I’ll give you Amtrak if you promise to allow local rail to stay public. But I don’t trust private enterprise for highways, dams, or airports.
I’m willing to give you farm subsidies, especially on corn (except sweet corn, which should be eternally subsidized). Not many small farmers left anyway.
ETA: I know subsidies aren’t an asset, but they would be a savings, which is almost as good.
ETAA: You can have the post office. Fed Ex and UPS seem to be handling things well enough and aren’t horribly much more. Of course they are competing against the USPS, which keeps their prices down. Crap. They’d have to be somewhat regulated to keep prices down, like the utilities.
Can you shed a little more light for me on your resistance to highways, et al?
The reason I ask is that’s probably where we’re going to have to go to fill out the last few hundred billion of the $1 trillion.
If National Parks and lands are out, which seems reasonable, we’ve got
Military Bases and the Presidio
Amtrak
DOE scientific labs
and not much else that I can think of at the moment.
There’s lots of great real estate in D.C. and New York (wait…who owns the UN building? Is that ours? It would take 0.01 seconds for me to decide to sell that. But I digress) but I thought you didn’t want to sell D.C. real estate.
Farm subsidies is clearly a no-brainer. And there’s a few hundred billion in operating expense there too, so it would actually have a nice impact over just 2 or 3 calendar years.
Whatever argument there may be for selling off Federal owned real estate, now is certainly not the time to do it. The real estate market is in the crapper, and credit is severely limited. We would most likely be getting significantly less for the sale than we could have 5 years ago, or in 5 years time.
The time to sell is when you don’t have to sell, isn’t it?
This is the natural time to tap deficit spending and borrow. But unfortunately, we seem to do that all the time, good and bad, so we might have run out of runway there as well.
Maybe asset sales is the only way. The family silver. The yard sale in front of the house. Posting on craigslist to pay the bills. Never is pretty when that’s the case.
Highways and airports are too easily allowed to degrade without being noticed, and have to be maintained at considerable cost. This is a serious problem whether you are a government or a business. But at least when you are a government, it is actually what you are supposed to be doing. When you are a for profit business, your objective is to make money. You have every reason to cheat on such things. Run the company for a few years, sell it to someone else, and disappear with your millions. Easy money.
Most things we’re talking about aren’t life and death. Highways, dams and airports are. I prefer it to be handled by an entity whose mission is to serve my good as a citizen than for it to be handled by an entity whose mission is to make money, and if serving me is necessary to do so, will do it on the way (but will certainly get away with spending less if it can). Not saying government corruption never happens. I’m just saying it’s the difference between someone who says he’s here to help versus the person who says he’s here to make money. The second can definitely be believed. Maybe the first one can, and maybe not.
I look to China as an example of unbridled free enterprise and rampant corruption. A lot of people are killed in ways that would never occur to me, like from sub-standard apartments or school buildings coming down in earthquakes. But highways and dams do occur to me, so I’m standing my ground on them.
Let’s not go into this now, but I would argue the deaths in China are exactly because the government is controlling the enterprise, and is completely immune and unnaccountable for shoddy construction and operation.
Except by violent overthrow from the people, which for a few days looked like it was going to happen (at least locally) during that recent earthquake.
Can you pick apart the physical infrastructure list
Highways
Dams
Airports
Ports (maybe on inland lakes?)
And find your dividing line yes/no for me? I find this conversation interesting.
Forgot about NASA. I’m winging it a bit here from memory, but I think NASA’s budget is about $15 billion a year.
There are already investors pouring capital into companies that will compete with NASA. Why not just let them bid for NASA? We save the operating expense and (I think) we sell off Cape Canaveral and a few other things as well. Pretty nice real estate, as I recall.
OK, assuming desperate need (and I’m in that position myself, being in the midst of very sadly selling my house out of dire necessity as we speak), I will give you (i.e. private enterprise) highways except for bridges and ports. Or you can have bridges as well, but they must be subject to annual government inspections.
The problem is, how can private enterprise make a profit from highways? What motive would they have? Are they going to be toll-roads? Because if so, no, I’m not going to sell them. Not if both they and Amtrak are going to private enterprise.’’ Unless, once again, they are subject to the same kind of regulation as the utilities - and this is only the highways that already have tolls. But after a while, this kind of regulation starts costing the government almost as much as running the damn things in the first place, not to mention being highly irksome to the companies themselves.
ETA: Ports refers to domestic ports. Under the current circumstances, I think that once we have a president more interested in real security than the image thereof, I’d prefer to keep the international ports in the hands of government for a while yet.
If the Proposals are serious, and more effective that NASA has been over the past twenty-five years ago, I’ll go along with this. I’d rather see it in government hands, but I’ll take space exploration any way I can get it. Deal.
We don’t need to sell jack shit. The idea that we’re going to need to liquidate parts of the government to pay for this is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding: that government budgets are like the budgets individuals or businesses are used to.
Government has responsibilities that ought not be liquidated: one can have differing views on whether we need the US Postal Service, but the idea that we have to take that service down to King Pawn over on Minnesota Avenue in Anacosta in order to raise some scratch to pay our rent just isn’t true. We’re going to finance the debt for the bailout in ways that individuals and most businesses cannot, by getting people to invest in our debt.
The size of the relief package is staggering, and ought to be accompanied by a better fiscal policy overall. The next president is going to have to deal with that. While I don’t minimize the impact of this additional debt, keep in mind that the risk of inaction is extremely high, and numerous chicken littles said the same things I’m seeing in this thread when we had to bail out savings and loans twenty years ago. Back then, $200 billion was a staggering figure.
If the US is able to avoid a meltdown, better fiscal policies are enacted, and we don’t panic, we will be able to pay for this over the long term. There’s no question in my mind.
Most certainly. I was just trying to inject a little levity into the discussion, throw out some provocative statements to get some intellectual debate going, and craftily slip in my libertarian agenda into whatever cracks I can find.
But in all seriousness…
The government does have a huge balance sheet. What does it want to do with it? Private enterprises need to leverage their balance sheet to the best of their ability to maximize economic output.
Does the government apply those same principles to it’s own balance sheet? Meaning, the balance sheet that you and I supposedly ‘own’ together?
Of course not. It operates mostly on cash-in-cash-out accounting on a yearly basis. It doesn’t even know what it’s balance sheet is. That is, how many assets and how many liabilities it has. If it did have a balance sheet, there would be number in the $50 trillion range on the ‘Liabilities’ side with the line item ‘Social Security’ next to it.
What’s on the asset side? Hell if I know. I doubt anybody does. But I’d like to know, because along with you I supposedly ‘own’ it.
Do I really? Do I really ‘own’ it? If I did, I’d like to have a little say over how it’s used. Because if the only say is controlled by unaccountable officials in Washington I don’t really own anything, do I?
The Fed is loaning money to AIG and demanding that it sell assets to pay the loan back. We as citizens are being asked to loan the government $1 trillion. Why can’t we also ask the same thing? That actually doesn’t seem like such a ridiculous question.
We actually got pretty far, didn’t we? Just in the few minutes of ping-ponging back and forth.
I bet we scooped up something in the $200-$400 billion range without really needing to roll up our sleeves, put another pot of coffee on, and tell the kids we won’t be home in time for supper.
I like the idea of an IdahoMauleMan/Oy! reaching-across-the-aisles ticket. You can be President, I can be VP. I’d even settle for Chief of Staff, since that seems like a position where you can actually get stuff done.
You sell the people on the idea we’ll make things better, get yourself elected, and I’ll go to work in the trenches behind-the-scenes with the Congresscritters. It’ll be a good cop, bad cop act with me as the latter. I don’t mind.
I’m having to sell my house because I have vertigo and can’t even work for a living! I don’t think I’m up to a campaign. The height of my ambition right now is to be able to get the Social Security that you scorn, because the alternative for me is to be homeless and hungry. Otherwise, I’d be up for it.
I did not scorn Social Security. I just think we have no means to pay for the accumulated liability we have created for ourselves. One of the reasons is because there is nobody even keeping track of what that number even is, and working it into our budget calculus each and every year. Hence, my comment above.
Wel, ever since I’ve been old enough to be aware of it, I have believed that SS revenues should not have been considered part of revenues when calculating the budget. It’s absurd. That money was to be exclusively for the use of Social Security, and if it had been left so, SS would be fine for many, many years to come.
Medicare is less secure, and really does need to be addressed. I believe that we need to address it, but I also believe we need to find a solution to the cost of health care in the country at large. I’m sure you won’t be shocked to find that I favor a single-payer health care system, and have done so since I attended university in Canada back in 1974-75 and experienced it. But then, I don’t view a rise in taxes to be the single worst catastrophe that could ever happen to me in my lifetime, nor do I believe in the axiom that anything government, private enterprise can do better. In fact, no one has yet managed to show me how adding a layer for profit will lower the cost of something without seriously screwing over the employees of the for-profit companies, which is an option I also don’t find particularly appealing.
You see, I don’t think incompetents automatically gravitate to government work. I’ve worked in private enterprise all my life (about 30 years) - I’ve tried to get into public work out of idealism, but never happened to have the skill set they were looking for at the right time in the right place. There are people who work as hard as they possibly can no matter what, and there are people who don’t. It’s not a matter of their setting; it’s a matter of their innate character, although it can be influenced to some extent by their immediate management. I have not been aware of government being one bit more bureacratic than corporate work, except that in corporate work, the arbitrariness may depend more on the whims of certain executives rather than on fairness laws being tried to followed to the letter. But believe me, it is fairly hard to be fired from a large corporation, and it is fairly easy to be “laid off” from a government position. The differences are pretty much in the heads of the people who have decided that government is bad by definition.
My brother sent me a Washington Post political cartoon today, showing a man being rescued by what obviously a government employed fireman from a burning building labeled “Wall Street.” The caption was of the rescued man yelling “Wait! Let me go back and save my “Government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem!” inspirational wall hanging.” In the corner is a tiny observer muttering “yeah, let him.” Self-described laissez-faire economists are nothing of the sort. They don’t want a pro-business environment; they want a pro-existent-business environment, which is a very different thing.