The US dollar is on track for its worst year in modern history

> Under a "republican" administration, no less.

Are you under the impression that this is surprising? Republicans are consistently the ones spending more when they are in power. It's time to dispel this myth that they are fiscally "conservative", they have presented more unbalanced/defficitary budgets than Democrats and the latter in recent memories are the only ones who managed to present budget with surpluses, under Clinton.

It's fairly obvious the reason he put it in quotes was because the Republicans and conservative movements claim to be all about "fiscal prudence and discipline", when in reality they're the ones responsible for the ballooning deficit.

Corruption has been compounding. Malicious business interests don't actually care which party has power. Just that they have access. It's telling that you have to reach back 30 years to find an example where the budget was balanced for one single year.

It is a myth, there are only a few Republicans that organize around the concept of spending less.

Both sides of the gerontocracy are happy to improve their lives while not planting seeds for the future.

It's an irony, not ?

Like a fly in my Chardonnay.

It wasn't at all obvious if it was ironically poking fun at that claim or that they genuinely believed it.

Yes, and then took those cuts and blew them out of the water with irresponsible spending in the form of "tax reform".

Nobody is going to see any benefits from those Medicaid cuts. We're much, much further in the hole then we were before.

Right, because the guy after Clinton decided to cut taxes and start multiple wars that would last decades. You can do better than a gut "both sides" reaction.

Those "malicious business interests" clearly prefer the republicans, judging by how much more money their last campaign received from wealthy corporate donors.

But indeed, the dems are controlled opposition at this point. Most of them oppose progressive ideas, at least as much than the republicans.

I don’t disagree. But it’s also true that this will set precedent for future entitlement cuts. Younger people are not served by having entitlements treated as a sacred cow. I am in the opposite camp, cuts will and already have hurt me. I just wonder if maybe we should stop perpetuating a multi-generational Ponzi scheme that allows any generation with large enough numbers (eg baby boomers) to steal all the money from the cookie jar and spend it before anyone can figure out what the heck happened. Maybe that’s a problem with democracy more generally, but that it is a problem cannot be denied. If the dominant age cohort in power is over 85 they will have little incentive to worry about the budget ir nation beyond 5 or 10 years, let alone 80 to 100 years that are relevant to today’s youngest citizens. Not that we should ditch democracy but maybe we should limit entitlements to prevent abuse.

I don't think it's a ponzi scheme and I reject the notion it's unsustainable. Our social services are quite poor when compared to the rest of the developed world, and they seem to have figured it out.

I'm not saying we need to become Western Europe, but I am saying that it's certainly possible to have public services such as public healthcare support in the form of Medicaid sustainably.

Repeatedly, conservative fiscal voices proclaim we must cut social services in order to improve our quality of life and economic status. "Starve the Beast" has been the policy of choice for fiscal conservatives for many decades now. And, well, is it working? From where I'm standing, no. Nothing is getting cheaper. Everything is a little bit harder. And the private sector is decidedly not picking up the slack. And, I certainly do not have a lower tax burden. Why do we keep doing things when we appear to have decades worth of evidence that it does not work. I don't know, to me, it feels like insanity.

I think the most damning example is healthcare. We have private health insurance in this country and it's just bad. I don't even think we're at a point where we can humor people who say it's not that bad. No... it's bad, objectively, from every measure. We pay more per capita than any other country, including taxes, and our outcomes are consistently worse. It's losers across the board. But now we're going to be leaning into that even more with these Medicaid cuts. Which will, I'm convinced, greatly increase private insurance premiums. Sigh...

It’s not a Ponzi scheme, it’s successful class warfare. We had a balanced budget at the turn of the century and could easily have addressed the Medicare gap by removing the tax giveaway to the wealthiest and reforming our healthcare system to be more like literally every peer country in the world.

Instead, we blew an enormous hole in the budget with Bush’s tax cuts and wars of choice, followed by bailing out the bankers’ fraud under Obama, and then adding trillions more debt with Trump’s first tax plan. At each and every time, we could have hit financial stability by taxing the wealthiest quintile slightly more but instead chose to take on debt giving them a tax cut instead. The way you’re talking about it as a generational issue rather than a “tax rich people like it’s 1990” issue illustrates how successful the generations of propaganda have been furthering the goal of rolling back the New Deal despite every bit of sober analysis showing that social services have significantly transformed millions of lives and restoring taxes to sustainable levels at the top brackets would have minimal impact on the rich.