[ExI] Donald Trump

[John Clark]

On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 1:10 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:



>  ​>
>> ​>​
>> … Under Democrat Bill Clinton the government ran a SURPLUS in 1998,
>> 1999, 2000 and 2001.  Republican George Bush was in power in 2002 and the
>> government ran a deficit that year and has been running a deficit every
>> year since. Ronald Reagan never managed to balance the budget for even one
>> year, but Clinton did it for 4.  John K Clark
>
>
> ​>
> Heh.  John do you recall how that was done?  It was done by “welfare
> reform.”  The US removed all those people from the welfare rolls, which
> resulted in lower federal expenditures and a balanced budget.  Hooray, a
> miracle it was! What really happened is that the huge and growing welfare
> masses were assigned a disability of some sort.
>

​But if that's the explanation somebody must​ be paying for all those
disability payments, if it wasn't the government it must have been private
companies. If so it sure didn't seem to have cramped their style much
because the 8 Clinton years were the most prosperous in the country's
history. And if that's the explanation what changed as soon as Bush became
president?

Well OK he did start 2 wars, one of which was against the wrong country,
and he did preside over the worst economic catastrophe since the Great
Depression of 1929, but other than that what changed?


> ​> ​
> in 2000, candidate Al Gore was able to give us a date for Social Security
> going bust: 2035
>
> Predicting is hard, especially the future
​,​

​so ​
I have very little confidence
​in a prediction of
what the economy will be like in 2035. We do know that in 2014
​
Social Security
​
took in $769 billion and paid out $714 billion
​
and the surplus
​
$55 billion
​went
 into
​a​
 $2.729 trillion
​ trust fund to cover possible future shortfalls. Some projections say that
starting about 2020
Social Security
​ will pay out more money than it takes in ​so they will have to dip into
that trust fund then, and 2020 isn't that far away so that prediction may
be worth taking seriously. And yes if everything continued on in a straight
line from 2020 to 2035 the trust fund would be gone in 2035 and benefits
could only come from taxes just as they do today; but the future never
happens in a straight line, if it did predicting would be easy. And it
isn't.


With today's rate of change I think it's a waste of time to worry about any
problem that won't become serious for more than 10 years, we'll worry about
it when the time comes and we understand the problem better and have better
tools to solve it.
That's why I don't worry about climate change much, and that's why I do
worry about the
 the wealth gap
​because I think it ​
will cause serious problems much sooner than 10 years.
​ Very serious problems.​

 John K Clark











>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160508/0caa3133/attachment.html>