André Gorz predicted the revolt against meaningless work (2023)

If Covid conditions had gone on longer, decades, then output would have gone down, the treasury from which subsidies and government checks came from would have dried up. Even bullshit jobs add to GDP. Even socialist and communists had bullshit jobs to keep people busy.

That said, the jobs I’d consider non essential are things like advertising, lifestyle, gambling/gsming and the sort. They add to the economy but I’d rather not have them.

What kind of jobs do you put into the lifestyle category? Depending on what you mean by that, I think that lifestyle jobs can have some non monetary value to society by increasing wellbeing.

Why does having yet another toaster add more value to the economy than the ad for the toaster?

Without advertising I'm good with a good old toaster -I don't/won't need a new one. With advertising I might have to get that new toaster that would match the new color palette of the kitchen I had to change due to "lifestyle" folks.

Federal spending is not funded by taxes, the US Treasury will never 'dry up', and the US will never default on its debts or entitlements. It may fail to pay, however that is not a default, it is a refusal or repudiation of an obligation.

...so paying taxes is just there to control people and expropriate their money? Please let Newsom in on this discovery. He says he's for the common man and woman. He's gotta do something.

But sure, Weimar had more money than god --it just had no purchasing power.

Taxes provide the fundamental value of money: taxes must be paid in the state’s currency, making that currency inherently valuable to avoid punishment. They also provide a way to prevent the existence of individuals powerful enough to corrupt the regulatory state, as has occurred in many of the most powerful neoliberal jurisdictions.

Yes, inflation is a constraint, and a powerful one - but avoiding inflation by treating a sovereign currency system like a household or corporation that do not have powers of money creation or taxation, and therefore must balance their budgets, is absurdity. The strongest constraint on state spending is an economy’s production capacity, not an arbitrary budget.

Regarding Newsom, US states are far more constrained in their spending bc they cannot create money, and must account for their expenditures more like a household or corporation. Social benefit programs, entitlements, etc. must therefore by managed and paid for at the Federal level, just like all of the goods and services that we, as a society, deem it necessary to produce regardless of whether it makes a profit or not - like most of the core transportation infrastructure, the global military empire, fundamental science, engineering, medical research and services, etc.

The fact that bullshit jobs add to GDP should perhaps be taken as proof that GDP is also bullshit.

Here's another point in favour: jobs only add to GDP when they're jobs. When your parent cooks dinner at home, GDP doesn't increase. But when both parents work and then spend (for the sake of argument) one of their entire salaries on buying restaurant food, GDP increases by that much, even though the whole thing is now less efficient.

There are (at least) two different ways of viewing this equation.

One view is that the government has a stockpile of money and can give out money as long as it has some and has to get more to refill its stockpile lest it run out. Taxes refill the stockpile. Bonds are borrowing money to keep the pile fuller for a fixed term.

Another view is to notice that the government stockpile is connected to the money printer, so it's not really a stockpile but actually has infinite capacity and can't run out. The cons of spending too much are not running out, but rather they are the cons of overprinting money - inflation. Infinity plus anything is still infinity, so taxes don't refill the stockpile (it's infinite) but they do unprint money to prevent excessive inflation. Bonds are paying people to unprint their money for a fixed term, at the end of which it is reprinted.

These are isomorphic models of the same system, which provide different insights.

Note that only governments that can print money can use your second model. So in the USA, only the Federal govt. California only has access to the first model, and could go bankrupt and/or default on bonds.

With GDP and taxation, the restaurant gets taxed. People making their food at home or raking their yard instead of a landscaper don’t get taxed for that work. If they did that’d get thrown into GDP.

I’m happy they haven’t thought of taxing our at home domestic product.

Output of what?

There are two ways to make money: you can trade people with money something that they prefer to money, or you can help people with money make more money, in exchange for a share of it.

The value of "output", whatever it is, is dependent on who currently has money. A vaccine for malaria has no value if no one who has money prefers it to money. A machine that can get you to Mars has no value, unless people with money want to go to Mars.

I say people with money, but it really people times money. And a few people have almost all of it.

So when we talk about output, GDP, whatever, as long as it's measured in money remember that it's mostly rich people's preferences we're talking about.

value doesn't have to be monetary

Yes, but it's often implied to be. If you want it to be comparable it usually defaults to be, we have few other agreed on ways to weigh one output of value against another. If someone says "we can't afford that" it's monetary value and thus mostly rich people's preferences they're actually talking about, but it's not as if it's easy to ignore either.