[ExI] AI, deficit spending, Civil War, trivialities, and madness

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Sent: Wednesday, 19 November, 2025 3:17 AM
To: ExI Chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
Subject: [ExI] AI, deficit spending, Civil War, trivialities, and madness

 

On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 8:58 AM <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > wrote:

 

>…You do if you insist on waiting till the last possible second to sell your Bitcoins. If you insist on wringing every last cent out of your Bitcoin … John K Clark

 
> Last cent out of BitCoin?  The last cent IS a BitCoin.  The loss is from waiting too long to put every last “cent” into something that cannot be created in arbitrary quantities.  It wouldn’t need to be digital currency.

 

>… it's also clear that soon millions of Americans are not only going to lose their jobs, they're going to lose any ability that they previously had to make money.  And Spike, you're still worried about trivialities like the budget deficit….

 

John, you fail to see the logical contradiction in those two comments.

 

The US federal revenue is based on income tax.  If millions of Americans lose their jobs and ability to make money, the federal revenue declines.  Of course the budget deficit is no triviality, it is of increasing concern.

 

 

>…Those millions of Americans are not going to quietly starve to death, so if Civil War is to be avoided the nation's economic safety net is going to need to be radically extended and it needs to be done quickly….

 

I am all for extending the economic safety net.  The critical point is to have that net held by a structure which can support it.  The federal government is already banging against its credit limit.  It is already straining just to make the minimum payments on its credit card bills.  That safety net must be held by states.

 

>…But He Who Must Not Be Named and his Republican stooges in Congress are moving in the exact opposite direction…

 

Irrelevant.  Those guys are all at the federal level.  Unreliable safety net holders.

 

>…and are dismantling the rudimentary safety net that is already in place as rapidly as they can. It's madness!   John K Clark

 

Have we learned nothing from the recently-ended record length US govt shutdown?  To end that, all that was agreed upon was a temporary patch, an agreement to keep overspending at the level of the previous overspending until the fed again hits its credit limit, which is about the second week of January, at which time the destructive cycle restarts.  I predict another federal shutdown, along with further shutdowns approximately quarterly.  This is an example of a support structure we don’t want holding the social safety net.  It’s madness!

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20251119/aee0034c/attachment-0001.htm>