Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right? We are living in your sliders world.

I hate these sorts of websites because they have a very intellectual starch to them but are very superficial. I also hate this frame of mind that's like, "nobody would choose to do boring stuff." People aren't stupid. I hate this "voters are stupid" frame of mind. It's unelectable, and it's always said by people who complain about political problems because they misunderstand and think that political problems are math problems. Like that all we need are more sliders. In this specific case, people love paying mortgages, they instantly understand the math of interest rates, and many many people are strongly incentivized to help people understand the magic of mortgages: that you get to both live in the thing you buy, which is useful, and that because you're living in it, people are willing to loan you 10x more than your income to buy it, a kind of leverage that isn't available anywhere else but people who will cut your fingers off if you don't pay them. We are living in your sliders world.

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9x39 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right?

I'd say we spend a lot on things a few people who can maintain/expand power see ROI for power on. Sometimes that's things, sometimes that's just cash for voters and future voters.

The sliders world is more about consent via revenues of the governed, rather than the tax crop they really are.

	▲	doctorpangloss 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		we can go into an actual, interesting conversation about government spending. personally, i think your pessimistic, slightly nihilist, "people who can maintain/expand power" POV is just a different side of the same "voters are stupid" coin, in that it is also unelectable (no Mag7 CEO or top-500 billionaire could win an election today, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk even pay huge commissions to study it for them, and anyway, most of the top-500s are heirs, and the ones who are only slightly less wealthy but way, way less powerful lose elections all the time) but appeals to this cynical, conspiracy-minded BS that distracts from hard truths like: people like paying for medical innovations. people are consenting to that. i mean, they certainly feel it is unfair when they have something they must pay for in order to survive, but in general, people have been choosing "expensive medical innovations" as an alternative to "dying" since the advent of the venture pharmaceutical system. slider world CANNOT fix the problem that for some people, medical innovations are expensive. people will pay ANY price to cure a terminal illness suffered by their child, for example - there is no MARKET PRICE or AUCTION PRICE or VALID PRICE, i mean you can put a number into the slider, but you can see how "average of current + creditable worth" would be the answer to "what would you pay to cure your kid's terminal illness?" and this is so, so much more interesting to talk about than taxes or vague nihilism about power. but no. it's too unorthodox. are you getting it? the website is stupid, why is it so hard to say that?

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janalsncm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> We are living in your sliders world

To some extent? But the sliders would probably be even more extreme. If you are 70 years old you’ll probably vote to put everything on Uncle Sam’s credit card and let younger generations deal with it after you’re dead.