All governments are building up deficits and unpayable debt. Many point out the problem this causes. They list only 4 options:
1. Ignore the problem.
2. Raise taxes.
3. Default.
4. Inflation.
This article explains them neatly and shows the pit falls of all four.
https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/four-ways-that-uncle-sam-will-respond-to-its-75-trillion-insolvency/
However there is a 5th and its the one governments of all persuasions are really running with.
This is the Star Trek economy option. The technological solution. This dates from 1980’s and is both bipartisan and is global. The idea is to fund research & production to get the cost of production down with:
a. 3d printing, nano tech, carbon composites, dematerialisation of products & services. In many cases we are getting very close.
b. Drop energy costs hugely: Solar, superconductor grid storage, batteries, new nuclear power. Fracking fossil fuels. Robotic coal mining. Solar does work if cheap storage and grid modulation becomes available. (The Scottish “Faraday Exchanger” technology does that. )
c. Develop cheaper medical technology. Particularly in the area of age related illnesses: Stem cells both adult and earlier embryonic, anti-ageing hormone and genetic research. Adult stem cell treatments are getting cheaper. The rest is in animal testing.
d. Reduce the cost of food: There are new crops and fertiliser technology, and hydroponics. Too many breakthroughs to count. Mostly unnoticed.
When Obama got elected the program got badly derailed. Older politicians don’t talk about it because its either old news or coming too slow to help them at the next election.
The logic is simple. Debt payments & government payments are worthless numbers. People spent this money on stuff. Make the stuff cheaper and they will not notice or care about a default.
If you lower the cost of living by 90% and default by 80% your still doubling your bond or social security payout to 200%. If you end ageing you end the need for social security altogether. We all cheer. Everyone would take free immortality in exchange for a debt cancellation. Technology based deflation cancels out intentional inflation.
Most have forgotten that this was openly discussed in the 1980’s.
They are literally spending more money on R & D to, hopefully, buy a path out.
Whether it can work was debated by a few but that’s forgotten too.
This is international. Its why China is building empty cities. Why oil countries are making artificial islands and bays in the desert.
Its not default avoidance or kicking the can. Its a long term program of default mitigation.
If you know you’re about to go bankrupt then you spend big to buy friends and pad your fall. Its Luke 16: 1-13.
The picture is a small drexler type nanofabricator. Key barriers to that disappeared this year with a new form of 3d printing called “volumetric 3d printing”. It cracks the problem of making the first nano machine.
6 replies on “Star trek budget.”
The only rational option (IMO) is the Calhoun/Reagan/Cruz/Trump idea to reduce the debt by economic growth, which drastically increases revenues. The problem, of course, is that requires some fiscal responsibility on the other side to pay down the debt instead of spending on new programs, but unfortunately we always end up with Democrats (or “moderate” Republicans) in charge of the House when the economy booms. I wish we could figure out how to fix that.
Exactly. It is wholly irrelevant how much revenue the government receives; the problem is with spending and spending alone.
Which is why I go on and on about crowd funding public goods. Cutting out the Bureaucrats and the parliaments. The report above is about what the politicians believe it will only work if revenue is replaced with crowd funding. The technology driven deflation can be a very useful in a transitions.
I’m not sure how this actually pays of the debt. You are making the classic error of assuming that the federal government will be fiscally responsible with this boost in income, which, of course, if they were, we would not be in this mess. They have to break their spending addiction or no amount of money in the the world will fix the debt problem. As tech grows, living standards will rise, but I don’t think the debt will go anywhere. Tech has gotten insanely more advanced since the 80’s, and that did not fix the debt. Why should even more advancement work?
I think the idea is that we will reach a singularity, beyond which either there is no money, or money is pretty much irrelevant.
Bill talked about this in a couple of TSL episodes a few years ago: his focus was on energy. He argued that if not for the irrational anti-nuclear power lobby which has kept us stuck in the 1970s, we could have effectively unlimited power right now. He talked about small, locomotive-sized closed-system reactors generations beyond any currently built reactor, and how their designs are inherently safer, and meltdown-proof in theory; but even if they’re not, they are small enough that a “leak” would cause little damage. Were we to utilize such technology, we would have so much energy that (a) we would win the global economy, because we would pay so much less for energy that the cheap labor loss abroad would be completely offset; and (b) with so much energy, we might pass the singularity into a post-money Star-Trek-like economy.
And when we pass the singularity, the national debt goes poof.
It will not fix the debt or generate new revenue, though many politicians think that. The point is that it cushions the default. They must eventually default. They all know that. They want it on the next guys watch. They want a soft default.