re: #63 allegro

I don’t know of anyone on either side who suggests that fiscal irresponsibility is a good thing. I see the major divide over what the money is spent for. The right seems to prefer corporate related expenditures and military. The left looks toward public good, education, and the safety net. If there’s going to be any over-spending, I would prefer to see the latter.

Only if there are no military dangers to this nation can military spending be seen as divorced from the public good.

The right sees some safety net spending as verging over into hammock spending. France is now proposing to move the official retirement age up from 60 to 62. Since, under a Democrat administration, there is no talk of lowering the age of social security retirement from 66 or 67 down to 60, today’s USA Democrat party is radical right wing by French standards. So it’d be fair enough to say that France is pretty far Left.

California’s system of allowing retirement at 50-something with full benefits, from many public jobs, is definitely hammock spending. Until such time as we have robots to do our work, and robots to program them and manufacture them, and robots to oversee the other robots, somebody is going to have to work if the work of daily life is to get done. Without a corvee, the only way to attract workers is to pay them, and if you’re going to pay them just as much to not work, the attraction fades.

Hence, the need for some amount of fiscal discipline.