is better. The comparison is only between America as it is, and America as it could be (and occasionally America as it once was).
I mean...yes? Very easily? Congress creates and cancels programs all the time?
And what would you give as a Fermi estimate for the ratio of programs created to programs cancelled?
Either in raw numbers of programs or total dollars spent, although I'm interested in both.
I would say this is the optimal time for Republicans to cut programs, controlling all three branches of government. Surely if they think USAID has a lot of waste they must have specific programs in mind already? If they don't it's just shouting.
This is going to depend heavily on definitions. Is an authority without appropriations a program? Is letting appropriations lapse and not providing more funds a cancelation? Where does imposing new requirements become a new program?
Now congress definitely prefers to be seen as doing stuff not not doing stuff. If you want a specific (unsure on how representative example), the 2024 WRDA (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4367/text) has specific authorizations and deauthorizations as well as a bunch of modifications you could look at.
That's kinda besides the point isn't it? During the budget cycle the executive requests funding for specific programs and Congress provides them some amount of deference. Probably even more deference if they explicitly calling out 'we don't want funding for program X because it is wasteful for reasons A, B and C'
"'Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use'"
That would be an excellent argument if anyone were actually saying that. You'd be well advised to take it and put it on the shelf until you find somebody who is.
There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives." This isn't a "oops, we thought this was somewhat net-negative and it was actually slightly net-positive" situation. This was a "literally ANY amount of effort would have determined this particular program was a winner" situation.
To say it a little pithier, you're claiming the argument is "don't ever shoot unless you can hit a bullseye" when in fact the argument is "if one of your first shots hits a child in the face, maybe we should take your gun away."
Now, there's an open question about whether cancelling a program like this was a result of incompetence (i.e. not doing the bare minimum research to understand how useful it was) or malice (i.e. seeing these particular foreigners dying as a good thing). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which is more plausible. Any, y'know, which is scarier.
>There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives."
Not according to Scott's reasoning. His example is a program of high effectiveness, but his reasoning is that since the money from the program goes back to the general pool, you need to compare the program to that, which would imply that we keep even programs of low effectiveness since they are still more effective than the general pool. He just doesn't spell this out.
Well, yes, if your goal is to raise the median effectiveness of the programs you start with the bottom 50-th percentile and replace THOSE, hoping the new ones will do better. That way median go up.
If you start with the very best odds are you won't be able to do better and median go down.
This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning: "You say we should use criterion X to decide if we should do Y, but edge cases are hard to adjudicate, so you're basically saying we can't ever do Y; or you're saying we should grind through the data until all Knightian uncertainty is resolved and we can find the true utilitarian result."
Two issues with this:
1. Edge cases and acceptable risks are a pretty general feature of utilitarian reasoning, there are various ways of addressing them, there's no particular reason for Scott to spend time on them, and utilitarian reasoning doesn't commit you to a particular strategy for dealing with real-world uncertainty.
2. The examples Scott focused on are not edge cases, and he repeatedly made this point.
>This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning:
Sure.
If you don't distinguish between action and inaction, then plain EA-style utilitarianism implies that if you don't immediately spend all the money you have (except that necessary for survival, staying employed, etc.) on helping poor people around the world, you are a horrible person for being complicit in their suffering.
There are ways in which EA tries to get around this. I don't find them convincing, but convincing or not, Scott isn't using them here--his argument is basically taking seriously the EA reductio ad absurdum that says you have to give everything away. Of course this argument applies to any sort of utilitarian reasoning about helping people. And that's what's wrong with it.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Basically, there are two ways to cut waste/abuse
1. Pause/stop everything and then restart those programs that can be justified
2. Audit all activities and stop those that are wasteful
Note that both methods are used by private companies: the second as part of the normal functioning of a company and the first in times of crisis. Both methods are legitimate and depend on the scale of the abuse, available time and available resources. I don't really have an opinion which way is more appropriate for the US at the moment.
It's not a time of crisis. Trump thinks it's a crisis, because he really likes saying "I will declare an emergency" and "the worst X in history," but our fiscal situation is not so dire that you can't wait a couple months to take the obviously good programs out of the firing line first.
If nothing else, the current budget funds the government through March. No matter what insanity you force through with executive orders, you still have to wait until March for the money to actually get redirected to the hypothetical better programs. May as well use that time to check if you're accidentally going to kill thousands of people.
If Turmp treats this as normal and doesn't rush it, the people involved in these programs have more time to make it even more difficult to cut things.
But isn't Scott's counter argument just: foreign aid is ~1% of the budget, so if you want to cut a lot of waste you can do so without touching foreign aid, which we now contains one of the best programs the government has (PEPFAR)? Now, obviously I see why it is politically toxic to say "we're going to cut a bunch of government programs but not foreign aid" but cutting foreign aid can still be bad even if it is politically convenient.
The answer to your first question is No, but your second is yes. Plenty of presidents have created commissions with the goal to investigate which programs were bad, then based on their recommendations, canceled those. This is the only time I can remember a president canceling more, than reinstating the funding later. And that’s assuming he actually plans on reinstating any of the.
? The point is, all we should be doing is taking away money from *bad* programs! Not taking away monry from unusually-good programs for reason, like PEPFAR!
The people canceling the programs literally have the philosophy that the government sucks at allocating money, so they don't believe at all that the money would end up in the actual best program.
There is this pattern I've seen a lot in business and marriages and the like where one person will say "we need to do both X and Y. I'm going to do X, and leave Y to you." Where X is the fun and easy thing and Y is the boring difficult thing.
It's not leadership.
https://www.econlib.org/when-to-defund/
Even dividing the programs into "good" and "bad" is generally wrong. Some are more effective than others, but they're also generally working on different problems.
Inspired by his post on homelessness, by any chance?
that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground
Is not an option.
As a rule, after you fire people, and blow up their programs, some you need don't come back, and it takes significant amounts of time for them to get back to work, (potentially years), and to rehire people.
In short, cancelling a program and reinstating it is a great way of turning good programs into bad ones.
In the meantime, the problem they were facing goes uncontrolled and gets worse, and now if it was a real problem you need to dig out.
In short, cancelling programs that you actually need really is prohibitably expensive, and cancelling ones that you do not still might cost money now to save money later.
Obligatory reminder that you can, yourself, from the comfort of home, redirect money from wasteful government programs to effectively altruistic ones. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AskPyNg6hHP6SrmEy/redirecting-one-s-own-taxes-as-an-effective-altruism-method
This is the kind of thing that makes tax book super complicated, and I'm all for it.
I expect many readers will make very incorrect guesses about this article based on that summary, so I feel I should clarify that it's not discussing some sort of legal earmarking process, it's talking about illegally refusing to pay your taxes.
I consider this clearly unethical (except ~in situations where it would be ethical to violently overthrow your government) and I think a large majority of people would broadly agree with me.
I read through this. I wouldnt say the "you" in this sentence actually applies to most people who read it.
There is one weird trick to not pay taxes if you dont work for an employer, have no us based interest bearing accounts, brokerage accounts or property.
Must be nice.
This is extremely illegal, extremely unethical, and can land you in jail.
That guy appears to have managed it for 20 years. Which is itself an indicator of the government being dysfunctional.
> extremely illegal, extremely unethical, and can land you in jail.
2/3.
> I doubt anyone has a specific finite foreigner-to-American ratio which is more than 1000x
I genuinely think that if you polled Americans, most people would value an American life at more than 1000 Africans. Hell, there's people who would say that number is infinite, seeing as they see those lives as having less than zero value. There's people saying that in this very blog's comments section, you can't just pretend they don't exist.
I think we're agreeing. You're saying many people would say the number is infinite, I'm saying few people would say it's finite but greater than 1000x.
...I still think you're really underestimating how little the average person values the lives of random Africans.
Blockade of Africa cost 2K Brits, freeing 150K slaves back in the early to mid-1800s so he might not be. Then again there are far more Africans as a percentage of world population than ever before, and people are far less Christian.
Where are you getting that 150k from? Is that just slaves directly freed. Becuase the blockade probably prevented the enslavement of countless more.
Yeah, and u are right. It’s a stupid datapoint to use without context.
What Scott wrote above is compatible with average person putting zero value on the lives of random Africans.
I think the big problem here is conflating "how valuable is this?" with "how much should the US government spend on it?"
As a human, I believe that Coca-Cola shareholders and Pepsi shareholders are equally valuable and worthy of respect. However, as a shareholder in Coca-Cola, I believe that the Coca-Cola company should spend one hundred percent of its money trying to benefit Coca-Cola shareholders, and zero percent of its money trying to benefit Pepsi shareholders. I have nothing against Pepsi shareholders as people (and I might even be one myself) but doing nice things for them is just not the job of the Coca-Cola company.
It's the job of a country's government to serve the interests of the citizens of that country, nothing else.
...What if the citizens don't want five million Africans to die for no reason?
Then they should donate to some kind of charity. They absolutely should do this! It would be good!
But they should do this on their own and not try to repurpose another organisation like the US Government.
This just questions the legitimacy of taxation. The enterprise of taxation presupposes the legitimacy of the collective imposing their will on the country and redistributing their assets as they see fit, rather than just independently paying for things, individually.
It's perfectly fine to question the legitimacy of the enterprise from first principles and adopt an alternative more libertarian perspective in which taxation is inherently evil and should be minimized to the greatest extent possible, but that's mostly orthogonal to the matter at hand.
If collective imposed redistribution to foreigners is illegitimate due to the mechanism, then using that mechanism to direct funds towards domestic causes is similarly illegitimate.
Yes, taxation inherently has legitimacy problems that voluntary donations lack. That's why it is commonly justified with the claim that individuals can't purchase national defense, being a public good. Charitable donations are not a public good however, and the existence of them shows it's possible without a government taxing to provide it.
No, that's not all there is to that position. One can concede the legitimacy of taxation but still question the legitimacy of things that the taxes go to pay for. I for example question where in the Constitution charity of any kind is authorized, let alone charity to foreigners.
I think there's a good argument for saying that the government needs to stop being an organisation that just does whatever random thing people want it to do and focuses on things only a government can do. The point* is that if you've got an all-singing all-dancing flailing omnistate, it may as well flap a tentacle in a direction that saves 250,000 Africans instead of flapping it in a direction that does nothing.
*rephrased in limited-government terms
But when you try and make it no longer an all singing and all dancing flailing omnistate, every tentacle cries foul.
But if PEPFAR is a good program, then clearly saving a quarter million Africans from AIDS _is_ something a government can do!
So why not let it do it?!
In fact, some of the money Coca-Cola spends does also benefit Pepsi. For instance, Coke and Pepsi both pay various trade groups and lobbying organizations to make the market and regulatory environments more favorable for soda generally. That this benefits their competitors is not a disincentive, since it makes the pie for both of them bigger than it otherwise would be.
The analogy to PEPFAR is that the United States buys several things that are in the interests of its citizens, such as "soft power," a better global reputation, a more stable world, and national pride, for what amounts to a very small amount of money. The fact that Africans also benefit doesn't make those things not in the national interest.
Yes, that's a legitimate argument in favour of governments handing out foreign aid.
"It helps foreigners" is not, though.
Well, it is if the citizenry wants to help foreigners. If it didn't help foreigners it wouldn't have any of those benefits I mentioned.
If they want to help foreigners, they can voluntarily do so via charity. That's what I do!
I feel like there's two discussions that might be going on.
Person A: the government shouldn't spend money on P regardless of whether the voters want it to or not
Person B: the government should spend money on P if the voters want it to
Person C: I, as a voter, don't want the government to spend money on P
Person D: I, as a voter, do want the government to spend money on P
I'm not even sure whether we're having the A vs B discussion or the C vs D discussion right now. I hope we're not having the A vs D or B vs C though.
Is a State not supposed to ever do anything based on ethical principles of any kind? A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral. You could say it only values those as proxies for reputation and stability and pride but that's just the same argument you can make for individuals doing good. "Uhh I didn't do it for you, I did it because it makes ME look better!"
The Tsundere Approach to international politics.
> A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral
Again we're getting confused between values and responsibilities.
The fact that a particular institution doesn't do a particular thing does not mean that any of the people in that institution think it's a worthless thing to do, just that it is outside the scope of that institution. Fixing potholes in Buenos Aires is a fine idea, but not something that the Moose Jaw Macrame Society should be spending its money on.
A state doesn't exist because of ethics. A state exists because some entity will claim a geographic monopoly on violence. In the US, that entity is subject to elections.
Is there a large coalition of Africans who are super-thankful of America and willing to go to bat for us in a crisis?
The US has historically dumped all sorts of resources into helping other people who then have zero gratitude for it, sometimes negative gratitude.
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - Mark Twain
There are also many places where we put in lots of money and gained gratitude, like Germany and Japan. But in any case, the recipients of the aid are not the only people we build up goodwill with.
Yes, those countries are great allies (maybe until three weeks ago). Rebuilding a first-world country is more likely to result in people seeing and understanding your contributions.
Bush said the Iraqis would welcome us with sweets and flowers. I don't think that worked out. How do Iraq and Afghanistan feel about all the blood and treasure we spent on them? "Oh, no, those are bad foreign intervention programs, not good ones." Sorry, like Scott said, you can't make the money flow to just the good interventions. Everyone thinks the foreigners will be grateful, but that has more to do with their ability to be like us in the first place.
Let's ignore Africans' ability to help us out if we needed it. Do they even have the desire to? How many countries have America Day celebrations for all the lives we've saved?
I think it's good to spend the money to save the lives out of the basic Christian duty like Deiseach said. But I see no evidence besides hopium that we're actually buying good will among them. More likely they see us as a bunch of foreign moral busybodies nagging them about their sex lives.
The US occupied Germany and Japan for years and essentially rebuilt their societies along pro-American lines, which TBH I think had a bigger impact on their subsequent attitudes.
There is a myth of the Marshall Plan that Tyler Cowen has written about, that our assistance to the defeated is why they recovered. In fact, we gave much more money to the UK (and forgave most of their war loans), while Germany was still required to pay reparations. The Ordoliberals of West Germany just did a much better job of running their country in the postwar era than Labour did in the UK.
A cursory search doesn't reveal any surveys of PEPFAR recipients, but they are presumably at least somewhat grateful the US provides the aid. Note that women and children are the primary recipients, and the latter are not generally grateful *to anyone*, even those who help them.
More broadly, this survey (https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/african-perception-united-states-evolving-geopolitical-landscape) of the African population says the following:
> When asked which country they perceived to be the best model for their future development, 33% of respondents chose the United States, while 22% chose China. Out of 34 countries surveyed, the United States surpassed China in 23 countries. Only 4 African countries (Tanzania, Senegal, Tunisia, Eswatini, Malawi, and Mozambique) ranked both countries equally. Compared to the results of the same question in the previous survey period (2014/2015), preferences for China and the United States as development models remained unchanged. However, the U.S. advantage increased marginally from 6 to 9 percentage points.
> Younger Africans (36% of people aged 18- 25) were more likely than older Africans (26% of people above 55) to prefer the United States as a model for development. While men (25%) and women (19%) expressed equal preference for the United States as a development model, men preferred China more than women.
Note that Africans don't see US-China influence as zero-sum. They welcome both.
I don't know if they'd go to *bat* for the US, but distance matters a lot - Mexico can send people to help us when a hurricane hits while that's a longer distance for any African nation.
I'm willing to leave the *ability* for Africans to go to bat for us off the table. Who knows what future thing might happen where we suddenly wish they have a bunch of goodwill for us? One reason to invest in goodwill is that you don't know how it will be needed. (And if they become merely "slightly below average economically," at 1.5 billion people that's an awesome trading partner.)
Thanks for citing the survey data.
Slo, charity.isn't charity, charity is trade.
I'm not sure what you're saying, so I'll say where I am.
1. "We do it because it's the right thing to do" is an excellent argument, and one I would make for PEPFAR.
2. If someone is going to argue we're going it for self-interest through soft power, I'd want evidence we're getting soft power.
I don't buy that citizens are actually getting anything in their interest.
PEPFAR is very much the motte justifying some completely absurd, and much less useful/stability-increasing/"soft power" providing NGOs dancing around in the bailey.
Interestingly, I think the Coca-Cola corporation might spend a higher percent of its intake on foreign aid than the US government (see https://www.coca-colacompany.com/social/coca-cola-foundation , I must be getting something wrong but it really does seem to be 2% vs. 1%). But see also anomie's reply.
That's their business.
This seems misguided. Coca cola is essentially payed by investors to increase their value, and accordingly, that's what they should do. Not due to some inherent rule about valuing one group over another group, but simply because it was on that condition that they were granted the money.
Using a strict parallel, taxation shouldn't be used for anything tax payers don't want. That doesn't necessarily preclude programs to benefit outsiders, since unlike the case of investors, it's hardly self-evident that taxpayers don't support that.
Of course, the parallel isn't strict, since individual taxpayers don't get to decide whether to pay taxes or on what condition they'll pay.
But that only makes the analogy even less appropriate.
>"Using a strict parallel, taxation shouldn't be used for anything tax payers don't want."
A wrinkle is that the distribution of influence over *how* taxes are spent is wildly different to the distribution of who pays how much.
Too easy to convince voters to spend somebody else's tax dollars on one's pet cause.
If Coca-Cola shareholders voted a resolution at a general meeting to pay a dividend to Pepsi shareholders then such a dividend should be paid. The interests of the shareholders are whatever the shareholders say they are.
The American people's elected representatives voted for PEPFAR. That means that it is in the interests of the American people.
The American people also voted for Donald Trump to be President, therefore whatever he does as President is also in the interests of the American people.
There's a Separation of Powers question to be argued in terms of who exactly has the authority to do what, but that's not what we're talking about today.
This is one question that bothers me a lot in the arguments against Trump's actions. Almost everything he is trying to do is something the Executive was directly or indirectly empowered to do.
I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
I totally get why they don't want him to do that, but as Obama once said and conservatives have since run into the ground "Elections have consequences." Obama wasn't wrong, but just very shortsighted.
> I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
The reasonable argument is that it is illegal for the President to do so. PEPFAR was not setup by a previous President, it was authorized by the US congress. It is still authorized by the US congress and the executive branch, according to the laws of the United States, is obligated to spend the money appropriated by congress.
If the Trump administration believes this program is bad, then they need to work with Republicans in congress to not reauthorize it in March when its current authorization expires.
Agreed.
The issue with PEPFAR is:
1. Does Trump have the power to shut down a program that was authorised by Congress (ie the Separation of Powers question you have).
2. Do the American people think that PEPFAR meets the goals that they have for government spending? I think that's what Scott is trying to answer here.
I don't think there is - or can be - some external absolute measure of "the interests of the American people" beyond "what the American people want". But then, I also think that shareholder lawsuits to impose some external legal standard on what management does are bullshit. Pass a resolution at a general meeting and if they don't comply, then fire them, or sue them. But the purpose of a corporation is to do what the shareholders desire. The purpose of a government is to do what the citizens desire. There can be limitations on how easily they can achieve certain things, on how big a majority may be required to do certain things. But if enough people want to do something, then the government or the management should be compelled to do it.
Foreign aid does serve national interests - it's a cheap way to buy influence with other countries. Being known as "those nice guys who helped cure our AIDS epidemic" is useful when we need to ask a favor from another country.
I find this style of argument in favor of foreign aid much more convincing than the utilitarian arguments where we give foreigners’ lives inherent value. Still, I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations. If they understood how much of a favor we are doing them by providing incredibly-good-value life-saving drugs, they would simply buy the drugs themselves.
Arguably, a publicly funded GiveDirectly-type program would be even more effective. But it would also be much more politically controversial.
PEPFAR benefits at around $4400 per life saved, which is right in line with standard GiveWell estimates of cost per life saved.
China understands this very well
Consistently acting like you consider lives to have inherent value, as opposed to making visible cynical Machiavellian calculations about who's more likely to be a worthwhile ally in the future, can be a useful strategy for building trust and gratitude.
Alice and Bob are going on a date at a restaurant. Bob is attentive to Alice's needs, but rude to Charlie the waiter. What can Alice infer about how Bob will act when Alice is in a less favorable negotiating position?
> I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations.
Given that the land exists and is populated, would there be greater marginal benefit to American interests if the people there were slightly more prosperous, thus able to participate in international trade more than they currently do? Or worse off, and functionally unable to export much of anything but plague-stricken refugees or desperate violence?
What favors have we ever gotten from that?
Probably stuff like "okay, we will drop the charges against the senator's nephew" or "we will release the Marine from police custody, but he better stay on the base from now on."
I think this is what people are thinking when they assign an infinite foreigner/domestic value ratio. They think that those African citizens should rely on their own government to create programs to benefit those citizens. They form the meta-level belief about relative value from this object-level belief about accountability.
If someone in Africa was concealing a biological weapon which had previously killed roughly three-quarters of a million Americans, a virus that clearly poses ongoing strategic danger since there's still no reliable cure or vaccine, would you say mitigating that threat is sufficiently relevant to shared interests of American citizens for government action? Assuming a proven, cost-effective way to do so, which doesn't incidentally create any "negotiating with terrorists" type messes.
But Coca Cola funds all sorts of non-directly profit maximizing pursuits (scholarships, sport games, physical renovations, art galleries, etc). Part of it is that shareholders believe that such pursuit have uncertain but positive ROI at some future date, or some indirect contribution to current ROI (through marketing, consumer franchise, "goodwill", etc.). But also because they think it's a good in itself.
Same for USAID. There might be indirect benefits (creating a bit of goodwill goes a long way and might be cheaper than sending in the marines/directly bribing some generalissimo to pursue geopolitical objectives, stimying the creation of new viral variants might be cheaper than curing US citizens when they get infected, the data generated are a public good benefiting US citizens, etc), but also is a good in itself, just like the Coca Cola program for disadvantaged youth or whatever.
There is also an element of "isolated demand for rigor" (or as commonly known online, hypocrisy): no, after spending so much blood and treasure to save the poor minorities oppresed by the Axis of Evil, make sure Israelis sleep safe and sound, indirectly funding missionary trips so that the souls of heathen foreigners might be saved, etc, you don't get to act all principled about how it's treason to cheapily saving Africans from preventable death. Clean your own house first if this is really what you believe and not just some convenient debate pose.
You can't handwave away the people who think the amount is infinite. And in terms of taxation, I think zero dollars should be spent on charity, since that is a matter of voluntary donations.
There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value. Pretty sure there's a few antinatalists around; there used to be.
Also the foreigner-to-American phrasing is better. If white Australians didn't speak English, Americans wouldn't care about them, either.
> There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value.
Well yes, I'm one of them. I'm not an antinatalist, mind you. A few people having less children isn't going to make the death of humanity come any sooner.
I agree with the literal thesis, and that PEPFAR is very good and shouldn’t be cancelled, but I’m not sure “flowing to other programs” is the best way to think of spending cuts
I think a better model of cancelling PEPFAR would be that it relaxes *real resource constraints* a little bit by taking a bunch of labor and everything involved in the medicine supply chain and such that was formerly involved in administering the program.
Financially, this looks like people getting fired, the price of labor going down a tiny bit, and former PEPFAR administrators etc selling their labor to the next highest bidder. Likewise for other resources: demand for gas and everything else in the supply chain drops a bit, price goes down, and some marginal uses of gas etc become profitable or just barely cheap enough for an arbitrary consumer somewhere to purchase.
(I wrote about understanding fiscal policy through the lens of real world resources here: https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/deficits-dont-matter-spending-does )
Also, to reiterate, none of this changes the conclusion for me. I think it’s good for the government to basically take up a PEPFAR-sized batch of real resources to use for PEPFAR
Scott's approach has the merit that it's making an apples-to-apples comparison. Even if you favor the programs being cancelled and the unspent money being returned to taxpayers, you could still achieve those cuts by ranking government programs on usefulness, and cutting programs starting at the bottom of the list.
How would you operationalize your model? It seems like it requires us to imagine what the typical private sector company would have done with medically experienced labor being fractionally cheaper. I'm sure that provides some benefits, but I'm not sure how you would calculate it.
I think it would be better if the Trump administration did that rather than acting chaotically. But since I favor ending most government programs, I'm not going to object when the chaotic process results in an end to some random program.
There's an old saying in state economics, 'Whatever we can do, we can afford'.
Money and budgets are abstractions, what exists in the real world is labor and resources and how they are directed. If there is idle labor that could be used to some good purpose, printing money to pay for that labor to stop being idle and start producing something is not lost money, it's money creating new value. And the money itself will flow back into the economy, activating more labor as it increases demand.
If there are people who want to run PEPFAR and are qualified to run PEPFAR and are otherwise going to be doing much less useful things, then paying them to run PEPFAR isn't a deadweight loss. It's creating value where none would otherwise exist.
All this would hold if the government didn’t increase spending to compensate. But also, each unit of gas etc. getting cheaper comes because a different American isn’t getting to use it. You’d have to argue the program employees were using the gas worse than the average American. Maybe so, if the program employees are richer than average, but I’m not convinced it’s a big effect.
If another program gets funded as a result, then the govt will commandeer those real resources instead. So it still matters where the money goes in the counterfactual.
Your framing is most useful in the general case where the legislature debates and proposes a specific level of spending which may be higher or lower to some previous amount.
This haphazard freeze with no changes in budget is a different thing
I am very skeptical of altruism, and very skeptical of charities. Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else? What if their best bussines model to maximize their self-interested profit is basically moral entrepreneurship, lying and even aiding authoritarian governments to get donations while pretending they "help" people?
Self interest is not reducible to economic profit. A person can have any reasons to prioritize their self interest in ways that have nothing to do with, or may even even require sacrificing, their access to economic resources.
"Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else?"
...not trivially, no? Just to give an example, I know lots of people who could easily get eg $500K working for Big Tech, who instead make $100 - 200K working at a charity because they really believe in the cause. I think I've heard the standard is that charities pay 30% less than for-profits for the same quality of labor, so if that's true then everyone working at a nonprofit is by that fact alone not working in their self-interest.
I agree with Eric that they will still prioritize something like "internal benefits they're getting", but those internal benefits might be the warm feeling of doing good.
See also https://meteuphoric.com/2013/12/22/pretend-to-really-really-try/
I worked at NPOs/NGOs that were mostly state-funded and supposed to do "good things". I am so grateful to all German taxpayers! Best salaries I ever got. Often tax-free. Easiest work and most fun work, too. And I was just a small cog, the people up made more and had even more fun. (One of them greatly enjoyed to tell the local staff: "You are fired". In contexts, where you could never fire someone under German law.) - It was "culture", but conversations with fellow aid-workers: just the same.
If your social circle consists of people who have the luxury of getting to choose between a $500K job and a more rewarding/inspiring/enjoyable $200K job, consider that you might not have a very good handle on what life looks like for the modal taxpayer. Plenty of people are legitimately financially struggling, as are their brothers -- not everybody's brother is a successful real estate agent in Des Moines, even if all the brothers of all the people you know are.
Because of diminishing marginal utility of money, somebody deciding to sacrifice an additional $300K on top of the $200K they're getting either way, is arguably less impressive than somebody putting $50 in a collection box when that $50 is basically their entire discretionary spending for this month, after rent and food and basic necessities. Which is great if they're choosing to put that money in that collection box of their own free will, but it makes it a morally dubious act to argue that the government should take that $50 from them and spend it on a charity not of their choice.
Sure, that's perfectly valid and a great reason to not take $50 from poor people.
But not as an argument against those charity workers being generally less interested in maximizing profit for themselves which is what this comment thread is about, no?
They aren't as pure as heart as an impoverished person who gives away the shirt off his back, but nobody's saying they're Jesus... just that they are likely satisfied with the life quality they have and not grasping for more. In a world where many well-off people are decidedly not that, I think it's reasonable to believe they are genuinely trying to help people and not secretly get richer. Just because they don't have to give up their house and car to help people doesn't mean they can't be helping people at all. Yes, it's easier to be content with what you've got when you've got a decent life, but so many people who have decent lives are grasping and envious and not content at all.
Agree, it's tangential to the main point of the top comment of this thread.
But Scott's dismissing of the "don't we have a responsibility to help those close to us first" point by saying basically "nah, nobody close to you is actually in need of help, that's just fiction" rubbed me the wrong way a bit. So I wanted to respond to that, and a comment where he casually mentions his many friends who are either making $500k or voluntarily choosing to prefer their dream job at $200K instead, seemed like a good place to put that response.
So your aim was to talk directly to Scott, and you felt like responding to a comment of his was more effective than posting a comment on the essay, so you picked the comment to which it could be least tangential and tried to connect it?
“Self interest” includes more than salary—self righteous moral preening has a value as well…
Especially for a social circle where people’s Hobson’s Choice is between making $500k as an evil Meta PM or $200k + the Warm Glow of Self Satisfaction(tm) for maintaining some charity’s IT stack.
Do you have an actual set of reasoned or empirical arguments as to your position, or are you just trying to make yourself feel better about not helping others by casting people who do as just as selfish but dishonest?
Genuine question.
Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Well, there's public choice theory. We have to assume everyone works for their self-interest and therefore organizations work more for their own continued existence and socioeconomic gains of its members than any causes, therefore if there any perverse incentives, like bussiness model I mentioned, they act accordingly. See the Rescue Industry, for example, and plenty of goverment programs that have long outlived their purpose.
Why do we have to assume that? Because there's a lot of obvious examples of people doing the opposite. For example, I'm arguing with you rather than doing the work I should be. That's obviously against my socioeconomic interest, and yet, here I am. Otherwise smart people buy lottery tickets. People buy games on Steam they never play and they know this.
So you can twist the evidence to suit your theory, or you can update your theory to fit the evidence.
Either way, I'm concluding you have no actual basis and are just trying to make yourself feel better.
"Self-interest" is not limited to "socioeconomic interest".
"People buy games on Steam they never play and they know this."
Ow! Foul!
Who is self-interestedly benefitting from PEPFAR? Are they doing so in a way that ultimately hurts the people PEPFAR is meant to help?
The people PEPFAR is supposed to help are the American people. Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste. Maybe the mechanism by which PEPFAR helps the American people is by helping foreign people, but this is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.
“Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste.”
That may be true according to your philosophy of government, but it certainly doesn’t say that anywhere in the US constitution. You can debate whether “promote the general welfare” in the preamble of the constitution actually means “promote our own welfare”, but nothing in the actually effective parts of the constitution is designed to prevent the government from engaging in foreign projects with the goal of helping non-Americans.
Article I Section 8 Clause 1:
“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and GENERAL WELFARE OF THE UNITED STATES; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”
Emphasis mine of course. I did check this before making my original comment.
"For ourselves and our posterity" is in the preamble.
Anecdotal data point: my wife spent a year in Tanzania to get a village school going. Salary: 1000€/ month. Does that sound like "self-interested profit" was at the top of her list of priorities?
I would *pay* well over 1000€/ month to spend a season or two in Tanzania, and if that involved volunteering to get a school going, all the better.
I think you should just move to Tanzania? I mean, I don't know you or your life. But immigration to Tanzania seems pretty easy, and the pound goes really far there. Probably it would cost much less than 1000 pounds a month!
I suppose my comment was too oblique? It was heartfelt - I've been planning to go to Tanzania for about a decade (as you might guess from my user name), and given the likely duration of my trip, it will probably cost > 1000€/ month.
But beyond that, my comment answered the rhetorical question "Does [getting paid 1000€/ month to work in Tanzania] sound like 'self-interested profit' was at the top of her list of priorities?" No shade on FluffyBuffalo's wife, but my answer is a resounding "uh, yes", at least to me.
You’ve got one hypothetical but I’ve got another. What if the best business model to maximize self-interested profit is to honestly identify suffering people and propose effective means to help them? Did you ever think about that possibility?
I don't think such business model exists. Because charities want donations, they don't necessarily have to help people to get them, they could just pretend they do and get more publicity and power.
I didn't think about that possibility because the subjective probability I assign to it is so low.
You should go read some Adam Smith.
What specifically?
I believe The Wealth of Nations is where he gives the famous “invisible hand” argument that the profit motive can in many circumstances direct many people to do the thing that is most sociallly beneficial.
The profit motive can direct people in such a way, but not by first identifying "suffering people". The price system doesn't require that a producer know about suffering, but instead what people will pay.
There's a problem of filtered evidence here.
Charities that only wish to serve their own interests do so best by spending tons of money on publicity, so that everyone knows their name and thinks of them when a charitable topic comes up, and goes to them first when they want to make donations or find a partner to work with.
Thus, the charities that everyone has heard about, are definitionally the worst ones who spend the most on publicity and influence instead of charitable work.
It's easy to get that filtered evidence and think that all charities are bad.
But there are lots of great ones that don't spend their money on publicity, so you don't know anything about them.
The money saved would not "go into the federal discretionary fund budget... from there, it would be go to the same kinds of programs the rest of the budget goes to". Mechanically that is just not a correct explanation of what would happen to the money. If Trump and Musk simply withheld all PEPFAR payments, the money would simply sit in a federal account doing nothing at all*. Economically, its value would flow through to Americans broadly in the form of reduced inflation (and consequently reduced interest rates).
At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit. (The same thing would happen if, instead of an improper cancellation by Trump, Congress simply repealed the program.)
You might quite reasonably believe that Congress will not choose to allocate this money to the best possible use, but the next use of the money *would* be deliberated, and it would *not* be some kind of automatic flow through to other discretionary spending. At the present time, the most likely use would be to offset a small part of the extension of the 2017 tax bill (TCJA), parts of which are due to expire this year. Congress would therefore need to find fewer other spending cuts or fewer other tax hikes in order to meet whatever deficit target they set during the tax negotiations.
* I realized this might be insufficiently forceful. The money would sit in an account *and would not be legally available for any other spending*. Trump (unless he broke the law) would not be able to simply move the funds to some other part of the "discretionary" budget. The discretionary budget is not called that because the president has discretion to assign the funds willy-nilly, it's just called that by contrast with Social Security and Medicare, where the spending amounts are determined by the program formula and not by a statutory authorization of a specific total $ amount.
I can’t see a like button. But if there was…. ‘Like’
I grant that you're right about the Trump/Musk situation, but "At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit." sounds to me like they would in every meaningful go into the discretionary budget. Am I misunderstanding something?
Yes. They could also go to tax cuts or deficit reduction. And not only could, but it's extremely likely that they *would* go to a mix of those two things.
They could also be used to pay for program changes to entitlement spending, although that is considerably less likely.
Under ~no circumstances would they flow to a program like BEAD which has already been allocated a specific pool of money that is unlikely to be increased.
I've changed the wording from "discretionary budget" to "pot of spending", which hopefully makes it clearer that the pot could also be used for tax cuts.
But I want to make sure this is just a semantic distinction - would you agree that if the government spent $1.5T this year and $1.4T next year, then you should think of 93% of PEPFAR as being used in spending rather than the tax cuts/deficit reduction, and the other two things are only important if the size of the federal budget changes in an unprecedented way?
The reason the distinction is important is that the merits of tax cuts, and separately the merits of deficit reduction, are unlikely to be similar to the merits of the average discretionary spending program. (Different individuals will likely disagree as to whether tax cuts are better or worse than the spending.)
Doesn’t this just come back to the point that out of all the things to cut, PEPFAR should probably be pretty low on the list? Not to mention I think you’re vastly overstating the “inflation benefits” you get from this money not being spent. Not only is a lot of this money going to foreign countries, but the Fed is doing monetary offset anyways. I’m thinking like a 1 basis point effect on interest rates at the most lol.
Depends no? If they cancelled $100B of spending and then didn't touch anything else I'd say 100% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts. If they cut $500B of spending then only 20% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts.
Foreign aid is one of the less inflationary forms of spending, given that it's spent overseas by/helping foreigners and it's a small percentage of total spending.
Money "not spent" in Africa, reduces inflation in Africa and slightly affects exchange rates. It does not (for the most part) reduce inflation in America.
The AIDS drug for Africa seems extremely cheap per life saved.
As a citizenist, I put a higher priority on my fellow American citizens' lives and well-being, but I'm not an ideologue about it. We can save a whole lot of foreign lives for not much money, so that's a good thing to do.
It would be nice if the unpleasant and unhealthy Southeast African male penchant for "dry sex" was also somehow deterred, but letting their poor wives die from AIDS is too high of a price and doesn't seem to have been very effective of a deterrent.
Presumably, Musk and Trump are canceling stuff willy-nilly and then seeing which policies are most vociferously defended and which ones aren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex
Oh! I think I'd better revise a couple of my replies.
I strongly agree with your presumption here, particularly given that Musk has had about two weeks to look over things from the inside, which is a laughably short period of time to consider an agency with tems of billions in funding (i.e, equivalent to a Fortune 500 company).
It’s weird to be cutting this much when you’ve only had two weeks to consider anything!
DOGE has not cut anything and has no authority to do so.
Well, *someone* tried to cut all federal grants at once, and did cut the entire foreign aid program, including medications for hundreds of thousands of people.
Weird how PEPFAR remains cut and Elon Musk keeps taking credit for it.
Is this your actual commenting account? @SteveSailer
I don't want to sound bad, what exactly do we earn by spending billions saving poor 60 IQ people on another continent from their own terrible practices? People have a point when they say money could be used to improve the lives of millions of americans which are more productive, if only government was way more efficient at least.
"I don't want to sound bad, but saving the lives of people who are poor or stupid is clearly a waste of time."
If you find yourself saying that, maybe it's a clue to think a bit more.
From personal experience, thinking has only made me care less about people, so your mileage may vary.
I am not saying nobody should help them, I am just thinking if we assume that if the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans, either directly or indirectly, spending billions on saving Africans from themselves doesn't make that much sense to me
You're arguing that people should only work to their specific self interest, which brings me to the question I raised above. For convenience:
> Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Or alternatively, let us posit this scenario: let us assume that A Country could increase the general wealth of its citizenry by 1% by, say, burning the Kuwait oil fields and thus improving the price of oil that the US exports at the cost of devastating the local environment and Kuwaiti economy.
Or, if you like, the Kuwaiti oilfields have already been set alight, should A Country intervene to mitigate the damage if the outcome is the same as the above scenario?
Have you never heard of reputational effects? The U.S. takes a great many actions in the world that are unpopular but (in its judgement) advance its self interest. Other countries often have choices about whether to help, stay neutral or oppose such actions. Insofar as people other than you DO care about human lives (and I assure you that some of us do), spending a small amount of money to save a large amount of lives seems like the kind of thing likely to pay for itself many times over, in terms of reduced costs derived from general goodwill.
I've seen this argument advanced a lot recently, but I've not seen any examples given of this goodwill having manifested in the real world. Granted there may be a few here and there, but I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much
And also, we already burned practically every bridge in we had by reelecting Trump, so there really isn't anything more to be lost at this point.
Honest question, have you been looking? Perhaps read up on your history and learn a bit about how international politics went from about 5000 BC up through the 1940s or so. The U.S. position in the international order is really, REALLY exceptional, and it's not just because of having the biggest economy or the biggest military:
https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
"I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much"
How much do various U.S. military operations cost? How much are its trade agreements worth? How about its intelligence services? Diplomatic corps? The collective budget (and value in the case of trade) of all of that is HUGE. Even slightly more friction in a few places--worse trade agreements, less efficient military ops, bad intelligence causing poor decisions--could add up to billions easily. Counterfactuals--bad things that DON'T happen because of goodwill--harder to account for, but given how many capital-T Trillions the U.S. spent because of ONE terrorist attack when a handful of militants in the Middle East got mad enough to actually do something, even small likelihood reductions for things like terrorism and war come out to pretty good deals.
I dunno, how about: it makes me as an American feel proud that America is saving lots of lives in Africa?
(And we're doing it for a reasonable cost.)
I'm the guy who came up with "citizenism" a couple of decades ago, but I've never been a fanatic about _only_ doing good things for fellow citizens.
You can do that by voluntarily donating to charities saving lives in Africa. That's what I do.
You could value being part of a nation that makes the *collective* decision to donate X% altruistically. Voluntary donations wouldn't get you that.
"if we assume that the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans" there is the assumption though!
I think when your country is the richest country on the planet, you can think about whether to help other, poorer countries rather than just your own citizens. A company should be interested in its own growth and profitability all the way until it becomes extremely successful, but that at that point, it should consider giving some of its money to charity, and many do. I think of the US government the same way. Our foreign aid budget is like 1% of what we spend money on. When you're the richest country in the world, you should start thinking about helping other, less fortunate countries. Your primary concern should still be your own citizens, but you can afford to spare some thought and money for others.
It's not just his assumption:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs/comment/91527279
I agree with Milton Friedman on corporations: they should disburse their money to their shareholders, and then let those shareholders donate to charity if they want to.
'General Welfare' can mean a lot of things. I don't know that this is so obvious a point.
If a large percentage of Americans want us to help other countries, and I think they do, would it not be to their "General Welfare" to have the government do that? And, can you not say it promotes positive relationships with other countries to provide them AID, which promotes the general welfare of the united states?
A quick google shows we provided foreign aid to Venezuela in 1812 to recover from an earthquake. Surely if this was some constitutional issue the founders would have cared about it at that time, since many of them were still alive.
Forty years ago I used to be strongly in favor of stockholders over stakeholders (e.g., workers, the community that grew up around the factory, etc.), but then I saw what first Michael Milken and then the outsourcers to China could do when unrestrained by anything other than the letter of the law (and sometimes not that in Milken's case). So, now I have more mixed views on the topic.
Is just perpetuating something more valuable than other possible uses, like say - within Africa - actually curing river blindness or something?
Or if HIV is a permanent part of human experience, is it good for a program to have no possibility of ever ending, no way that responsibility can be transferred so that it will not be reliant on the fortunes of one country?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is an effective use of the US treasury. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it is concerning, perhaps, to an effective altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?uses, like say actually curing river blindness or something?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is a great use of dollars since everyone says so. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it perhaps ought to concern the altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?
This is only a partial response, but, part of PEPFAR is preventing new HIV infections in newborns, so it does reduce the future burden.
We haven't gotten far enough to actually be reducing the total number of people with HIV over time, but we could.
That does sound very crucial. Putting little ones on HIV drugs doesn't sound good.
Perhaps the question is less how much foreigners value foreigners, and how to convince people to value their own.
I don't think the reason people in Africa rely on the US for AIDS medicine is that they don't care about each other enough, I think it's more about how the US is insanely prosperous compared to Africa (and uniquely so for a country of its size).
PEPFAR costs something like $21 per year per US citizen, which is pretty trivial for a country with a per capital GDP of $80k but less so in, say, Zimbabwe, which has a particularly high HIV rate (22%) and a particularly low GDP ($2.5k).
Also the entire world population with HIV is around 39 million, which is only like 12% of the population of the US. So it's about 58 times easier for the US to pay for HIV treatment for the entire world than it is for Zimbabwe to pay for it for their citizens.
Firstly, it looks really nice. Even if everyone is ultra-cynical, no one seems to want to stop being a hypocrite. They all dress themselves up as democracies or supporters of world peace and welfare. Saying you saved millions of lives from a disease in a foreign nation is status-raising.
Secondly, it buys influence and networks with local leaders. If the US had an Africa strategy to bring the nations into alignment with it, this would absolutely be a part of such a thing. I don't think it does, but it does generate positive feelings and counteracts China's influence. If you are an American citizen, you benefit from Pax Americana for every country that subscribes to it, even if you see dollars going out each year.
Gives us a bunch of clout.
From https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
"... the average respondent thinks that the United States is a meddlesome busy-body that only occasionally considers the needs of other countries…and that the United States is thus a force for good and peace and they like it very much, thank you."
The above article discusses the fact that, historically, superpowers tend to wind up opposed by large chunks of the world in a logical balancing response, but the US is military allies with a huge chunk of the world, trades with a huge chunk of the world, and can throw its weight around powerfully against e.g. the Russian economy.
This has tremendous benefits for US citizens, and I would argue that purely out of self-interest it's definitely worth 1% of federal expenditures
The Copenhagem Consensus has developed a easily understood cost benefit analysis and made specific recommendations for enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost. It might pay to explore the website.
Bjorn Lomborg developed that to argue against climate change mitigation, does anyone use it in other contexts?
He developed it to argue for ways " enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost". Sorry, if you favorite project did not make it to the top. As you are not the only one who believes it should so very obviously be on top, Lomborg wrote some books explaining how to address climate change - and how not to. You may also read this blog and Scott`s writing in other places to see why not everyone here believes in "I want you to panic".
Anything Scott has written on climate change/crisis/deniers/... you can point to?
Here on ACX I remember a Straussian one:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids?utm_source=publication-search
My answer got out a bit too early. Anyways: Scott is “Rationalist”, to a large part, ie part of a community that worries about AI becoming an existential risk. Climate change is seen as real (by me too, also by Lomborg, also by Matt Ridley) and as a serious issue to consider (by those 3 guys, too), but NOT as an existential risk to humanity or even modern human civilisation (same here +BL +MR). Scott rarely touches the issue directly, as lots of other cover it competently (eg: BL +MR). And he is wise enough not to claim warmer winters are on average better than colder winters. His posts about why more people die in winter did touch the topic a little, but he came up with seasonality of flu as the most plausible reason. Nor did he ever wrote - Greta forbid - “more CO2 has lead to a greener planet earth”. He DID write recently he does not really care deeply whether there are 97 kinds of squirrel in the Americas or 79. Matt Ridley would loudly disagree!
I’m pretty sure that in the case of Limburg, he started by thinking about climate change and only moved to this broader question after that.
Or maybe he first drank tea. What matters: are his conclusions broadly correct. Epistemic helpless, but they make much more sense to me than what I got to hear from the other side. Which is: what we got on TV, what we heard at school, what was and is written in text-books for teenagers I had to work with - and Greta/Last Generation/ Klimakleber on and over the top.
When you are several trillion in the hole with blowout deficits each year, doesn’t all money saved (unless it cuts directly into revenues) automatically go into the worthy cause of pointing the ship in a smarter direction than furiously digging yourself into a bigger hole? Mix them metaphors!
You’re talking about spending money you don’t have - it’s all money you can’t afford that you’re borrowing.
Do you really think that however much stuff Musk cancels, the deficit will be smaller by that amount next year?
I’m highly pessimistic about politicians and spending also - but I would have had the same assumption about Javier Milei before I saw what he did. That shocked me enough to realise that my previous assumption that political systems were so broken they had no chance for course correction wasn’t always going to hold.
It’s pretty grim when clear thinkers like yourself can’t even conceive of the possibility that the most indebted nation on earth could possible stop spending and start cutting without catastrophe forcing it on them. It’s like it’s not even on your table of possibilities.
Its like an alcoholic open to any solution to his problem that doesn’t involve changing his exponential intake trajectory.
In this specific case, house Republicans have said that they intend to pass a budget extending Trump's existing tax cut (TCJA), cutting other taxes, and adding new spending (e.g. on border security). Extending the TCJA costs ~500 billion per year by itself; the other stuff is expected to be expensive but the details aren't negotiated yet. Conceivably they will find enough pay-fors to offset all of this but it isn't expected.
Further discussion: https://www.novoco.com/notes-from-novogradac/outlook-for-2025-tax-reconciliation-legislation-and-its-potential-impact-on-community-development-affordable-housing-historic-preservation-and-clean-energy-tax-incentives
The US isn't Argentina. It's biggest budget slices are for Social Security and the military. Not surprisingly, these also have very large and powerful constituencies who will electorally punish anyone who tries to reign them in. It's not impossible to fight them, but you need a lot of political capital to try. Republicans do not seem particularly interested in cutting spending on either, and I suspect Trump isn't going to break on that.
Foreign non-military aid is a very small amount of the overall US budget. You could double it to account for military aid or whatever and that would still be true (and not for nothing, but most people would not consider sending aging weapons overseas to count, so it's less than any nominal dollar amount you'd see).
The only way any of this makes sense is for DOGE to say to Congress in 8 months "look, we cut a trillion a year of spending and the world blamed Elon for it and thinks it's already done. Now all you have to do is ratify it by passing a reduced budget"
This way, Congress avoids most of the incentives that normally make it politically dangerous to cut programs, because Elon already did it.
The programs being cut currently are irrelevant on the scale of the US federal budget. There is absolutely no way that Musk can cut $1T dollars from the budget without major cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and/or defense. And if any of those are cut you better believe Congress will not "ratify" it because a LOT of voters depend on those programs and will be very upset if they are cut.
What do you mean when you say we can't afford it? What's the negative consequence the ship is pointed towards?
Should I link to the US debt clock? If your conclusion is “this is fine and will continue to work well indefinitely” when you look at it, then our perceptions are too far apart to reconcile.
Or maybe you think “it’s a lil high, I’m sure we’ll ease up before disaster strikes”? Either way we’re poles apart.
I know the debt is big but that doesn't answer my question.
The U.S. is 237 years old. To the best of my recollection, the national debt has been a number than most people would consider large for every single one of those years. Even among the earliest policy thinkers of the U.S. there were those that argued that it *should* be large.
So if you think the U.S. is headed towards immanent disaster because of its debt, could you please provide more specifics than "hey, look, big number?" What size of number will cause the disaster? What form will the disaster take? Will it be sudden or gradual?
gradual, then sudden
Probably hyperinflation?
At some point if the debt continues to grow then the interest payments on the debt exceed the tax collection capacity of the US Government.
Now the US Government can just keep printing dollars if it likes, but at some point you destroy the illusion that these dollars are worth anything.
If huge debt weren't dangerous then why would any government bother to collect taxes at all? It's much more politically popular not to.
Darn it, I wrote a whole little essay just now trying to explain this, and you did a 10x better job in 5 sentences.
Yep. Republicans are going to do their best to collect as little tax as possible without actually touching big ticket items. Unless you think DOGE are about to be getting into any military systems any time soon?
Not every single one of those years. Jefferson paid off the debt when he was President.
I don't have specific answers to those questions and I doubt anyone truly does since the exact context of the current world economy has never occurred in history.
But when Moody's and other rating agencies start downgrading our rating I'd say it's a problem we shouldn't ignore. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/moodys-changes-outlook-united-states-ratings-negative-2023-11-10/
Basic theory of MMT: government debt for any large Fiat currency is not the same as your credit card debt. Modern governments don't collect taxes and then then spend what they collect. They create as much money as they think should be spent, them they delete some of the currently circulating money by taxing circulation.
There has literally never been a government who could print currency and who didn't have debt, because without debt there is no money. Government debt bt is literally just all the money ever created, plus interest, minus all taxes ever collected. Unless you want a straight up contraction of total currency, the number will keep growing.
“Basic theory of MMT” this is like barging into a medical argument and saying “basic argument of homeopathy”. There is not a single serious person who should be convinced by arguments from MMT… particularly after 2020-2022.
-It answers the question of why national debt can be dangerous, but not the way people think.
-Why do you think the pandemic era challenges MMT? A huge amount of money was printed, it wasn't used to build productive capacity, taxes remained low, and then we got inflation.
-Are you confusing MMT with the policy preferences of MMT advocates? To use your tortured medical analogy, it's like arguing against medication because you dislike pharma lobbyists.
Most economists consider MMT to be completely bogus. There's no reason to think it gives us any insight that basic econ without MMT lacks.
Jefferson paid off the US government's debt. This did not eliminate currency, although of course we weren't on a fiat system then. If the current government decided to pay off all its debt, it would probably take a long while, but that wouldn't eliminate currency either.
inflation is a tax on those who cant afford a whole house at a time
No.
Inflation is a tax on people who lend money at fixed interest rates to those who can’t afford a whole house at a time.
If you have a fixed 30 year mortgage, the best thing in the world for you is steady, persistent inflation well above your interest rate.
Of course the HUGE caveat here is that your INCOME must also inflate at the same rate as everything else.
What has killed the US middle class since the 70s is that wages haven’t inflated at the same rate as general inflation.
Inflation.
It took me a while to figure out the answer to this question! People don't talk about it much, they usually leave it as a sort of vague disaster.
(TLDR: if debt climbs out of control, governments have to choose between a "debt crisis" and "hyperinflation", both of which are serious disasters for citizens.)
The first problem is that the more debt an entity already has, the riskier it is to lend them more money. So the higher US debt-to-GDP rises, the higher interest rates investors demand to convince them to buy US bonds. Those bonds backstop other investments (since nobody will give you a 2.5% 30-year mortgage when they could get a 4.75% 30-year T-bill), which is a direct cost paid by citizens. Homeowners literally pay more to the bank each month, the higher debt-to-GDP goes.
The specific disaster that happens when debt-to-GDP rises too high is that the country has to spend most of its incoming tax money on servicing the debt (paying interest to the folks who hold treasury bonds). Which means they have to issue even more bonds to get the money to actually pay for stuff. This cycle compounds. It's paying off one credit card with another credit card, basically. Eventually, there is no longer anybody who wants to buy US treasury bonds, no matter how high the interest rate. The market "bottoms out".
At this point the US must simply stop paying some bills. Maybe they stop repaying T bills, in which case their rating tanks and they can no longer raise money that way. Maybe they stop paying the military, or social security. This is one possible disaster. (Right now, the US spends as much to service the debt as we do on the whole military, if you want a sense of how far along this process we are.)
There's a way to get out of this bad cycle, though! The Federal Reserve can buy the T bills. And they don't care what the interest rate is on them, since they print money for free. (They don't actually print the money for this; they increment one bank account without decrementing another one, which they're allowed to do because they're the Federal Reserve. Anybody else who did it, jail.)
But this makes all the other dollars in existence less valuable. Which also helps the interest rate / bond problem, since all the US debt is denominated in dollars. You can "inflate it away". But this kind of inflation is essentially a tax, since you're debasing all the dollars your citizens hold.
So, basically, if the debt gets big enough, policymakers have to choose between two disasters. Either "the government can't pay its bills" (ie debt crisis) or "everybody's money is worthless" (ie hyperinflation).
The debt is mostly held by the US citizens and companies and the debt/gdp ratio has been pretty stable post-covid. It's still a good idea to reduce deficits somewhat but it's not a catastrophic situation.
At what point does it become a catastrophic situation, and how many decades away is that?
If debt of 125% of GDP is not too bad, what about 250? 500? 1000? There must a limit somewhere beyond which you run out of people willing to lend you money cheaply.
I don't think it's a helpful framing of the problem. It's just not the right KPI to track. Japan's ratio is over 200% and it's still not a failed state. It's not exactly a success either but so are many countries with 50-100% ratio.
The inflation on the other hand is a real constraint, and it's caused by extensive spending as we saw in the last few years.
I'm not that worried about 200%, I'm worried about 300%, 400%, 500% and so on.
At current rates it's adding about another 100% every ten years, and that will accelerate as the interest term starts to dominate all the others.
If you want it to stop at a mere 200% you need a plan starting now, you can't just say "Oh I'm sure someone will figure it out in a decade".
Step 1. Allow the TCJA tax cuts to expire this year, like the Republicans who passed them intended.
Bam, $500 billion off the deficit in one shot, starting this year. All the Republicans have to do is keep a promise from Trump's previous term - that these tax cuts were just a temporary stimulus and not a permanent loss to the government's revenue.
If the budget is in such a crisis, why are Republicans still trying to cut taxes further? What reasoning puts "cut PEPFAR" or "give Elon Musk root access to the Treasury computers" higher on the list of things we should try than this?
So rather than reducing the deficit by cutting spending, the plan is to just keep increasing taxes forever? And then one day the income tax rate will be 100%, and the government will deign to give some tiny fraction of that money back in the form of inefficient government programs that exist mainly as sinecures for the friends and family of government bureaucrats?
If spending cuts are impossible and spending increases are inevitable, then spending will increase until it consumes all available resources. Since living under the boot of a parasitic bureaucracy that sucks you dry for all eternity would be very bad, it stands to reason that any policy that cuts spending in any way is worth doing.
The blob has had decades to do this responsibly and they've made negative progress. Clearly the only path forward is to do it irresponsibly.
Step 1: cap Social Security at $1500/month for everyone
Step 2: raise retirement age to 68
Step 3: restrict Medicare and Medicaid to only cover procedures and drugs covered by at least 5 EU members in their public health systems.
Step 4: transition all city, state and federal pension plans to Social Security, with the same $1500/month cap
That's what, like 30% of the budget cut right there and then?
"If your household is over budget, you can address that problem either by spending less or by earning more income. It is tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that by analogy, the government can address its budget problems either by spending less or by raising taxes. But the analogy fails because raising taxes is not like earning more income; it’s more like visiting the ATM.
The government is an agent of the taxpayers. Raising taxes to pay for government spending depletes our assets just as visiting the ATM to pay for household spending depletes our assets. That’s not at all like earning income, which adds to our assets. "
https://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/11/15/econ-101-for-the-supercommittee/
This form of argument feels like an all-purpose argument against ever doing anything at all. Someone tries to raise taxes and you can say "Why raise taxes instead of cutting spending?" Someone tries to cut spending and you can say "Why cut spending when you could raise taxes?"
The proposition on the table right now is cutting spending, and that's a great idea. Raising taxes may also be necessary at some point, but that's a different discussion.
One thing I do think is that the goal should be to cut down the Government to a size where it's doing its actual job efficiently, and then figure out how much tax needs to be raised in order to fund that government, rather than to see how much money can possibly be squeezed out of the people and then try to think of ways to spend that money.
This economist has a plan: https://x.com/JessicaBRiedl/status/1806391665260638270
A few days ago, the online Right was in favor of the government hiring more Air Traffic Controllers. Eventually, somebody on the Right will realize that instead of canceling programs, we can put our guys in charge of them!
It's not enough to put "our guys" in charge of them, you also have to purge them of any potential dissenters. When most of the people working at these agencies have liberal/establishment sympathies, it makes more sense to just shut down the entire agency and rebuild it from the ground up.
That makes sense, the problem is with stuff like the FAA planes can fall out of the sky in the meantime, making your administration much less popular.
Not that that's what happened with the recent crash--those were all Biden appointees. I think the thing is you just don't have enough conservatives who really want to work for the FAA or HHS to actually staff those agencies. Frankly working in government has been so left-coded within living memory that I doubt you could find enough conservatives to staff those agencies--smart, competent people with right-leaning sympathies tend to go into the private sector where the incomes are much higher and the ideology's more friendly.
I definitely think the indigo blob is a thing, but why would I care if the traffic controllers are conservative or liberal?
And yes I am aware of Trace's FAA post.
Maybe we can use the money from cancelling all foreign aid to pay these people more.
The FAA can be privatized. Canada already did it.
https://www.econlib.org/privatize-the-skies/
I don't think government work is actually "left-coded". It's just that constantly attacking government tends to make government employees not like you, regardless of their politics. A lot of the people Trump is purging are Republicans, just not full-Trumpist Republicans.
It hardly ever makes sense to destroy an.institution with institutional knowledge. You are reinventing Lysenkoism.
I agree with all that except for "rebuild it from the ground up". The same process of capture will happen again.
Political appointees are a small part of the federal workforce. Most of the permanent bureaucracy is staffed by careerists who are hostile to the right. Left-wing employees are attracted to work in governments & non-profit organizations, right-wingers are drawn to other fields. In our electoral system the parties tend to trade off power, so any temporary Republican appointee will eventually be replaced.
If this had anything to do with deficit reduction, maybe I’d agree with you, but the deficit is not going to decrease. Republicans are in power currently, and they have been ideologically opposed to deficit reduction for forty years (because that money could instead be used for tax cuts). Congress plans to greatly increase the deficit this year.
And when it crashes and burns - the analysis will still favor the “we can’t do anything and should never try to retrench” crowd. Because those expressing the view that you just did, were “the naive” ones.
Yes, all cancellation of spending goes into deficit reduction, and deficit reduction is not the worst possible goal. But is $6 billion of deficit reduction actually as valuable as several hundred thousand lives? You might think that most congresspeople and most voters have drastically undervalued deficit reduction, but that’s still a very different question from whether PEPFAR itself is less valuable than deficit reduction.
It's more valuable to the US government. If saving lives in other countries is valuable, we should do so via charitable donations.
This would be a much more convincing argument if the current administration were working towards some sort of fiscal tightening more generally. But in reality almost everything else they are planning is making the the US fiscal position much worse (by orders of magnitude more than what we are spending in foreign aid).
Congressional Republicans (with the administration's fervent support) are working on extending the TCJA, adding a projected $4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years
If this aid is really effective, maybe people who share your view and private charities will step in to fill the funding gap in the absence of sending tax dollars.
...thereby redirecting their charitable giving from other slightly less worthy causes, which now suffer.
Yes, but this makes the counterfactual of the US Government cutting the program less bad, because it effectively sucks money from causes that are significantly less good (as Scott himself noted, charities have extreme disparities in effectiveness).
You can use that argument anytime anyone stops doing some good. If I stop feeding my children, you could respond it's not as bad as it seems, because someone else might step up to feed them.
Scott insists on the actual counterfactual of where the money would go. I think it's reasonable to symmetrically insist on the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from, because in this specific instance there is common knowledge that there's an issue here and AIUI sufficient interested charity throughput to actually replace this 100% (in many cases there's not, which is the key difference between this and your generalised form).
Is the actual counterfactual of where the money would go still worse than the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from? Entirely possible! To use Scott's numbers, one charity is typically 100x as efficient as another, so if this is 1000x the marginal government spend, and it's one of the most efficient charities, the marginal charity getting pulled to pay for this is probably still 10x the marginal government spend! But I like being fair, hence insistence on applying the same scrutiny to "where it'd be taken from" as to "where it'd be going".
If your children were currently receiving charitable money, then perhaps your reasoning would be correct.
It's less bad to the extent that private charitable giving is efficient, always going to the charity that is most worthwhile and most badly in need of money. Since we know it's actually very inefficient, we should expect private giving to only make up a small fraction of the difference.
Shutdown all funding that goes towards the arts, for example, and send it to PEPFAR? Plenty of stuff to cut that doesn't involve saving lives.
Most charities don't have billions of dollars to spend.
They would if people donated billions of dollars.
"Hey, give money to PEPFAR, we save one life per $50."
I don't know the number, since Scott's post oddly never mentioned it or I missed it, but it's apparently a super awesome number.
It would quickly get all the money it needs if it just said it needed money.
Presumably the life-saved/dollar ratio isn't as good for AIDS charities as it is for malaria charities, since the EA recommendations are usually about malaria.
And the claim for the vaunted malaria net program is that you get to $5500 per life.
Wikipedia says PEPFAR has saved around 25 million lives for around $110 billion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief), which is $4.4k per life, right in line with GiveWell averages of $3-5.5K per life.
Malaria charities in terms of the literal bednets are probably much less regulation-intensive than medicine that may need to be taken on a particular schedule, so that could be one component of the difference.
Excellent argument. So excellent that it can prove quite a bit more than you appear to have intended. Let's apply it elsewhere:
Some people say the U.S. military budget is absolutely vital for national security. I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero? I'm sure you can fill in the blanks for every other item in every other budget (federal or otherwise) and draw the correct conclusion.
None of this is necessarily incoherent, BTW. If you want to be an anarcho-capitalist, that is certainly a thing you can be. But if that's what you want, you ought to do so with courage, consistency and forthrightness.
>I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero?
Because then you have to legalise private citizens having thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, which won't end well.
Military and police are actually much more of a problem to substitute with private entities than anything else on the table. There is a reason that people who want to take chainsaws to the government usually don't want to take chainsaws to *that*.
Not so. You could cut the (tax allocation for its) budget to zero, leave it legally under the government control, but solicit charitable contributions to pay for the program. Which isn't quite full ancap, but it still matches the original argument well enough.
There is a fairly-significant difference between "cut a government program, let private actors do it independently" and "keep a government program, but make taxation for it voluntary". Among other things, willingness to pay for stuff tends to correlate with control over that stuff.
There's more of a risk of some military taking over and then setting taxation to whatever it wants. If we cut the governments charity budget to zero, there isn't an equivalent risk that the government will be taken over and the charitable budget reset.
Military example is trying to prove too much, I think. Here's a different one - The federal government provides funding/subsidies for:
- Fossil Fuel - Maybe $20B
- Farming - $30B
- Faith-based organization grants - unknown amount
- Roads & highways - $50B+
- Veterans spending - $300B
- Gun manufacturers - $100M in inducements (this might be state-level)
Many of these are things that some folks on the political spectrum might disagree with their tax dollars being spent on. Their arguments for disagreeing may be very similar to the arguments against foreign aid ("it's not the job of the federal government to distort the free market system through subsidies"). And they could also argue that if these are so valuable, charity would step in.
So - imagine a Democratic president deputizing a businessman (say, Mark Cuban) to go in and, without congressional approval, halt distribution of these funds because we need to stop the spending and we might as well start somewhere. Would you consider that lawful?
Sources for above data:
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs
https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/cutting-federal-farm-subsidies
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/08/text/unlevelfield2.html
https://www.hud.gov/states/shared/working/r5/fbci
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59667
https://goodjobsfirst.org/top-three-gun-manufacturers-have-received-more-105-million-subsidies/
I wasn't making an argument for or against any use of government funds. I was suggesting to Scott that the people he is worried about due to the lack of government-funded aid might still get help from another source.
Yes, you were. Again, your argument Proved to Much. Anyone could say the same about any government program at any time for any reason, and it would be every bit as valid as what you said. You like it, you fund it.
But then again, the opposite is equally untrue. We obviously wouldn't want the government to intrude on every possible cause. Therefore there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handled by the government" and there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handed by individual citizens". You are not arguing principles, you are arguing which category this particular thing should belong to.
My bet is that people would actually pay for it willingly because the alternative is to be taken over by China and Russia. I'm ~99% sure it would be fully covered by voluntary "donations" by citizens who's tax bill is now $0.
Yeah, I agree, but instead of PEPFAR, it's specifically about funding the police wherever you live. If we just cut all the funding to them, then surely private citizens will step in to fund it.
My comment is about something that is happening already - PEPFAR funding is paused.
I’m not advocating for or against funding it, or for or against libertarianism. I’m not advocating anything.
I’m speculating that if this is really a great cause then maybe other charities or even the people who currently work for PEPFAR might find a way to keep it going without federal funds.
Wouldn’t great causes that need funds attract more donations than others?
No, that's not how the real world works, just as in the real world, even though the police are a worthy and important way to spend government money - that provide a value sufficiently high it might even beat out PEPFAR! - if we cut it then it just gets cut and not replaced.
I have no idea how you would even go about transferring all PEPFAR employees and medical supplies from the government to a private charity, and even if people figured it out, it would take a bunch of time, during which those babies would still get AIDS.
Charities funded by voluntary donations rather than taxes really do exist. You don't have to imagine them, you can look them up on GiveWell.
Transaction costs are a thing! It takes time to spin up a website saying "we need X money to meet a surprise shortfall," it takes time to find interested donors, it takes time to re-hire the staff who got fired, and that may not even happen because some people are going to say "fuck this I'm going to work a job where my paycheck isn't at risk when a billionaire throws a tantrum."
And Elon Musk can hack off bits of budget much faster than you can spin up replacement private organizations. Are you going to propose an emergency fundraising drive for every single good government program to get cut? What if it's something that's still good but not as attention-getting as lifesaving AIDS drugs?
Yes, they would in fact do so, as proven by hundreds of years of precedent in places without organized police forces. Just look at how early American settlers defended themselves against various bandits.
Settlers versus bandits isn't the same as urban crime. A city is an insanely dense region full of strangers; a bandit is one of the handful of strangers you'll see in the nearest few kilometers. There's a reason we transitioned away from mob justice to police departments alongside the spike in urbanization, and it's that police departments are much, much better at handling "find the guy who did this" and "stop the guy from doing this" when there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people within a few kilometers of you.
If we wanted to replace urban police we'd want something more formal than posses of settlers. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
If Jeff Bezos woke up tomorrow and said "fuck Amazon, I'm firing everyone and deleting all the code off our servers and leaving everyone's packages stranded in random warehouses," you wouldn't go "this is fine, Amazon is very profitable, so someone will step in to build a new online everything store."
(And, uh, also in this hypothetical Walmart.com doesn't exist.)
Probably someone would eventually build a new everything store! But that would take years, and it would probably be more expensive and less good than Amazon for a very long time. You definitely couldn't just pick back up where Amazon left off: key people would have already gotten a different job; the servers would have been rented to someone else; neither the vendors nor the customers trust your new Nile.com.
PEPFAR is really good not because helping with HIV/AIDS is a particularly good thing to do; actually, it's kind of mid, and a lot of economists complained back in 2004 that it was a waste of money. PEPFAR is really good because it's an unusually well-run program, because it was George W. Bush's pet project and he really, really, really wanted to make it work. "End PEPFAR, private charity will do it" is like saying "end Amazon, someone will eventually make Nile.com"-- except that capitalism is beautifully efficient and someone will make Nile.com, but rich charity donors keep going "save millions from a horrible death? Nah, I'd rather buy my alma mater a really ugly new dorm."
Also, the U.S. government actually does have an advantage at working with other governments, as PEPFAR does. It is called "diplomacy" and the State Department, which houses PEPFAR, specializes in it. Some large funders, like the Gates Foundation, are basically countries, but the vast majority of private charity doesn't have the level of soft power the U.S. does.
Bezos/Amazon is WAY above replacement. He/it is unusually successful for a reason. This isn't true for all tech CEOs though, Ballmer was below replacement and once he stopped running Microsoft they started doing better.
But the question isn't whether we should replace the head of PEPFAR. The question is whether, if you completely destroy an organization, it doesn't matter because someone else can start a new organization to do the same thing.
Depends on the organization. For many, creative destruction is indeed optimal.
> It’s a little unfair to focus on BEAD or other especially bad programs, because money gained by canceling a good program will on average be redirected to a merely average program.
I disagree. The government isn't great at keeping their priorities in order. In fact, I'd say they're pretty terrible at it. But I still think they do better than chance. With the money they have now, they're trying to fund the most important things. They're failing horribly at it, but the things they're funding are still better than the things they're not funding. The fruit they've taken is, on average, lower hanging, so if you give them extra money, the fruit they use it to pick probably be higher than the average one they picked so far.
In short, the money will be redirected to a somewhat worse than average program.
Thank you, I've added a paragraph about this to the post.
Look. The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. That's a card you have played too many times. If we didn't vote for Obama/Biden/Kamala Trump/McCain was going to nuke the earth. We've heard it. If we didn't pass the Green New Day / Diversity Enhancement the Nazis were going to resurrect and invade Poland. We heard you. Any minute now.
But we no longer believe. That's the crux of it. We no longer believe you mean the things you say, when you tell us that, conveniently enough, the world is arranged in such a way that after we finally win the right to run stuff we have to do the things you want us to do or we are monsters. We are over it.
The problem of lying to us is not that we stop believing 'that specific lie'. It isn't even that we stop believing some percentage of a lie, such that the next lie can become 10x bigger and have the same effect. It is deeper than that.
Y'all said Trump had a piss tape and you were going to show it to us. You said he was in the KGB, and conveniently fell silent when Putin waited till losing control of one of the two countries he was ruling to attack the Ukraine. You said he was (somehow) also a Nazi (one of those communist nazis I guess) and would attack China. You said he watched 7 hours of tv every day, and had lost the ability to tell if it was real or not. Just an absolute firehose of lies.
Your team says a lot of stuff. I'm not gonna make the abortion comparison, but obviously you see where that goes, as far as us believing your motivations.
So we get a turn to be in charge, right? The bullet is blocked by a miracle and our guy gets to be the leader. He immediately is like 'lets not give billions to democratic grifters, shut it all down'. And what we expect from the guys who have proven, over and over, that they lie in order to become more powerful, is that a lie will happen such that he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
So, sure. He can't cut the gov or millions of babies will die. He can't not do green stuff or Mumbai will flood and millions of babies will die. He can't stop paying the Ukraine army or Russia will win and millions will die. Nothing stops you from saying that. Kamala didn't get to win but Trump has to do everything she would have done.
But, if you mean it. If you've always meant it. Then show us the piss tape. Show us his Russian spy badge. Roll up his sleeve and show the Dark Mark. Like, you endorsed the bad guys from your IRB nightmare post, I credit you with believing what they say. So in your world there is a piss tape, yeah?
Or, if your position is more nuanced, then say that. Say that you guys lie for power, and that this particular statement isn't one such lie. It is different from how we have to pay for the people to who hate us and think they are better than us in a billion other ways. This one is real. It goes to something that matters.
Like, you've always struck me as sincere. You have, I dunno, capital, here? Like, if you mean it. If you mean it this time, and you'll admit that the rest is tactical, but you genuinely think that if we don't obey you this time there will be seven figures of death, then say so do the betting market thing, and I'll buy it.
Because, like, take a sec and become us for a sec, and this is bullshit, yeah? The gov is doing something with millions of dollars that saves millions of lives? Pull the other one, right? The gov can't make a train station with a hundred times that money. There are liberals with that money from hell to breakfast, and they are somehow stopped form doing it privately (Cuz, like, if this was real, the whole maleria net thing doesn't make any sense)? Like, EAs would have been all over this.
I don't think you are insincere. You've always been a straight shooter. But I think you are being fooled. Can you genuinely look into it? Like, you get that, from someone outside of your POV, this is exactly what your team WOULD say, just to keep our money flowing to your pockets for a few months longer? "Yup yup, working folks gotta keep on paying the rich guys or they'll stop saving poor babies."
I don't believe them. They are always lying in order to hurt people and enrich themselves. But I might believe you.
From some kind of abstract perspective where all liberals are a perfectly coordinated team, you're not wrong. I've said basically this same thing in some of my posts.
Still, I will say, with 100% sincerity, and am happy to bet you via any mechanism you want if you can come up with this, that I think 100,000s of people will die if they actually cancel this one. (if you don't believe me, believe Trump/Musk, who apparently figured out that they made a mistake and restarted).
I think these two facts (liberals often like, PEPFAR is genuinely good) are both true. So what do you do about it?
I think there are two ways you could interpret your concern.
First, conservatives literally have no way to sort through the film of lies. They're in a state of total epistemic uncertainty and they should just assume everything is a lie. I think this is false. There are plenty of smart conservative doctors and epidemiologists - some of Trump's recent appointees are in that category. Or they could notice that PEPFAR was started by GW Bush - hardly a bleeding heart liberal. All of these things would have taken a few days to check.
Second, you could interpret it as karma coming home to roost for liberals. I think the people who suffer when you cancel a program that saves millions of Africans mostly isn't liberals, it's Africans. I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane, and also all of those liberals have nice jobs and are still sipping champagne regardless.
Thanks for responding OP. I have read your stuff since the livejournal days. I used to give money when the NYT doxxed you. I stopped as we got more different, but I remember you fondly. That's why I answered instead of just rolling my eyes.
If you are saying this, and Trump and Musk came around, then I guess it's true. I can't claim that that's why Trump/Musk changed their minds, but I think the bigger version of this (the truth saying liberals said they really meant it) is probably what got through to them. It is important to have voices like you on the other side who aren't liars. If you'd destroyed your reputation doing piss tape stuff I wouldn't be here. I don't matter, but I mean I as in guys like me.
About your two ways, it's the first one. I've worked ten hour shifts in a gas station. I don't have the time to sort out what liberal is lying about what. I know you guys, as a team, will lie for power, and the ones that don't do it go along with those who do. I'm not judging, that's how we work too.
So what I do is I trust our leaders to work it out. It sounds like in this case they did. I hope you will keep on trying to make sure they don't get stuff wrong, and I hope they will stop all the waste that's going on but keep doing good stuff like this thing.
Anyway, thanks again for reading and answering.
I appreciate you - I hate preaching to the choir because it's useless, but everyone speaks such a different language these days that I don't know how to get people with really different starting assumptions from me to listen. I guess keeping in touch with some of them are still around from when people were closer to being on the same page is the best I can hope for. Thanks again for commenting.
> I trust our leaders to work it out.
You shouldn't. They didn't reassess because they were convinced by sound argument, they got scared by the bad press and cucked on the ruthless dismantling of the administrative state they initially embarked on.
They dropped Matt Gaetz based on the same kind of bullshit, and the woman they replaced him with will be nowhere near as effective as he would have been.
...Wait what? Are you seriously mad that they're not burning down the government enough? It hasn't even been 3 weeks, give it some time.
No, I agree they're doing far more than I expected, but I'm not going to pretend that when they're forced to walk back a move, that it was part of an unseen grand strategy, or that they changed their minds after Liberals convincing argued for their side: they retreated because their enemy successfully repelled their attack. That's fine, they're fighting powerful opponents, well-entrenched over decades, and it's unreasonable to expect flawless victories.
But I agree it's a retreat, not a rout, so "cucked" might be too harsh.
I think you shouldn't discount this being part of the plan.
> On Jan. 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, ostensibly allowing for the distribution of H.I.V. medicines. But the waiver did not name PEPFAR, leaving recipient organizations awaiting clarity.
On Sunday, another State Department waiver said more explicitly that it would cover H.I.V. testing and treatment as well as prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. The memo did not include H.I.V. prevention — except for pregnant and breastfeeding women — or support for orphaned and vulnerable children.
Although PEPFAR is funded by the State Department, roughly two-thirds of its grants are implemented through U.S.A.I.D. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neither organization has released funds to grantees since the freeze was initiated.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Rubio appeared to blame the recipient organizations for not acting on the waiver, saying he had “real questions about the competence” of the groups. “I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” he said.
I don't think Trump is worthy of any trust. He has shown himself repeatedly to be a liar so shameless that even the professional lying class (politicians) was outcompeted by him.
I'm pretty sure the pisstapes thing was always just liberal shit posting. Who took it seriously?
PEPFAR played into GW Bush's "Compassionate Conversative™" Evangelical persona. His was economically liberal in his spending (e.g. Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, Healthy Marriage Initiative).
Spending money on saving innocent third world victims of AIDS plays into the White American Evangelical worldview similar to how Abortion is about how women and babies (fetuses) are the innocent victims of the abortionists or society who should be saved.
It's just one of many Conservatisms (e.g. fiscal conservatism, moral conservatism).
>I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane
I think they *do* recognize it as insane, but that cuts from both sides. Either they get held hostage by infinite debts and people without skin in the game (they'll have their cozy jobs and champagne regardless), or they call the bluff and let the people they *can* hurt be hurt. If there was a more direct mechanism that didn't look like an endless, grinding civil war, they'd take it. If there was a direct system of compromises and tradeoffs- "we'll approve funding to save X African lives if you send Y DEI admins to work in the salt mines and gulags," they'd take it.
The African lives are as much pawns to the champagne liberal as they are to the heartless conservative.
I agree that liberals cry wolf way too much. The reason that crying wolf is bad, though, is that occasionally a real wolf shows up, and if you don't have credibility no one will believe your warnings until it is too late. In the case of PEPFAR, there is indeed a wolf at the door. There's a lot of good evidence that it is an effective program that has saved a lot of lives.
PEPFAR is also a bipartisan program, it was started by Bush, and Obama, Trump (the first term), and Biden each saw no reason to mess with it. So this isn't a case of Democrats demanding Trump implement a Democratic agenda, it's a case of them asking him to leave a Republican program in place.
If you want me to establish that I have a nuanced and credible position on this, I am happy to denounce other times that liberal/leftist/Democrats have used histrionic language about stuff. For example, the Green New Deal was a terrible idea, there are many ways to ameliorate climate change that are friendlier to the economy. Reopening schools after the vaccine became widely available was a no-brainer and it's ridiculous how much resistance it received in the name of "saving lives." "Defund the police" was just stupid.
Do conservatives not cry wolf at all? Anyone remember "gay marriage destroy society", etc?
Their slippery slope argument turned out to be at least somewhat true, but I admit the trans nonsense is more of a culture war distraction than a real problem in society. And it seems to be losing influence. It was just so insane that it's gone on for so long, and part of the reason is that post-vibe shift, gay marriage culture warriors were a movement without a cause.
Well, the climate got worse even if it didn't kill everybody.
I think if you look at the predictions made by Scalia's dissents, they were quite accurate.
"The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. "
Well, yes, clearly. I suspect you have not quite thought this all the way through though. Because the result of this reasoning isn't "we're awesome and perfect and nothing ever goes wrong." The result of this reasoning is "we *consistently*, *predictably* do dumb things that kill millions of people, because we've decided that ignoring anyone outside the group who warns us about ANYTHING is the One Absolutely Indispensable Badge of Group Membership." See, some fraction of people on the liberal side DO listen when sober and sensible analysis says "hey, this is a big danger that will kill a lot of people." And you know what they do once they've listened. They REPEAT IT. And then you hear "wow, the liberals are saying something will kill millions of people again" and not only do you ignore it, you assume anyone who doesn't ignore it, and assume they're one of the liberals.
I mean, not to point too fine a point on it, but we literally saw this play out EXACTLY five years ago. A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible. Conservatives saw the liberals saying stuff, screamed "FUCK YOU, YOU CAN'T TELL US WHAT TO DO!" and did pretty much the opposite of everything that was expected to have helped. A million Americans died. A million AMERICANS. The people you loudly claim to care most about. Some of them would have died anyway, of course: other countries with more unity and better leadership still lost people. But the U.S. got hit disproportionately hard. *Especially* the red areas.
I didn't want those people do die. Nobody I know wanted those people to die. But when you decide that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for anyone outside your circle to communicate important things with you (which is what you have basically said), then any important knowledge that doesn't *start* in your circle can never, ever get in. Including new things that we learn about the world, even important, urgent things like "hey, this plane is going to crash."
I'm scared, Walter. I'm scared because it feels like tens of millions of people are living in an entirely different reality than me, and because when I try to talk to them about basic, simple, bedrock pieces of reality to try to establish some common ground, they repeat utter nonsense, or call me names, or stick their fingers in their ears or whatever. Sometimes they crow and revel about the utterly stupid things they've done. Sometimes they gloat and smirk about how they're going to harm my friends and family. I don't know what happened to this people, but I sure wish I could reach them. Probably you feel the same way (if about different people), but insisting "I will never, ever so much as consider what anyone even slightly aligned with them tells me under any circumstances" certainly isn't going to fix it.
Reality always has the last word. You can't win an argument with reality. No matter how aggrieved, how hurt, how righteously angry you FEEL, no matter how stridently you argue against reality, it will not budge. The BEST possible outcome is that you get nowhere and look foolish. The worst possible outcomes get entire chapters in history books, with somber memorials and days of remembrance.
>A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible.
No. Neither side came out looking great, but the progressive blob has a greater counterfactual death toll to answer for.
Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid. *That* would have saved a lot more people than any lockdown after accounting for the whole "yes, welding everyone into their homes would stop transmission, but it would also lead to everyone dying of starvation" issue. And the misery of losing international transit would have been far less than the misery of lockdowns; ditto the economic costs.
I remember. When it mattered most, the conservatives were the ones taking things seriously and the progressives were the ones ignoring reality. Their blob gets a better grade than yours.
Given that the conservative blob decided to react against vaccines and refuse to wear masks, I'm not sure that last statement is the case.
We're probably similarly cynical about both blobs so I won't bother arguing that here.
The masks I was considering and are still strictly less of an issue than the quarantine. Quarantine would have saved everyone; masks and other NPIs saved some, by spreading the infections out to unburden hospitals and to move some infections after the vaccine, but not all (I don't think bringing R under 1 was ever feasible, in hindsight - not without the shit the PRC got up to, at least, and even they eventually fell short), and at greater cost (including in deaths, because of the drug overdoses).
Vaccine hesitancy is the one thing that compares, although while most of the refusers were Red Tribe that seems contingent on the vaccine being deliberately delayed in order to prevent it being Trumpeted (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-3-12-new-cdc-guidelines-available?utm_source=publication-search#%C2%A7and-yet-no-technically-we-are-incorrect-eric-topol-is-actually-the-worst - NB: linking Zvi because he's a Rat who hates Trump). That's not the whole blob, but it complicates things.
The correct immediate reaction would have been to call President Xi and say in suitably diplomatic language, “In an autocracy, bad news can travel slowly up the chain of command, but this virus is a serious threat and it is in both our interests to get it quickly contained. We will happily send our best virologists to assist you.” Just because that’s what Obama would have done if he were still President doesn’t make it a bad idea.
I don’t know which progressives called shutting down international transit Sinophobic and paranoid. A web search suggests that any who did did not use the word “Sinophobic.” In any case, I would think that the person to answer for the death toll would be Trump, not unnamed progressives. After all, progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opposed Trump’s corporate tax cuts, but that didn’t stop Trump.
I remember Pelosi visiting SF's Chinatown in early (Feb?) 2020 because the Republicans were saying anyone traveling from China is more likely to have been carrying the new virus. I think they said "racist" in general though, and not specifically "Sinophobic."
She visited Chinatown on Feb. 24, saying that people shouldn’t stay away from Chinatown due to the virus. She seems to have stuck to a positive message, not criticizing Republicans at all, and saying nothing about Trump’s travel restrictions.
Sample quote: “We want to be vigilant about what might be on the horizon -- what is out there in other places. We want to be careful how we deal with it (coronavirus). But we do want to say to people, come to Chinatown. Here we are, again, careful, safe, and come join us.”
For context, here is what Trump tweeted the same day: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
And who was President in early 2020 with the power to do this? How exactly is it the fault of progressives that Trump didn't do the thing you think was called for at the time.
"serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid."
Hmm.
I was living and working deep in the heart of "blue" America throughout 2020, and was/am well networked in progressive circles due to the work that I do as well as my family background. Literally no one I knew was opposing shutting down international travel at that time. Also they were all canceling all international travel personally/professionally -- I knew multiple people who took significant $ losses backing out of previously-booked international trips during that year.
So I'm puzzled...progressives during 2020 "balked at" shutting down international travel? Which progressives?
Also -- wasn't Donald Trump the president throughout 2020? With Republican majorities in the Senate and on the Supreme Court? And a slight Dem majority in the House having zero self-identifying progressives in its leadership?
If formally shutting down international travel was the serious and correct reaction...which party during 2020 had the capacity and hence responsibility to make it happen?
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
Possibly, but I think the devil’s in the details here.
What date are you talking about? Would such a shutdown include Canada and Mexico if they didn’t follow suit? How long would you give them to adjust?
Covid started adding up in early March 2020 – if you had timed this too early (reports from China started late December, I think), you would have a lot of angry people and little to show for it for a pretty long time…
January/yes/basically none.
Let people be angry; they'd eat their words later.
Late or early January? Late January would already be stretching it, but early January seems frankly unsustainable given the mood at the time.
Businesses would have been yelling their heads off (remember how North America is very integrated economically), and no one would have bought the cost-benefit analysis.
I doubt that it would have been politically feasible to contain an outcry that big for even a month without clear rationale, let alone more.
Hug a chinaman, y'all!
I agree, disagreements about what seems like pieces of bedrock reality can be unsettling. There's a much more unsettling thing however: when tens of millions of people seem to forget what opinion they had and vehemently argued for about said pieces of bedrock reality just months ago. It's one thing to realize that some piece of reality is not as bedrock as you thought and change your mind about it, but what were your expressed and recorded beliefs about it should really not be debatable, and yet...
Since you brought up Covid, here are two time capsules that you might find surprising (and deeply unsettling). First, that time when Nancy Pelosi went to literally hug people in SF Chinatown to demonstrate that Covid was not a big deal: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-san-franciscos-chinatown/2240247/
In that case the liberal opinion did a 180 degree reversal (complemented by complete retrograde amnesia) in literally less than a week, Pelosi hugged Chinamen on Feb 24, on Feb 28 everyone got upset about Trump calling Corona a hoax (fake news btw, he did not) and suddenly it was a big deal.
Another is this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/worstof/comments/i1x87n/in_which_ramitheasshole_scolds_and_mocks_a_mother/ wherein redditors are confused and surprised when confronted by their own opinions on the efficacy of masks from four months ago.
Again, it's one thing to believe that the fact that masks don't work against Covid is a piece of bedrock reality. It is even understandable to get morally outraged at people who insist on wearing masks in the time of shortage and kill someone's grandma by doing so. Maybe even do a little harassment for the greater good. And, separately, it's understandable to change your mind and come to believe that you're killing a grandma by *not* wearing a mask outside and that's bedrock reality, bud.
But the amnesia accompanying this shift in progressive opinions is genuinely scary. How can you have a real discussion about what is true or not and what is likely true versus bedrock-reality true with people who genuinely don't remember their own beliefs from a week ago? Who believe that certain things are true because it's a moral thing to do, and since they have always been morally correct, their memories of their past beliefs change as necessary?
From Europe here, but it's the same: the amount of political, media and public amnesia around all things COVID disturb me a lot, at least as much as how quickly and deeply democratic governments went authoritarian without any noticeable institutional resistance (make you wonder what distinguish liberal democracy from authoritarian regimes deep down....).
I sorted the 3 in term of more and more surprising: politicians doing 180° is no surprise, kind of part of the job. Traditional Media not that surprising, not after their full support of government message during the first peak. Public, that's more surprising, I guess I was naive about the percentage of people still exerting a modicum of self-honesty and critical thinking. I knew it was likely small, but that small? I don't think they do not exists, but it's clear they do not exist enough to be visible even on non-traditional media.
I think at least part of the explanation (for the almost complete media support, and initial public support) is not only fear, it's the World savior mentality, especially the variant "we can save the world from apocalypse if we accept suffering a little now" mentality that is a hallmark of western thinking since the beginning of Christianity, at least. Media jumped on this nice story, maybe because encouraged by power in place, but also because it's just the kind of feel-good story they just love (we will win against an inhuman enemy with the strength of our altruism, resilience and unity - basically the plot of any apocalypse-porn blockbuster)
Still, I think Public amnesia is largely unwillingness to explicitely discuss what happened, rather than true amnesia, and that the COVID episode significantly hit the "suffer now to save the world" western meme. Because global warming and ecology is largely using this meme, and it's popularity is in free fall...
Funny you should mention this, because a week or so ago I happened to reread this old post:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/
Watching the two sides both 180 in regards to quarantine was disheartening, because it feels like everyone just wants to make whatever political argument is most convenient for them in the moment. About the only consistent thing was the left crying racism as per usual...
Numerous cost-benefit analyses have been done since showing that "do nothing at all" was in fact the right approach. You would've been right if the pandemic was at least 3-5x more deadly, but COVID simply wasn't deadly enough to warrant doing anything about it.
This is a great comment and anyone from the left wing who is still going “but how could ANYONE vote for TRUMP” (most of my family lol) would do well to read it.
I do think though that we as the conservative team should try and sort out truth from lies. Just because the mainstream media etc bullshits constantly and distorts in order to mislead, doesn’t mean that literally everything they say is false. This is a trap that conservatives can fall into. For example, I am a doctor and I can tell you with some confidence that Covid vaccines work to prevent severe Covid infection. I am also confident that climate change is real, although exaggerated.
With the PEPFAR thing, it’s early days but it seems like it’s the one decent program in all these billions of dollars of waste, fraud and corruption that the government has been up to - so obviously the media are harping on it constantly. Fine, OK, if it’s a good use of taxpayer money hopefully Trump/Musk will reinstate it. But talking about it is a distraction from USAID funding Internet censorship or gain of function research in the Wuhan lab or torture training for repressive Latin American regimes backed by the CIA or Islamist terrorist groups.
Tucker Carlson tried that with the Daily Caller early on, believe it or not. He couldn't make any money and it wound up doing the usual report-lots-of-crap-and-the-occasional-actual-liberal-malfeasance conservative-media thing.
This is kind of what Richard Hanania was getting at with the Elite Human Capital thing (though his exact definition of it sounds suspiciously similar to himself). Liberals read, conservatives watch TV. There just aren't enough people on the conservative team who care enough or want to work for it to make a right-wing New York Times with strong journalistic standards (outside of their usual ideological blindspots, of course) a viable entity.
Some of it's ideological capture and assortment over the years, but I honestly think too many bright conservatives are busy raising kids. Which, I mean, obviously is necessary for there to be a next generation, but it gives the left an asymmetric ideological advantage.
Conservatives also have the largely unacknowledged problem that their intellectual tradition no longer has a strong basis underneath. God has been dead for more than a century now, nobody seriously thinks that there's a coherent universal ontology with religious dogma at its center, and separate magisteria/god-of-the-gaps replacements are clearly inadequate. Until this is acknowledged and dealt with, conservatives have nothing to entice secular intellectuals with.
That is a good point. I think some are trying to do it with various forms of nationalism or fascism under another name, even if it was kind of a flop in 1945.
They were/are rightist utopians, not conservatives. Claims about restoring mythical centuries-old "golden age" don't count.
I think pre-2020 Jordan Peterson had a potential to create a new foundation for modern conservatism... but then he went to Russia and got his brain replaced, and he just isn't the same person anymore. :(
What other conservative intellectuals are there? Theodore Dalrymple comes to my mind; any other examples? My rule of thumb is "a person who could write a guest post on ACX without dramatically lowering its quality level".
Hanania, kind of? But all of them have been reluctant to explicitly come to terms with the problem I pointed at. Of course, doing so isn't easy - replacing the basis of your ideology is about the most anti-conservative thing imaginable! But still necessary, I claim, if conservatism has any intention to provide serious challenge to progressivism/utopianism.
God is surprisingly alive in the US.
I don't think the problem is a lack of human capital for conservatives. The problem is that a conservative who doesn't support Trump 100% in every way is called a "Democrat" nowadays.
Republicans *had* a lot of human capital pre-2016, but they were all excommunicated or silenced.
“Y'all said Trump had a piss tape...”
Who is y'all? I never made that claim, or any of the other claims you list in that paragraph. To the best of my recollection, neither did Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
On the other hand, it was Trump himself who claimed on November 21, 2015: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering. So something’s going on. We’ve got to find out what it is.”
He later claimed explicitly (on ABC’s This Week) that he saw this on television. If this were true, the footage would have been saved on video. I’m still waiting for the video tape.
For that matter, I’m still waiting for the Weapons of Mass Destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
I know there are a bunch of nuts on the political left; mostly I ignore them. You should, too, rather than dismissing an entire half of the political spectrum.
On the other hand, honest conservatives like Daniel Larison during the Bush years or Liz Cheney more recently, are the fringe conservatives.
> there are a bunch of nuts on the political left; mostly I ignore them. You should, too,
The analogous version of this is "Sure, Donald Trump is a bit of nut; you should mostly ignore him."
And of course I would if he weren’t President.
You've missed my point. Why does him being president make a difference?
If it's because he's powerful and can do a lot of damage, that's true of the "nuts on the political left" you suggest we ignore as well.
I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis; you said Mexico was going to pay for the wall; you said covid was going to kill a negligible number of people; etc, etc. (Those last two "you"s were specifically Trump.) Hell, I could go farther back: Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I appreciate Scott's efforts (and willingness, and ability) to talk sense across these lines. But I think that part of that is recognizing that the amount of lying on BOTH sides has been crazy. Obviously we have different views about the balance: I think there's been more lying on the conservative side, you'd probably say the reverse, so let's just say it's both and remind ourselves of the fundamental attribution error (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
That said, I don think that there is a distinction worth making: namely, distinguishing mainstream voices from fringe ones. On my side, neither major politicians (Biden/Pelosi/Obama/etc) nor journalist voices (your pick of NYT columnists) said anything about a piss tape. But it was Reagan who said medicare would end American freedom, Bush who said Iraq had WMDs and Trump who said Mexico would pay for his wall. I am not saying that all liberal lies are from fringe voices (the covid messaging was pretty deceptive at times, although not always), and am certainly not saying you couldn't find lunacy on the fringe right far beyond what even Trump says. But it's an important distinction to make, I'd argue.
But fundamentally, we live in a polarized society in which each side sees the other as fundamentally unconcerned with the truth. The response to this should not be to dismiss everything the other side says, but to read/listen to both sides, and decide each individual issue on the merits as best as we can (with, of course, a recognition that there are also both genuine mistakes and reasonable beliefs which change with new data as well as lies at play.)
>I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis;
I think this strengthens their point: The cons had a string of failures that discredited them back then, the libs became ascendant, and had their own string of failures and now we're here
>Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I mean, if you add Social Security to that, I'd say you shouldn't count it out yet.
"A private email server is an unimaginably awful security breach" hasn't aged too well.
The sad thing is that the Clinton emails fiasco really was a disqualification; but our standards have dropped so much since. Never thought I’d find myself wishing we could go back to Bush.
The correct conclusion is that lying is endemic in politics. Which is why we should use futarchy instead.
PEPFAR's not our team! It's your team! George W. Bush is not a liberal!
Until Trump noticed PEPFAR, PEPFAR was a bipartisan program because it was extremely popular among conservative evangelicals, because it was created by a conservative evangelical president in response to conservative evangelical concerns about the global poor. The liberals haven't done anything a tenth as good. I don't know why evangelicals have gone insane, but the liberals are just stewarding the program until the evangelicals return to their senses and start gloating about how the conservative concern for government efficiency saved millions of babies while the libs were fussing around with DEI for shrimp.
The Republican base has become increasingly isolationist since the 2010s at the least. RINO is not a new insult.
My point is, if you squint your eyes to see things how the populists would, you can understand why they regard PEPFAR as liberals spending money to help foreigners instead of Americans.
If you say "PEPFAR is not a populist program," then I'm not going to write a long screed complaining about that. But it's insane to have a definition of "liberal" in which George W. Bush is a liberal. Especially if you're also (correctly!) criticizing liberal fearmongering about McCain and Romney. There is no world where Mitt Romney is a true conservative non-RINO and Bush is basically a Democrat.
What? Romney is a RINO too. You have to realize that Trump (and by extension, the new Republican party) aren't conservative, they're revolutionaries. Anyone seeking to protect the old order is an enemy.
I don't think they've gone insane, they just realized that they hate Africans more than they like pretending to care about human lives.
I think the balance of the evidence about 2000s-era evangelicals suggests that they did, in fact, genuinely care about Africans and human lives.
>Until Trump noticed PEPFAR,
To be fair I don't think Trump noticed PEPFAR at all. He was aiming at taking out left wing NGOs and PEPFAR happened to be in the blast radius.
First, I will just point out that "people make overstated and hyperbolic claims about the policies of their political opposition" is not some unique pathology of the left. Everyone does it, all the time, throughput human history.
But to respond to one specific point
> he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
He was not elected to have this power. He was elected President of the United States, which under our constitutional system does not have the power of the purse. PEPFAR is a program authorized by the US Congress and the President does not have the legal power in our system to just decide he doesn't like the program and refuse to spend the money. It's current authorization expires in March, if he believes its a bad program then fine, he can use his influence to get congress to not reauthorize it. But what he is doing now is very clearly illegal.
But people elected him in the hopes that he would upend the system. In that sense, he was elected to have power that supersedes the old order.
No, he was elected President in the normal way that people are elected President. People had all sorts of reasons for voting for him, but the question on the ballot was definitely not “Should we give Donald Trump dictatorial power not beholden to any law” If that WAS the question on the ballot and a majority said yes then that would something different.
It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not. Democracy is a system of compromise, not justice. It prevents conflict by making sure the minority does not needlessly waste their lives fighting fights they cannot win. Thus, the majority always has the final say.
> Thus, the majority always has the final say.
Just to be pedantic, a majority of Americans actually voted for someone other than Trump for President.
> It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not.
Of course it matters. People were voting for a President, a job which is supposed to be defined by our laws and have limited powers. If he is doing things that are explicitly not within legal power of a President then that is not what people voted for. Imagine you voted for someone to be the treasurer of your town. If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
Wait what? He won the polular vote this time. Are you saying that the vote was rigged?
Edit: Huh, apparently he was a minority majority. Well, third party votes are equivalent to not voting, so I don't see it as particularly relevant. If they wanted a voice, they could've had it.
> If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
If doing that was part of his political campaign, yes, yes I would.
The US and.most democracies is constitutionally constrained with limitations on powers, not a raw.majority-can-do-what-they-like system.
You mean he was elected to.do things a president is not allowed to? Or to be more radical.in the same framework?
This is a helluva comment which has way more salience than I (as a firm Never Trumper) would like. Any objection if I share it to my Notes feed and -- maybe, if I have the nerve -- with a few close relatives?
No, I don't mind if you share to whoever. Thanks for the compliment.
Why not use the saved money to reduce the national debt?
Or give it back to the people it was taken from? Maybe some of them have brothers in need.
I think the best way to think about that is that reducing the debt is a federal program that we could spend money on. It’s not the least valuable program to spend money on, but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
>but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
I think there's plenty of indication:
* Debt to GDP ratio is the highest it's been in a long time
* Interest on debt is becoming the largest item in the US Budget
* This, if unadressed, is likely to trigger a debt crisis which would, at best, greatly reduce Americans' purchasing power, through debasement of their currency.
Unless, by virtue of them being the biggest, you consider the average federal program to be Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense Spending, it does seem better than average (and even then, I definitely think you could do with some cuts to social security, but that's very unlikely to happen)
Given the benefits of reducing the debt, I agree it’s quite valuable. But again, you have to compare the cost. It’s not cheap to reduce the debt by a trillion dollars a year. And is it *so* beneficial that it’s worth cutting a trillion dollars of other programs? Some of those programs, yes. But again, this is one priority among many.
I think most of what the government spends money on is stuff that it shouldn't, thus reducing the debt is superior to most of that.
Convincing Rebublicans that they should do that would be a good first step. Right now their plans are to massively explode the deficit, and the only disagreement is "how high?"
I would argue that money not spent does not just sit there, there is no money to sit, as manifested by the huge amount of debt we are in.
It’s useful to think of cutting debt as just another program to fund. It’s a better program than some, but not the very best program to fund. I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’s better than the average government program, even though it’s surely better than some.
Does it bother you even a little bit that PEPFAR was yoked to a lot of idiocy so it could be used as a distractor to prevent the idiocy from being threatened?
Is it really the right response to such a thing to acquiesce to this trick in order to avoid a potential temporary slowdown in the good aid programs in order to separate them from the bad ones they have been yoked to?
Do the tricksters who do this bear the moral fault or do Elon and Trump bear the moral fault for not respecting the PEPFAR human shields? (And whose fault was it that those PEPFAR human shields had been corralled into such an extremely time-dependently sensitive relationship to USAID that their health was actually threatened by a few days of administrative confusion?)
In what sense was it yoked to idiocy?
If you mean that the same government that did PEPFAR also did lots of idiotic things, trust me, the government that's canceling PEPFAR is also going to do a lot of idiotic things.
If it were me, instead of canceling everything the first week, I would take two months to ask people which things were idiotic, then cancel the idiotic ones (doesn't have to be some kind of sinister hard-to-interpret experts - I could have told them this one myself). I'd even be fine if they erred on the side of canceling too much, as long as it's an error and not the intended outcome!
Not just “the same government”, but the same AGENCY (USAID), which was a slush fund for things like color revolutions and laundering money to politicians’ cronies, AND WHICH TRIED TO block access to information about its own disbursements to Trump’s incoming auditors (the only reason an immediate *suspension* of USAID activity was needed was that mutinous resistance was occurring, a thing Trump had vowed would be immediately nipped in the bud this time around).
Man, you parse this differently from me. To me, color revolutions seem like a CIA/DoD project meant to help the American people by screwing over its enemies. I think it's slightly dangerous to the charity arm to force it to also prop up our country's own selfish interests, but I hardly think it's treason or anything.
I strongly disagree with this statement about "color revolutions". The two I saw closest (in Ukraine) had not much CIA/DoD/xyz in it - esp. not direct and not directly relevant. Oh, one of my friends taught some of the students who started a demonstration on Maidan. Oh, his salary was mostly paid by a western NGO? So what? Your politology-students are angry about their gov. - you let them have a discussion, they ask for advice, you shrug and tell them: One option is to do a protest (fun fact: they knew anyways). - To twist that into "CIA staged 2014" is ... stinky BS. What I see from far - Belorus or Georgia - looks same.
Also, I doubt US-agencies are competent to do relevant stuff there - just far too slow moving. It has been some decades: how much CIA involvement in the protest in East-Germany 1954 (or 1989/90) ? How much DoD in Prague 1968? In Budapest? Even Solidarnosc? Even the Arab spring - oh sure, facebook and phones were invented by the CIA. (Edit: US-agencies was "USAID", slip of mind)
The CIA used to help overthrow socialist governments in Latin America all the time. The point was to win the Cold War. That ultimately did happen, though was it caused by the CIA? Eh, who knows?
Not an expert, but heard it often and sounds likely to me. Monroe-doctrine and all. "Indochina" is obviously also a clear and - not so subtle - example, though outside the Americas the US agencies famously blundered their "help" (similar: Africa). We can assume the US tried as hard as it could in Iraq before and after occupying/liberating it - no one seems to care to tell THAT story, as nothing had come out of it (similar: Iran). - In modern day Europe, they seem to have learned not to mess things up. Sending peace-corps volunteers to Ukraine did not "trigger" any revolution - it's what you do; my country sent me to Russia and Ukraine to help teaching German. Made me a spy or an agent for system-change? Wished it did. ;)
I think that people in Eastern Europe are quite capable of hating Russia even without CIA involvement. It may sound weird to edgy right-wing Americans who take their information about the world from Russia Today, but maybe reading about Holodomor on Wikipedia could be a good starting point.
+1 Well said. Will quote in future.
I don't think of the CIA as actually helping the American people. The DoD also devotes little of its efforts to "defense" of America either.
Some fraction of USAID money (on the order of ~$500 million? So a lot to a normal person; not a lot in the scale of the US government) was going to NGOs that promoted illegal immigration, teaching them the magic words, etc.
Also not everyone is a universalist like you.
Why not shut down *those* programs then?
This is about on par with saying "occasionally cops kill innocent people, so we should have no law enforcement whatsoever"
I wasn't arguing that the DOGE shut it all down and restart method was correct; my comment was aimed just at Scott's, that some fraction of the "charitable arm" is acting against American interests and in ways many Americans might call treasonous.
I think he's taking an overly-rosy view and it doesn't help his case.
USAIDs payments were and are public.
In left wing spaces right now all the news is "PEPFAR gone, millions will die!" In right wing spaces the news is "USAID paid $1.5 million to a Serbian NGO to promote DEI in Serbian workplaces, $70,000 to produce a DEI musical in Ireland, $2.5 million for electric vehicle subsidies in Vietnam, $47,000 for a 'transgender opera' in Columbia, $32,000 for a 'transgender comic book' in Peru, $2 million for transgender clinics and 'LGBT activisin' in Guatemala, etc". It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire. Definitely a point in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down, but the Trump admin seems to be going with a "move fast and break things" strategy.
> in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down
I don't see it. If you care about cutting off patronage funds to your enemies' allies, and don't care about PEPFAR one way or the other, what's the problem? Of course the other side will wail about PEPFAR, because they want both, and it's not politically advantageous to publicize the patronage.
The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans. Even if you don't care about PEPFAR including it in the blast radius give your opponent's ammunition to use against you. I can see the advantages of moving fast and broad, but one of the disadvantages is that it takes media focus away from the patronage funds and towards programs that are more popular and you weren't planning on cutting anyway.
It's also a problem that delays in funding might actually "kill someone" at which point your political opponents now have martyrs to try to beat you over the head with. (It would also be a moral problem to do something that results in people dying when you could have done it in a way where they don't die, but I wanted to focus on the political problems. Especially as we don't know if anyone is likely to die from doing it the fast and broad way.)
> The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans.
And again, why would Trump's base care about this? They already have majority power, they have no reason to care what the minority thinks of them. If they do resort to violence, well... Now you have an opportunity to purge the opposition.
Trumps base may not care, but many Americans will care and their votes count to. The Democrats want the average American to see Trump as causing chaos and disaster, and PEPFAR disruption is a decent weapon for that purpose. The Republican's have a small majority in the House and an alright majority in the Senate because the average American currently prefers Republicans. Giving your opponents ammunition to change the average American's mind about that is always a problem. It may be worth the cost, but it's still a problem.
Some of the chaos has been bad enough that even congressional Republicans criticized it. And I'm sure there's a lot more they're too afraid to say.
People who signed up for "boo trans people" or "boo inflation" aren't going to like it when the checks stop going out. It might be fashionable to hate on government in the abstract, but when confronted with the actual reality of destroying government, you're going to lose support VERY fast.
They were going to accuse you of something like that whatever you did. The details don't seem that relevant. I actually heard a lot more about his DOGE team accessing the Treasury's database than about PEPFAR, so they seem to have assessed (correctly, imo) that their target audience cares more about that than the deaths of "hundreds of thousands of Africans."
I don't think them getting martyrs to use as a weapon helps them all that much. They seem to have made a lot of hay out of the physical appearance of his DOGE team, and I think that's hard to top.
Yes, the enemy will always attack you. That doesn't mean that you should make it easier for them, or that making it easier for them to attack you isn't a problem.
> It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire
Why is that obvious? The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
> In right wing spaces the news is
I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible. Like I remember awhile back someone saying they were spending money on, like, "the sex lives of worms" or something, and it was really a program to figure out how to sterilize some invasive species that was killing crops, or something like that.
Anyway DEI in Serbia seems good.
>The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
I agree: the best explanation for why they are making sure PEPFAR isn't canceled with the rest of them is because they didn't want to cancel PEPFAR.
>I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible.
Everything listed could be a lie but the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff". Even if it's not true it tells us what the Republican focus is on the whole funding freeze.
My understanding is they un-cancelled PEPFAR because a bunch of evangelical Christian groups actually do care and raised a big stink and that's their constituents.
> the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff"
"The Republicans" could mean various things. If it means the rank-and-file ... perhaps it's what they're focusing on, but rank-and-file partisan types tend to, in the first instance, ignore negative news about their side. And given my point about evangelical groups at least some Republicans are pro-PEPFAR. But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
>But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
The Republican's in charge are the ones who are crowing about the "dumb stuff": that list I quoted earlier is from a White House press release, and Republican congress-critters have been repeating the same list of items in speeches for the last few days. What evidence do you have that what the Republicans really wanted to do was cancel PEPFAR? The only evidence you've presented is that PEPFAR funds were frozen along with all other funds in USAID. The fact that PEPFAR has been cleared to keep existing while all the "dumb stuff" is getting cancelled is strong evidence that the "dumb stuff" was their aim and PEPFAR wasn't.
Why not just shut down *those* programs then?
This is about on par with saying "occasionally cops kill innocent people, so we should completely defund all of law enforcement, and maybe hire some of them back in a few months"
>Why not just shut down *those* programs then?
That seems to be what the Trump admin is doing. They froze everything and are now vetting one by one. Programs like PEPFAR have passed and won't be shut down.
Like you said, they froze *everything*. Musk bragged about feeding USAID "into the woodchipper", and they've shut down many other things too, like most science funding, even completely non-objectionable stuff.
At some point, they might try to restart some of that, but shutting something down for weeks causes irreparable damage even if you *don't* lock everyone out and try to destroy the whole organization. When you stop paying people, they're forced to look for new jobs so they can eat and pay rent. When you stop paying for medicine, people die. Food aid rots in the ports (this is something a REPUBLICAN senator criticized Trump for) etc.
Something similar is playing out with the deportations (which I totally support, so I'm not even endorsing the should-be-criminals-only view).
A local reporter actually did some actual reporting - went down to Home Depot where the illegals stand at the edge of the parking lot under what little shade there is, and hope to get picked up for day labor. They all said there had not been much work the past few months; that was what they worry about. Asked if they were worried about being picked up by ICE, they said (in Spanish) no, that they believe ICE would focus on criminals, and since they weren't criminals, they didn't feel they would be in its sights.
Meanwhile, the high schools are letting the kids out to protest, probably permanently; and there's a protest at the Capitol, and much hand-wringing because deportations are such an existential threat to the entire Hispanic population lol.
I'd like them to be more specific: tell us the names of Tren de Aragua members, for instance, that they wish to remain here. Or which Chinese traffickers of indentured slaves.
Are you asking why Trump and Musk yoked PEPFAR to other programs in their cuts? Or why PEPFAR is run out of an agency that does foreign aid?
As for your last question about whose fault it is that PEOFAR recipients are in a time-sensitive relationship with medication, I think it’s the HIV virus’s fault. No human decided that you have to take the medication regularly - everyone would rather have a medication that works long term and allows big gaps between doses.
That’s a strange way to misrepresent what I am saying.
I am NOT SAYING that PEPFAR aid recipients don’t have to take their medication every day!
I am ONLY SAYING that it’s extremely unusual for patients who have to take a medication every day to be vulnerable to a few days of administrative confusion-normally they BOTH have a reserve of spare pills available, AND their doctor or clinic doesn’t suddenly lose access to all drug supplies from all suppliers if some faraway organization has a change in leadership.
This isn’t a few days - it’s supposed to be a 90 day pause, and the officials were told to stop sending supplies. The clinic probably has supplies for a week or two, but if the staff isn’t supposed to come into the clinic that’ll cause problems.
It was fully resolved within a few days. And the USAID is not the only supplier of those medications, they are available everywhere for people who can afford them, and doctors and pharmacies everywhere are used to dealing with insurance changes and administrative changes and other hiccups in such a way that it takes much more than a few days for any patients to “run out” of necessary meds.
Wired says it was not resolved:
https://www.wired.com/story/usaid-researchers-email-access/
Issuing a waiver for a program is a little irrelevant if you lock out and fire everybody running it.
The 'idiocy' as you call it is the entire point of foreign aid.
Foreign aid is not about deadloss charity, as Scott frames it here.
Foreign aid is about soft power projection across impoverished nations around the globe.
It always is and always has been a tool for statecraft, either by being used directly as leverage in negotiations to get favorable deals and considerations from poor nations, or as you say as a mask for more sinister operations that need to move a lot of money in foreign areas without a lot of scrutiny.
We can talk about whether the US should be projecting soft power in these ways, but if we want that discussion we should have it openly. Pretending that PEPFAR being associated with such things is a knock against the program is missing the point; that is what it was created to do in the first place.
Pause, review, validate, prioritize, resume the good stuff, kill the bad stuff
One day you're going to be diabetic, and your insurance company will say they're pausing your insulin for six months to "review, validate, and prioritize", and then six months later they'll send your corpse a nice letter saying "we decided insulin was necessary after all!"
I think probably what they actually did (pause it for one day, realize they made a huge mistake when everyone screamed really loud, restart it) was fine (though I'm not sure! Probably there were real disruptions to a program that 100,000s of lives depend on!). But this only worked because lots of people screamed really loud, and I am proud to be one of those people.
My point was that you do this once when you discover that, in among the wonderful things you’re doing, there is some serious amount of very dubious, wasteful, even damaging activity as well. Given the fungibility of all the resources that are going into this scheme if you don’t pause, etc., then you’ll never have the opportunity to fix anything. It rather looks like DOGE has revealed a specific trigger point with regard to USAID that deserves this kind of once-in-a-lifetime response.
The question remains: Why do you have to just pause everything while you review, when you can't even spend the money the pause presumably saves until the next budget decision? The disruption and uncertainty the pause causes cannot possibly be worth whatever its benefits are, especially if the reviewers are that uninformed about what the stuff they're reviewing is doing.
Because of enemy action, obviously. You can't review hostile bureaucracy in a timely manner while it runs as usual, as it will obfuscate and frustrate you at every turn.
How? Why does pausing the programs magically make the "hostile bureaucracy" unable to stymie your efforts? Are you just going to fire everyone while you review? If so, how do you plan to restart the good programs with nobody to run them. None of this makes sense
I don't think they fired anyone yet?
You put everyone on paid leave, lock them out of their paperwork and computer systems so they won't be able to interfere with the review, then fire those who deserve it, and everybody else resumes work. Also, people will scream with righteous indignation particularly loudly about actually valuable programs (as we witness here), which would also provide useful evidence.
Honestly, a lot of people, probably quite a few over here, will be able to just pay the fees and sort it out with the insurance company later.
I don’t think that pausing for one day and restarting is working yet, because they haven’t unpaused all the other funds that are needed to run this.
A reason why medication should be paid for directly by consumers rather than insurance.
That's a fully generalized counterargument to any institutional or policy change that can potentially cost lives in the short term. Including, say, a hypothetical scheme to replace insurance with whatever policy that ends up lowering the cost of and increasing the availability of insulin in the long run.
What value does pausing have, other than making sure a bunch of babies now have HIV that wouldn't otherwise have had it?
You can still send Musk around to get everybody's SSNs and the new bluechecks can misinterpret publicly available data without pausing everything.
Wow, how did no one ever think of that before?
They might have, but lacked the will to carry it out.
This matches very well with my intuition, which has long maintained when someone utters a sentence of the form of "we should stop funding X and give that money to Y instead," the only correct way to interpret that sentence is "we should stop funding X." They do not care about Y. If they cared about Y, they would just be advocating for Y. The only reason Y is in that sentence at all is to try to make X look worse by comparison.
Also I'm no expert but I don't think government processes (outside of *maybe* two items both in the discretionary budget of a single agency) actually allow you to just take money from one place and move it to another. You can argue for funding Y. You can argue for cutting funding to X. But they are separate arguments which stand or fall independently (which is as it should be).
The analysis about what would happen with this hypothetical unspent money is essentially incorrect.
If the US did not spend that $6 billion dollars, that would not result in the federal government spending that $6 billion elsewhere, because congress hasn't authorized more money for those other programs. The marginal effect would be to reduce the federal deficit by $6 billion dollars. This means that the treasury would borrow $6 billion less that year in order to have enough money to fund what it does spend money on.
This means that investors who buy treasury bonds in order to finance the US' deficit spending will instead invest their $6 billion elsewhere. Who are these investors buying treasury bonds? Some of them are:
- The Federal Reserve. If the Federal Reserve buys $6 billion less in treasury bonds in a year, that means that the money supply is effectively reduced by $6 billion, resulting in a tiny amount less inflation. This means that everyone who holds cash sees the value of their cash increase (or, decrease less) ever-so-slightly.
- Institutional investors like banks, mutual funds, pensions. If these investors buy $6 billion less in treasury bonds, that means they're investing their money elsewhere. Then the marginal change is to increase the amount of money invested in other similar low-risk investments in the US. Think more loans for (and thus lower interest rates for) mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, etc.
- Foreign investors. They will invest their money in something else, possibly not in America.
So, in summary, the actual marginal consequence of not spending that $6 billion dollars is that that $6 billion will be invested elsewhere, in similar low-risk investments such as mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, and foreign government bonds, by investors who would have otherwise invested purchased treasury bonds. There may also be a slight rise in consumption if interest rates on investments are lowered some. You may or may not think that those uses of the money are more valuable that PEPFAR.
I'm assuming that Congress has some idea how big the existing deficit is when they decide whether or not to pass new bills, and that eventually cutting old programs makes them think they have room to pass new ones.
I think they spend more money whenever they can, which is why the deficit has got to the place where it is.
I think this is the right way to think about all government spending. But unless you’re someone who thinks that this alternative is better than almost *any* government spending, it would be surprising if it turned out to be better than PEPFAR.
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Niger is 5.79, its population has increased from 11m to 27m in 25 years and and the country imports 41% of its food.
Thus, while canceling PEPFAR and allowing people to die of AIDS now seems harsh, one could argue that the demographic landscape is already incredibly unsustainable, and all PEPFAR may be doing is kicking the demographic can down the road slightly until extreme civil strife and/or famine absolutely ravage the region, and enormous numbers of people die in various nasty and brutish ways.
It could be argued, that in the long run (generations), that if we feel we must interfere - lowering the fertility, raising the drought resistant food output, and letting AIDS run its course might be a more pragmatic approach.
If Niger has a food supply problem, why not address that, without touching PEPFAR spending? The idea that, because there's a risk of famine, one should hope for a plague to forestall it is pretty wild. There isn't a famine now, so it's like if Scrooge had said, "If they are not going to die, they had better do it."
You've glanced up against a controversial take here :
Implementing agricultural reforms, administering health care, fostering cultural change in family planning - it all sounds a lot like we're taking over Niger?
I didn’t say anything about fostering cultural change in family planning. And we’ve helped many countries, including with technical innovations, without “taking them over.” I don’t even know if Niger is at risk of famine as you say. What I’m saying is that “if a famine is coming let AIDS run its course” simply makes no sense, because the reason to prevent famine is to prevent people from dying horribly and needlessly, which is the same reason to prevent plague.
I tried to address this at my longer post at https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/1886505797502546326?mx=2:
(4) DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE? I think this is false for places like India and South America, which have below replacement fertility rates. It's more true in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are still above replacement, but getting less so - their TFR will be below breakeven in about a generation.
I think in the sub-Saharan African case, there are two opposite effects. First, giving an individual more money causes them to have more kids. Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04). All charity is some combination of helping individuals and making a country richer. Even curing disease is like this, partly because its long term goal is to eliminate the disease (which would be great for the country) and partly because raising a potential worker to age 25 is a big investment, having that worker die at age 25 means you have to write the whole thing off as a loss, and that's as bad for GDP as losing any other big investment. I don't know for sure whether these two effects cancel out, or which one is more important.
If you told me the pro-fertility effect was stronger, I would count that as mark against global health programs, but not an infinitely large one. A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much. If I can prevent that at the cost of pushing back the sub-Saharan African fertility breakeven point six months or five years or whatever, I still think that's a good trade. If you disagree, there are lots of non-sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
>A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much
That seems like a dubious assumption for numerous reasons. But a steelman version would be something like:
>Imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents at least a tenth as much.
You can make arguments about the extreme effectiveness in PEPFAR, even with significant adjustments for differences between populations.
>DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE?
That claim also sneaks in the assumption that life as a poor person is so bad as to be not worth living. Why exactly is more poor people a bad thing, if they live happy lives and only cost a trivial amount of resources? If the population of Africa was 4x what is is now, and PEPFAR cost 0.4% of the federal budget, it would be...still a pretty good deal?
Maybe the "vast swaths of poor people" argument would make sense if foreign aid was on the verge of crippling the American economy, and we just couldn't bear the cost, but come on. PEPFAR is like $10-20 per year per American! The demographic explosion that's going to bankrupt is, unfortunately, well-off geriatrics in Florida collecting social security checks and using Medicare.
A male and female are in a prison and given a set number of calories for only two adults to survive on.
They admit they will always feed themselves first. Should they have children?
Most of the starvation in Africa happens in conflict prone regions where it is difficult to import food. In relatively peaceful areas, people in general are not starving.
It will be very interesting to see how the demographic transition plays out in SSA considering the association in many SSA cultures between fecundity and social status. It would be wildly interesting if the TFR there ever went as low as South Korea's.
"Many studies (n = 48) found that having many children can bring social status and prestige to families and communities."
https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-023-01627-7
"Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04)."
The non-3rd world did not have children in a negative resource environment for decades. It is immoral behavior toward their own children, stop enabling it. If you disagree, there are lots of sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1888708803367170515
Interesting case where the fertility dropped before the nation became 'wealthy'
...and Niger's per-capita GDP is also up 4.4x from 25 years ago. It may be hard for you to believe, but most of Africa is on the same upward economic trajectory as much of Asia in the mid-20th century.
Plus, if you were truly humanitarian-minded and worried about population growth, you'd advocate for additional funding for family planning, not mass death and suffering. "Letting AIDS run its course" is ghoulish and sadistic when it can be treated for a trivial amount of money.
Malthusian arguments have just never been proven true in reality.
Every person who survives is another laborer with the potential to contribute to the economy.
If you randomly kill 10% of the population, you don't suddenly make everyone else 10% richer because now there is more to go around. You at teh very least shrink the economy by 10% because you killed 10% of the workers, and more likely you shrink it by 40% because critical people in a pipeline or supply chain being lost disrupts the entire chain, and people are displaced because their family lost a breadwinner or they are leaving work to go into mourning, or etc.
And this is only exacerbated if instead of killing them immediately, you give them a slow wasting disease that kills them over years during which their family has to care for them and provide for them.
So, no, letting people die to avoid famine does not work, and making people healthy and strong does not create famine. It is just straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly good to save people from death and disease.
Malthusianism was an accurate description of human existence prior to the life of Malthus.
My family is in danger from the national debt. So's yours. 60-80% is a safe debt-to-GDP ratio. The US is at 123%. This article reads like it comes from an alternate universe where governments never have debt crises. Where interest rates don't affect anybody's lives. Where no country has ever played chicken with macroeconomic forces and ditched just a smidge too late.
Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts. If I thought there was any hope of decreasing the debt, I'd . . . well, I'd hope it would go for the worst government programs first, but I'd understand if they wanted to give everything a haircut. Getting rid of the best ones first, not touching lots of the stupid ones, and we all know they'll increase the debt anyway just seems dumb.
Trump is dumb. Also, our families are both in danger from the national debt.
Trump would do the tax cuts whether or not PEPFAR or USAID or whatever is defunded. When/if the debt goes up it would go up by an amount less the amount of whatever is defunded
I should be less flippant. Your ethical calculus ought to account for the fact that government spending influences macroeconomic reality, and that macroeconomics poses real danger to real people. There is an actual, real, not-hyperbolic trade-off between spending money on foreign aid and reducing the danger of economic catastrophe for US citizens by paying down the national debt instead. In the case of PEPFAR, it seems like the trade-off is obviously worth it.
"Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts." Many who are right of center believe that tax rate cuts can improve the debt, (in specific situations and in general; in short term and long term contexts). If you have some specific reason to believe that those crowds are wrong, or that Trump is not amongst them, do tell. Otherwise this seems to be a bit unfair, no?
The Laffer Curve is real, but I don't think even Art Laffer himself is claiming that we're on the right side of it (admittedly, the tax code is complicated so some tax/benefit combos might be).
The only time we balanced the budget in my lifetime happened after Clinton raised taxes in 1993. He got punished for that in the midterms and no president since has dared taken a similar risk.
Taxes are not the only reason it went down, but GOP appeals to the Laffer Curve always ignore this one spectacular exception.
Interest rates were much higher then too, as was interest as a share of GDP.
Trump indeed doesn't care about debts, but taxes are not a solution to it.
https://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/11/15/econ-101-for-the-supercommittee/
I disagree. I believe Trump cares about debts. I even believe that Scott believes Trump cares about debt. I believe it is a rhetorical excess to say otherwise. Of course, there's a long list of priorities, and caring about debt (or changing debt by a marginal dollar) may be differently prioritized for him than for others, but to say he doesn't care (at all) strikes me as disingenuous. I mention it because Scott seems to want to evangelize to "the other side" and rhetorical excess that impugns the motivations of other side strike me as counterproductively divisive. One way for me to have indirectly made that point would be the Laffer curve. There's a nice article written by a Trump senior policy advisor arguing we are on the inefficient side, suggesting that the concept may be resonant with at least parts of Trump's circle. But the Laffer curve is just a tool to have made the point, and a bit beside the point. Incidentally, to clarify - I do believe that for many prospective marginal proposed changes in tax policy that we are on the right side of the Laffer curve (particularly when adjusting for effects after including growth), and that is not a rhetorical excess on my side.
Trump has said "I am the king of debt. I do love debt. I love playing with it"
Which specific proposed marginal changes to tax policy do you think will increase tax revenue?
FWIW Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio is over 250% and they seem to be muddling along okay.
The thing about debt to GDP is the context in which it occurs. If there were a a large country out there with a huge surplus, I'd be more worried. But China, India and pretty much of all of Europe have ratios above 75%.
The only countries with low ratios are economic weaklings like Russia and Afghanistan.
Japan is an interesting case! They get away with it because people there save a ton of money, much of it in the form of government bonds, and international investors use them as a stability hedge. They've also got a ton of deflationary pressure, so interest rates stay really low despite super inflationary monetary policy.
But other countries can't get away with that kind of thing. Even developed nations like Greece, for example. When the 2008 crisis hit, they were running a 129% debt-to-gdp ratio and had a huge unaccountable public sector. They went into a recession, lost a quarter of their GDP over 4 years, unemployment went to 25% and they had to be bailed out 3 times in a row.
So the interesting question is, how much leeway does being the world's reserve currency actually get us? And will we continue to be able to maintain that advantage in the face of BRICS? When the next economic downturn comes, are we going to be like Japan or like Greece?
I just think the chance that we're the next Greece is non-zero, and so it's wrong and bad to treat government spending programs as though they only trade off against other government spending programs. By all accounts, macroeconomic trends are cyclical, which means another 2008 is coming at some point; and every dollar of government deficit spending, no matter which program it funds, trades off very concretely against my personal safety from that coming crisis.
Goldman Sachs predicts a 15% chance of recession in the US this year.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/goldman-sachs-lowers-odds-us-recession-15-after-better-than-expected-jobs-report-2024-10-07/
Polymarket has 23% right now https://polymarket.com/event/us-recession-in-2025
Your family is also in danger from HIV taking over the world, and also from climate change, and also from asteroids. It’s true that the government debt poses *some* danger, but it would be strange to think that *this* danger is more pressing than several hundred thousand lives per year, especially when you are only averting $6 billion a year of the debt.
No, we in the US are not in danger from HIV taking over. Decades ago health authorities scared Americans into believing it would crossover to the majority population who didn't engage in IV drug use or sex between men, but it never did outside of sub-Saharan Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fumento#Heterosexual_AIDS Infectious diseases have more externalities than other health issues, but HIV specifically has limitations which prevent it from becoming endemic in the larger US population.
First of all, people have been making that exact argument for my entire life and probably before that, close to a half century at this point. No one has ever done anything to address the 'problem, and no crisis has ever emerged. It's a bunk argument that doesn't understand how the finances of a sovereign nation with fiat currency works, especially not if that nation is the US with all its unique advantages and relationships.
Second, as Scott says in the article - if what you cared about is the national debt, you'd be arguing to cut huge amounts in military spending or etc., not chiming in when someone says foreign aid is good.
Indeed, we should be cutting huge amounts of military spending, along with our gerontocratic welfare state.
We should cut huge amounts of military spending. I'm chiming in because I think Scott's ethical calculus should account for the risk of the US not being uniquely invincible to macroeconomic forces, as you both seem to think it is. 2008 seemed to showcase a distinct lack of US macroeconomic invincibility, to my memory.
And Clinton worked really hard to address the problem of the national debt. It was one of the signature achievements of his presidency. Look it up. It's not something Rush Limbaugh invented to scare you.
"I am happy to “concede” that if you face a choice between saving a stranger and saving your brother, save your brother! Or your cousin, or your great-uncle, or your seven-times-great-nephew-twice-removed. I’ll “concede” all of this, immediately, because it’s all fake; none of your relatives were ever in any danger. The only point of this whole style of philosophical discussion is so that you can sound wise as you say “Ah, but is not saving your brother more important than saving a complete stranger?” then doom five million complete strangers to death for basically no benefit while your brother continues to be a successful real estate agent in Des Moines."
This a million times over. Most debates with the "intellectual" right could be entirely dismissed by some version of this paragraph.
Right. But most people are not effective altruists. Most people are selfish. They care about their brother in Des Moines (assuming he didn't beat them up growing up or marry a much hotter spouse) but caring about people halfway across the world or shrimp is really much more something you do when you've got enough to spread around.
What if your brother has a passport and a libido? What if viruses are contagious? PEPFAR tamps down a global pandemic, which benefits everyone on the globe. Also, since what has happened here is political smoke and mirrors and zero actual change to the foreign aid budget (since Rubio is taking over their budget and absorbing it into State Department) we have near zero information about what Rubio will decide to do with PEPFAR in 90 days. Since PEPFAR buys the political support of African nations, and since Rubio and the administration remain interested in the deployment of power and influence internationally, my guess is that after missing three months worth of doses, little if anything about PEPFAR will change. The USAID “closure” is bureaucratic reorganization not shrinkage.
I'm saying why few people care, not why I don't. Your argument is excellent on the actual merits. I just think most people are too stupid or self-absorbed to care. We just got a president elected who promised to control inflation with tariffs.
A million times not this. How can anyone possibly on the same page advance that Singer point about the drowning child, and condemn another hypothetical as "all fake"? Have you ever seen a child drowning in a river, and do you realistically ever expect to? Whereas this is really about spending money on PEPFAR vs spending money on something else, and I can easily see myself spending money on life saving medical treatment for my children. So it turns out not to be all fake at all.
I'm pro PEPFAR, I donate monthly to an African children facing charity, but good causes are not helped by bad logic
Scott is a doctor, and his other lifesaving credentials are well-established. I know I've personally physically intervened to save a few lives (and many other, more minor acts of goodness towards strangers).
None of them were literally drowning children, but I don't take that to be your point.
None of that detracts from my point that there's a proximity element to moral obligations whether that's genetic or physical or (in the medical case) physical plus professional. We can argue that there shouldn't be, and about whether this principle justifies ending pepfar (it doesn't). My objection is purely and simply to shouty moral philosophers like Singer inserting fallacious analogies into the argument and getting away with it.
He's a psychiatrist, not an ER surgeon.
Are there any people who would be buying life-saving medication for their children if it weren’t for the dastardly use of a tiny fraction of the federal budget to save lives in Africa?
I could imagine there are people who would be buying life saving medication if they didn’t have to pay for social security, or for the military, but the amount they are paying for PEOFAR isn’t realistically affecting this.
>and I can easily see myself spending money on life saving medical treatment for my children.
By 'can see' you mean 'hypothetically'.
That was the whole point. The things you might imagine spending the money on instead are hypothetical. The people dying in Africa are not.
Also, good luck paying for your kids lifesaving medical care with the $17 that would be your share of this program.
I am that winner of life's lottery, a rich Englishman, so my share of PEPFAR is £0.00. But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok because what difference can it make to Walmarts bottom line?
As to your "hypothetical" point my children might not be ill yet but there's no guarantee they won't be, so perhaps I am building a contingency fund. Secondly I and most people would if necessary sell my house to save a child. As you don't seem to buy the proximity argument, have you already done that for the sake of these African children?
You're literally making Scott's point for him in answer to the key paragraph. Americans have made the reasonable decision, through their reps, to spend something like 0.3% of the budget of the richest nation in history to save the lives of 100s and 100s of thousands of poor people, mostly children, in destitute countries. Your dumb philosophical intellectual games and feeling of superiority are just you masturbating to your small mind in the corner. And Trump doesn't get to undo that decision by himself. He's not king.
So how does that work? President George W Bush initiating the scheme was a reasonable decision made by the American people via their reps, but President Donald Trump putting it on hold is something completely different? Was Bush king to a greater extent than Trump?
Uh yeah USAID exists through legislation
>But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok
Moving goalposts generally means you've conceded that your first argument was wrong.
We were talking about saving a foreign life vs saving your child's life, and whether this argument falls to Matt's objection about hypothetical vs. real-life harm.
If you agree that your objection to Matt's point was invalid for the reasons I gave, and instead want to start arguing that all taxation is theft so all government programs are immoral, then we can do that but I'm literally just going to link you to Scott's Non-Libertarian FAQ.
Both rude,and illogical. I wasn't making a new point, I was responding to your claim that there is not very much money at stake.
Which raises another issue. I donate, completely outside the tax system, to charities which benefit African children. You can claim not to believe that, but then we can have a bet about it under which the loser makes a large donation to a charity which benefits African children. I suspect that you would find that bet unappealing. Being an arse on the internet is not a substitute for putting your hand in your own pocket.
I think "taxation for foreign aid is theft" is a much more defensible claim than "all taxation is theft". With taxation for something like national defence, there's a plausible reason why all citizens have a moral duty to pay -- namely, that all who choose to live in a territory are choosing to benefit from their defence. Whereas if a program is used exclusively by Africans, then there isn't a clear reason why the obligation to pay for it should fall on people living in the US.
I feel like this accounting relies on much more paternalism than we should be comfortable in a democracy, and certainly much more than the type of libertarian who thinks any taxation is theft should accept from their government.
My formation is that in a democracy, the government largely does things that the citizens want it to do. And we judge what the government does by how much it satisfies the citizen's preferences about what it should do, rather than by some set of proxy measures of who it helps and how. In that sense, a preference to help citizen and a preference to help non-citizen are not qualitatively different from each other, they're just preferences to trade off with everything else.
I think that your formation relies on a sense that how it actually works is government takes you money and then uses it to care for you. This is more paternalistic because it implies that you are not a party to deciding how the government operates or what you it to do - the government succeeds if it uses your money to benefit you materially, and fails if it uses your money in ways that don't benefit you. To me this removes the role of democracy and citizen's preferences.
TBH, I immediately start by questioning the estimates of "lives saved" by any of these programs, or foreign aid (occurring private efforts) generally. The sources of the data are exactly the same NGOs and foreign governments who are receiving the stream of spending and goods. In areas where corruption is a way of life and no one can really audit the books.
So it works out to
1. NGO with a stake in the whole system does a small study in one area, reports some number that may or may not generalize (spoiler: it never does) about lives saved per dollar spent.
2. More NGOs, aid organizations, etc multiply that estimate by the top line spending number, not counting the 90+% "overhead" (ie bribes, kickbacks, normal overhead, political donations (I repeat myself)) and come up with BIG-NUMBER of lives saved, which is why no one can ever think of doing anything about these funding streams, including looking into them too deeply, because "think of the children".
Forgive me for being cynical, but all the incentives and evidence I've seen points to this being another Washington Monument strategy.
Such numbers (“25 million lives saved!”) — which this author cites without an ounce of skepticism — are no doubt cooked up in the same manner a methhead concocts his drug of choice. How in the world would such an organization ascertain this figure in the first place? HIV doesn’t always lead to AIDS, and even AIDS does not exactly kill one instantly… Anti-virals, moreover, don’t cure anyone of HIV or AIDS last I checked. Is this organization simply administering anti-viral drugs to symptomless HIV-positive Africans and then patting themselves on the back for saving black lives? I wouldn’t be surprised. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if in reality this much vaunted program doesn’t take more African lives than it saves. A disturbing thought, certainly, but there’s no end to the disturbing realities one can find these days if one goes looking with open eyes.
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
In case you're conservative and don't trust the liberal media, here's George W Bush saying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0ymilJYb0
And here's FOX News saying it: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-renewing-bush-era-program-africa-help-fend-off-russia-china-boost-national-security
And the Washington Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/14/we-must-save-pepfar-to-protect-most-vulnerable-fro/
And the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/counting-the-lives-an-aids-foreign-policy-helps-save-849a3b87
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
A quick look at the ungated pieces (FOX and wapo, both opinion pieces) reveals that they make assertive statements without actually citing primary sources. Credibility: 0. Those sources that are cited are exactly the same groups that have large, even existential incentives to...round up...their numbers. I'm not accusing anyone of actual malfeasance, just "too good to check" + it being extremely hard to actually get accurate data.
Beyond that--if this is such a great program, the pharmaceutical companies can make a really easy PR win by voluntarily continuing it. It's not like USAID actually was doing the actual production or administration of the drugs--they just provided money and facilitation, while siphoning off overhead.
If a hospital were considering whether to lay off an expensive surgeon, and someone pointed out that the surgeon was scheduled to perform a life-saving operation on a child tomorrow, it would be ridiculous and evil of the hospital board to say "well, it's just one afternoon of work, if saving the kid's life is so essential and the operation is such a good bet then if the surgeon has a heart he'll do it for free even after we fire him".
Your apparent notion that we have good data coming from large parts of Africa on overall mortality let alone cause of death is amusing but depressing. Are you concerned with the facts of the matter — ie in establishing what we can know that we know — or with propaganda and/or the suppression of your own intellectual curiosity in favor of some preexisting emotional attachment? I cite a pandemic-era NYT article as evidence of the poor state of affairs in regards to mortality data collection from Africa: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html
By the way, apart from the sheer problem of “counting the dead” throughout large and remote swathes of Africa, there are significant issues with determining causes of death, especially in connection to AIDS/HIV, which, might I remind you, does not itself cause death but can only be associated with death; that is, to put it another way, HIV/AIDS does not result in a universal set of mortality-causing symptoms that allows one to say unequivocally that it was the primary causeof death. See this paper for an overciew of the variety of causes of death associated with AIDS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7590652/#:~:text=In%20particular%2C%20malignancy%2Drelated%20death,2)
Given the considerable uncertainty surrounding these issues, and the immense technical difficulties involved with determining the facts of the matter in a way that would satisfy even a slightly conscientious observer, the mere hour of research you recommend hardly seems sufficient. Did you yourself spend more than an hour or were the George W. Bush speeches and newspaper articles you cited enough to slay all doubt?
>not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it
"*Even* Republicans have never denied that the Republican Party saved millions of lives" is a statement that implies a very strange world-model. Did you mean "not even Democrats have ever tried to deny it"?
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
In case you're conservative and don't trust the liberal media, here's George W Bush saying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0ymilJYb0
And here's FOX News saying it: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-renewing-bush-era-program-africa-help-fend-off-russia-china-boost-national-security
And the Washington Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/14/we-must-save-pepfar-to-protect-most-vulnerable-fro/
And the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/counting-the-lives-an-aids-foreign-policy-helps-save-849a3b87
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
Trump's own NIH head nominee (Jay Bhattacharya) also co-wrote a study back in the day confirming it saved 740,000 from 2004-08: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/05/740000-lives-saved-study-documents-benefits-of-aids-relief-program.html
This was a program entirely done by George W Bush. For years, liberals were trying to figure out ways to say it was ineffective. But reality won out and the conservatives were right - this was a highly effective program.
It wasn't entirely Bush. 2006 was still under Bush when it switched to generic drugs, increasing efficiency 10x, and effectiveness much more. But if Bush wanted to be effective, he would have done so from the start, rather than waiting to be embarrassed by Clinton and WHO using them.
Someone who values foreigners' lives and donates to charity could believe that governments shouldn't be spending public funds on non-nationals
They could, but in practice I have yet to meet such a person IRL.
In general, it turns out that wanting to help people and wanting the democratic government that you elect and pay for to help people is hugely correlated.
I understand that many people have no qualms about spending other people's money on their preferred projects. I just don't think the government should be empowered to take their citizens' money to use on causes that don't explicitly benefit their respective nationals no matter how many vote to do it (except maybe if it's 100% of the voters)
First of all, why should that be a principle? We're in a democracy, the principle is 'the government does things that the citizens want it to do'. I can see a principled position for 'all taxation is theft, you can't take money from anyone for anything they don't want.' But 'you can't take money from people for things they do want if those things help foreigners only'? Why?
Second, what do you mean by 'explicitly benefits'? By a strict enough definitions, lots of domestic programs don't fit that description. By a nuanced definition, all foreign aid including PEPFAR meets that description.
Of course, any right wing policies that voters want is "populism" and "antidemocratic" and "against norms" etc etc etc and any left wing policies are just democracy
>for anything they don't want
You thought I wouldn't notice you sneaking that part in there?
Anyways, I'll copy paste something I wrote in another comment:
I'm not a libertarian, but one thing I agree with them on is that it should not just be assumed that we should be okay with governments taking our money. This is the root of why many libertarians believe that taxation is theft - they question why we should be okay with governments taking our money, and reject the validity of the justifications given. The last bit is where I part from libertarians, at least the tax=theft kind
I recognize there are some things beneficial to members of our society that requires us to be compelled to collectively pay for them. Given that this is how I and similarly thinking people justify taxes, it is hopefully clearer to you why we are far more skeptical of the spending of public funds on foreigners - the funds are compelled from us in the name of our own benefit, not in the name of benefitting others some place else - and why spending public money on things like AIDS treatments for Africans looks to us like our money is being stolen to pay for your preferred charities
I am such a person, but since this isn't IRL I guess your statement hasn't been refuted. Perhaps if we ever attend the same meetup it will be!
Utilitarian logic just doesn't work. That's why SBF is in prison. It's wrong to take action to kill anyone foreigners or not, with only very unusual exceptions. It doesn't matter whether killing someone increases net utility. Similarly on taxes, they are involuntary. Arguments that can be applied to voluntary charities don't apply to taxes, because taxes are a violation of property rights. Any use of taxes should be decided based on democratic decision or an overriding emergency necessity. These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
I think this is a reasonable and consistent position, and it's not really the one I'm arguing against (it sounds like you think taxes to help foreigners and taxes to help countrymen are about equally bad).
I discuss this in a little more detail, and probably disagree with you a bit more, in my Point 1 near the end of https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/1886505797502546326?mx=2
Im banned on X, sorry. For "inauthentic behavior".
congrats, I suggest shopping the fediverse via ban lists
Just add "cancel" to the URL, like this:
https://xcancel.com/slatestarcodex/status/1886505797502546326?mx=2
I think of taxes as only being justified to help the population being taxed. And then, only when taxation is the only means of providing that help.
Quoting from your tweet:
"it's true that government charity is very inefficient, but government non-charity is also very inefficient"
There is good reason to think it's less efficient. It's Milton Friedman's distinction between buying your own lunch vs buying someone else's lunch vs buying someone else's lunch with someone else's money.
This is a very good post. I think you should post it here on Substack for posterity/sharability.
> These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
How is it not democratic? The people elected their congresspeople, collectively delegating decision-making authority to them, and those congresspeople then collectively agreed to fund PEPFAR in 2003, and then did so again in 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024.
You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
When I say democratically I mean whatever the current political process is. Thats for two reasons: (1) You can't clearly define democracy because it means too many different things in different countries, and even different things to different people in thr same country and (2) the only reason I care about democracy with regards to taxes that it makes revolt less likely, so the specific form doesnt matter. Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy. Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so. In the past democracy was robber barons telling people what to do in the newspaper. Then we had the agency media complex, where the agencies tell people through the media what to vote for. Now it's social media algorithms.
The FDR agency based post ww2 era of democracy is over. PEPFAR is a relic of a different time.
> You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
No. You choose who your representative is; you have to delegate your votes to Congress for all the myriad reasons the founding fathers opposed direct democracy. They also opposed a tyrannical executive too, incidentally. Alas.
> Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy.
The "deep state" is a horrifically bad mind-killing heuristic. Maybe Bush 2 actually thought, "Hey, things in Africa are really bad, I want to do something that can help Africans," spoke to Condeleezza Rice about the issue, who explained the biggest issue facing Africa was AIDS, and thus helped pass a bill which helped with AIDS, which became really successful? Like he wrote in his memoirs? If anything, a serious reading suggests that he was annoyed with "the deep state," since he repeatedly pushed for a better process over what was then being done, eventually giving highly specific orders about a focused, specific program with actionable goals and real measuring of the outcomes, rather than just bloating up the budget for bureaucrats.
Instead of, I don't know, the Deep State firing its mind control rays at him and Congress to convince them that saving babies from AIDS was good. There's an anecdote about the Nazis giving the Japanese a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Japanese going, "wow, these guys seem pretty badass, can we ally with them instead?" and that's me with all these imagined conspiracies. The world seems to be going pretty well, all in all - if the source of this isn't markets, rule of law, and democracy, but instead a shadowy cabal of ubermensch secretly pulling all the levers of power, then I'll have to reevaluate all my political opinions!
> Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so.
So, you think that Congress would not pass a renewal of PEPFAR if it was put up to a vote in 2029? You think that they would vote for a bill to kill it if it were put to a vote now, in 2025? I can tell you that I have written to my Congresspeople to maintain PEPFAR, both now and in 2023 when there was a kerfuffle about the Mexico City policy. I actually even posted about it here and other places, to encourage others to do so as well. I certainly hope my Congresspeople would not vote for such a thing, and I would commit to permanently voting against them, and whoever they endorse, in both primaries and generals, if they did so.
But, to be clear, they haven't done so. All you guys constantly refer back to "oh, actually, this is just the will of the people." Okay. Then get Congress to vote to kill babies with AIDS, rather than having the President unilaterally do it.
I'll try to explain this again more clearly.
You don't delegate your vote to congress. When you vote, you're voting for a representative. That representative gets the same amount of power no matter how many votes they got. 51%? 90%? Doesn't matter. If instead it was a delegation, then the amount of power the representative would have would depend on the share of votes.
I don't really care whether it's called a deep state. Personally Id prefer to call our previous system agentic democracy, because of the importance state agencies played.
Frankly I don't take memoirs seriously and you shouldn't either. The writer has a huge incentive to assign themselves more agency than the agencies gave them. And to make themselves look better.
What drugs are you smoking?!? Mind control rays? Zionist Aids babies? Japanese Nazis?!? Where did you get the idea I believe in those things? Reign in your imagination a bit please, the world is not that exciting. Conspiracies are rather dull.
Okay, so you just can't read. I guess I should have figured you were thinking at a significantly lower cognitive level when you first proposed that the Deep State passed PEPFAR. My mistake.
Let me put it in simple words for you:
PEPFAR is good.
Killing PEPFAR is bad. It would cause a bunch of people to die of AIDS.
Killing PEPFAR is extra bad if you break the law to do it, since following the law is a useful bright line to keep society working.
Killing PEPFAR quickly, rather than slowly, is extra bad because nobody can do anything to help the people PEPFAR helped. For example, babies don't get HIV meds to keep them from getting AIDS.
Therefore, Trump is an extremely evil person for this, specific, act. If the Christian God is real, he will burn in hell for this (Matthew 25:41-46). I don't care about your stupid ideas about democracy or the deep state.
That clear enough?
No one is preventing you from using your own time and money towards the issues you care about. Taxes are taken by force, so not everyone who pays taxes is going to agree about how those funds should be used. Personally, I don't believe taxes should be used for anything except public security because the use of force can only be justified by preventing a worse use of force.
I understand you have deeply held Christian beliefs about Hell, but many people don't believe in Hell even many Christians. You can't use your belief in Hell to justify how tax funds are used.
And then they elected Trump.
Yes, they also elected a Republican Congress. It would be a bitter pill to swallow if the Republican Congress decided to kill PEPFAR, but that is not what is actually happening.
They elected a Republican congress with the expectation that they would serve Trump. If they could elect a clone of Trump to occupy every one of those seats, they would have.
Maybe I'm a big old democracy cuck idiot, but I don't think this is actually true.
...Everyone always underestimates the hold that he has on people. You don't get people calling you the second coming of Jesus without some level of unholy charisma.
Is it so hard to believe that this is what the people want? That doesn't necessarily justify their actions, of course. Maybe the majority is actually just evil from your point of view. But what the hell are you going to do about it?
The simplest answer of course is likely to be the correct one, and that is that some people have negative value for the lives of foreigners. A program that saves one such life is worse than any fraction of a broadband boondoggle.
That also explains the continued support of the rolling genocide in Palestine.
It's not clear that PEPFAR aid has actually restarted. They're claiming it has, but reports are that clinics are still turning people away https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/health/trump-usaid-pepfar.html
Admirable, but it seems clear to me that the operational plan is cutting programs wherever there won’t be too much resistance in order to “shrink the government” which in practice means tax cuts. That’s the only consideration.
If they cared about effectiveness, they’d talk about that instead of calling USAID an evil ball of worms.
I'm always shocked on these types of articles at how many of the top-level comments argue that giving even the tiniest amount to life-saving charities is bad. Is this really a majority view or do the few people who think this just feel really compelled to comment a lot?
The discussion is (mostly) not about whether giving money to charities is bad. It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do. As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
> It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do.
That may be your view, but it's a small fraction of the complaints in this comment section.
> As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
If you read the comments on any of the articles from this blog on giving to charity, you'll see that's not true. I don't think any of the other articles on charity involved government spending, but they garner just as many complaints. Even this article has a few people arguing that Africans shouldn't be protected from AIDS.
It's also my complaint. And I'm in this comment section!
I'd applaud you if you donated your money to your preferred charity. I do not applaud people using the power of the state to spend other people's money on their preferred charity
Whatever extreme view is expressed in the comments is unlikely to be the majority one, because people with non-extreme views don't feel compelled to comment. The recent survey demonstrated that.
I do think there is a strong effect where the people with “extreme” opinions are more likely to comment. On the other hand, last November was a pretty comprehensive measurement of the revealed preference of the American people.
This is a regular occurrence in the comments section, yes. You can browse the comments section of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian to see like 50 people arguing it's good and right to care about British people, and close to zero disputing the ratio of effectiveness.
I personally donate to charities dedicating to the third world (specifically sub-Saharan Africa tends to be the focus). But I oppose any tax dollars being spent that way.
I am wearing of hearing the "moral" arguments I hear from many people. My legal-immigrant wife was cheated by USCIS. My congresswomen failed her, as did the rest of the "do-gooders" now coming out in opposition to deportations. When I raise the issue I have been called "selfish", "racist" (?), and many other things. My wife gets no sympathy (her "value" is "literally zero" to many even if not to you), and gets caught up in the inverse of Stalin's alleged "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." And if you never cared about the one person, why should I trust that you actually care about the many? If my wife has zero value to you, why should I care about the people you want to help?
If people didn't let these systems rot--if legal immigrants were cared for, and foreign aid programs regularly reviewed for their value--we would not get to the Trump stage. Don't expect your house to remain standing if you can't do needed repairs. I have seen how the State department functions; it is an embarrassment, as is the mentioned USCIS.
I am very angry about all of this.
I have literally never met a person who thinks that illegal immigrants should get rights and be allowed to stay, who doesn't also think the legal immigration system should be reformed and expanded to be less punitive and awful.
It kinda sounds like you are setting these two things in opposition to each other in the way you frame the question, and I'm not surprised if people react negatively to that and tell you you're doing it wrong. I'm betting if you instead framed it as 'everything the US does about immigration is bad, even legal immigrants get screwed over and we need to fix the whole system' then you would not get pushback.
Has anyone estimated the number of HIV/AIDS cases outside of Africa that PEPFAR prevented by reducing the transmission of HIV in Africa? (Per year, or over the ~20 years of the program, or even projected to 2050).
Public health is/was concerned with ending transmission chains as well as saving individuals. The 26 million number is bound to be an undercount of the total lives saved.
Should we also worry that the more people get infected with AIDS, the higher the probability of airborne super-AIDS or something?
(And if so do we want to be treating AIDS patients or letting them die quicker?)
My dad works on HIV/AIDS tracking and prevention in the US, and a big part of the reason it's impossible to eradicate it in the US population is because of people from countries with high rates coming here not knowing they are infected. It's definitely true that fighting diseases like this globally is an effective way to fight it at home.
It sounds like we could avoid it by not letting such people in.
We could end HIV entirely just by killing everyone on the planet.
Observations like this are not serious unless they include an argument that it would be worth the costs.
We wouldn't be able to accomplish any other objectives of ours if we killed everyone on the planet. Whereas we can do plenty while not letting such people in.
As charitable and fun as ever, aren't you?
People from countries with extremely high HIV rates have on average extremely low economic value (not to be confused with moral value, which we're assuming to be equal across all humanity, but broadly irrelevant to governments). The cost of not admitting them is, as such, roughly zero.
I'm sure that you will point out and find amusing that such a policy would probably have excluded Elon Musk, though I'm not sure how high the rate was at the time he fled.
Arguments can be made for providing aid without a commensurate allowance of admittance.
Does something about PEPFAR's work require that it be done by the government? This argument makes a lot more sense if the situation is "either the US government funds this or it can't get done" rather than "this could run with private donations, but it's a government project because individual donors are bad at decisions so their money needs to be taxed away for this."
Especially since this is basically just a giveaway to big pharma plus some coordination with existing groups actually administering the doses. If it's such an unambiguous win, the pharma companies could pick it back up for a massive PR win at very little overall cost.
I disagree and I wrote a post about it: https://bucktalk.substack.com/p/contra-scott-alexander-on-money-is
Framing this as killing people seems misleading. It’s like analysing any tax reform through of the lens of who is “winning” and “losing”, rather than, what makes policy sense. The ultimate status quo is nothing, so it does seem reasonable to seek a policy justification for spending the money, rather than needing a justification to cut it.
Under US law, there is no actual authority for Trump to engage in the spending freeze. The money for PEPFAR was lawfully appropriated by Congress, and under the Impoundment Act of 1974, the only way he can rescind spending is by telling Congress why, on the same day he does so. Thus, his decision to cut the funding is itself illegal. Illegally preventing someone from receiving medical attention is ~killing - if you purposefully blocked an EMT from getting a patient into the hospital and receiving life-saving medical care, that would be prosecuted as murder here in Texas (as you knowingly and intentionally caused their death). In this case I think it would be closer to manslaughter, as Trump merely recklessly caused the death.
I was more making a philosophical comment, that a person is not positively obligated to spend any of their money to save people outside of their circle of concern, or you end up at infinite charity. Agree once you have extended care to someone, they are in that circle. But there seems a meaningful distinction between stopping money allocated to some spending program (where the death caused is remote) and say switching off someone’s life support (where it is direct). Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
> Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
Sure. And PEPFAR is good, that's why it has been passed by Congress five times, in 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024. There are, I'm sure, lots of foreign aid programs that turned out not to be worth the money, and presumably Congress quietly stopped funding them.
Ok then. My objection is just framing. Seems like a rhetorical trick to benefit from most people’s assumption that the current status quo is correct, rather than justifying the position from first principles. Like when people say tax cuts disproportionately favor the wealthy, instead of thinking about whether the level of tax is optimal or sensible.
Do you have the specific citation, because my guess is that the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” gives lots of implementation latitude to the President, such that he is not required to spend a single dime in any particular two-week period if he decides on a funding freeze to audit the program.
I agree that this is against the spirit of the law, but congress should stop giving the president so much authority over spending if they want the president to have less authority over spending.
The Impoundment Act of 1974 specifies:
>"deferral of budget authority" includes—
>(A) withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority (whether by establishing reserves or otherwise) provided for projects or activities; or
>(B) any other type of Executive action or inaction which effectively precludes the obligation or expenditure of budget authority, including authority to obligate by contract in advance of appropriations as specifically authorized by law
>[...]
> Whenever the President, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the head of any department or agency of the United States, or any officer or employee of the United States proposes to defer any budget authority provided for a specific purpose or project, the President shall transmit to the House of Representatives and the Senate a special message specifying [a bunch of shit]
The 90 day pause is very clearly a "deferral of budgetary authority." One might imagine that in the normal day-to-day of governance, some days there's just no money spent on a particular program, but I don't think any reasonable person could think this isn't "withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority".
Here's the text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/7130/text
I know about the anti-deficiency act. That particular statute has been cited quite a bit recently. What I am interested in is the specific text of the appropriation made by congress for the PEPFAR program. I’m not an expert, but the citations I found cite back to 22 U.S.C. 2151b-2, which states in part:
“(1) In general
Consistent with section 2151b(c) of this title, the President is authorized to furnish assistance, on such terms and conditions as the President may determine, for HIV/AIDS”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/2151b-2
If the terms and conditions the president determines are, “everyone needs to come back to the US now while we figure the budget out,” it’s not clear that any budgetary authority has been deferred, because the authority was given within the appropriation for the president to determine the terms and conditions under which to furnish assistance.
>funding freeze to audit the program
I am not a professional auditor, but it seems like stopping a program to audit it is pretty overkill and probably detrimental to being able to execute a thorough audit of all the moving parts. Also, Trump isn't bringing in auditors, he's letting Elon Musk and his DOGE team (that has no audit related qualifications) dig through payment histories and concoct lies saying that the spending was secret and funneled to partisan left wing orgs like... Politico for their political tracking subscription service. It's glaringly obvious this is illegal, breaks precedent, and is just Trump being corrupt by handing someone sensitive government access to lie on his behalf.
So imagine a world where you find a young deer next to its dead mother, take it into your house and hand feed it for 5 years, and then are considering whether or not to release it into the wild again.
If you had ignored it in the first place, maybe it would have died, or maybe it would have learned to fend for itself and been ok. But at this point it is dependent on you and doesn't know howto survive without you, and will definitely die if you cut off that support now.
If you created a framework that people need to live, and they accepted that framework instead of building their own alternatives based on assurances from you that it would stay in place and be stable to rely on in the future, then yeah it's reasonable to say you are killing them if you suddenly shut it down without warning.
Analogy is inapt. The deer can’t now learn to fend for itself. But a human - any human - can learn to obtain anything that money could have bought them. So many more things can intervene before withdrawing money directly causes death. Not so in the deer case, or for turning off life support.
I'm sure *normal* people don't hate African children enough to value their lives at 0.
But if anyone did value African lives at 0, the billionaire throwing Sieg Heils and rooting for the far right in Germany seems the most likely candidate, no?
I'm sure normal people don't explicitly value African children at zero, but if you examine the donations they give, you'll find that they by revealed preference value the lives of African children at zero.
Might actually be less than 0 for some people. The more of them there are, the more of them will eventually come here, and if they do they'll join the other side in the current culture war.
He was actually born in Africa.
...In apartheid South Africa.
"Realistically I think it’s even worse than this, because in practice the government levies as many taxes as it feels like levying, spends as much money as it feels like spending, and turns the difference into deficit, so it’s not obvious that canceling PEPFAR gives any more money to American programs. I’m writing this assuming that we want to keep the deficit fixed, which is a laughably fake assumption for the real government."
This footnote is actually at the heart of the issue. Congress spends however much money it decides to spend, on whatever it decides to spend it on, and sets taxes wherever it wants to (paying the difference with debt). The only way to get more money back to people or to redirect it to other programs (well, in a normal world, where Congress actually does things, instead of sitting around letting the president trample all over the Constitution) is to convince them to vote to spend less or spend money on different things. Same thing with e.g. a small or narrow tax cut; any shortfall is made up with a different tax or with debt (which becomes tomorrow's taxes).
I think this is looking too deeply into the assumptions MAGA types are making – they simply don't care about children in Africa, and would rather save $6 billion in taxes. They don't want that money in the hands of the government at all.
My initial position was that we should find a way to transfer PEPFAR to private hands. This would be done in a way as to not "pause" the program(which obviously would cost lives). I still think this would be an ideal solution, since this would preserve the program while cutting government spending.
Now, I think PEPFAR is just to good and cheap of a program ,and so I don't really care where the money comes from. There are better places to cut money from, anyone serious about cutting government spending should not have cutting PEPFAR as a priority.
NOTE: When talking to right-wingers, don't forget to point that the number of children with HIV in Africa is decreasing. It is a worry among us Chuds that programs like PEPFAR are just subsidizing reckless behaviour by Africans, that is, we worry that the people will just start having more HIV babies knowing that they will survive thanks to meds. The data shows that there isn't any HIV baby boom, to the contrary, babies with HIV will be thing of the past soon.
> Valuing a foreigner at less than 1/100th of an American would put them somewhere between a cow and a chicken, which if nothing else seems like an awkward thing to have to bring up at UN meetings.
Most Americans aren't vegan, so a revealed preference argument for showing that they value foreigners less than 1/100th of an American would also show that they value animals much much less than 1/100th of an American.
...That's assuming that they value Africans more than livestock.