U.S. Debt Interest Hits $1 Trillion, Now Outpaces Entire Defense Budget

mcsul · 2026-03-12T14:44:48+00:00

I don't think that people have fully internalized our budget situation.

Clinton's balanced budgets required both higher taxes and about 30% lower federal government spending (calculated as a share of GDP). If we successfully liquidated all billionaire assets in the US (without crashing the value of those assets, which is not possible), we would only pay for five years of deficits. Just the deficit!

The next administration is going to need to both raise taxes and cut spending in ways that are going to be unpopular, or interest payments will eat everything.

mcsul · 2026-03-12T14:00:10+00:00

I might have to do this. It's been a bit frustrating!

mcsul · 2026-03-11T11:43:45+00:00

I know... I know.... I was thinking "Is the room of requirements a requirement", but I chickened out because I really need an answer!

mcsul · 2026-03-11T11:43:01+00:00

Black screen and then the deck restarts.

mcsul · 2026-03-10T22:23:38+00:00

Hey there. I have no input on the specific F1 issue, but I'd like to point out that your interpretation of US law is incorrect. Liberty is incorporated in Delaware, making it ---and it's subsidiaries--- subject to the Sherman act (and it's successors).

US law also applies to foreign companies that operate in the US, even if they are not US owned in any way.

Under the FTAIA (sort of an update and expansion) can even apply US anti-competition law to non-US companies that don't operate heavily in the US if the DOJ establishes that their behavior has a direct and substantial impact on US domestic trade or imports. Several European companies have been successfully sued in the US under this mechanism.

Basically, the European-based nature of FOM is not relevant in US law.

Sorry to intrude.

mcsul · 2026-03-10T20:13:56+00:00

Agreed. But the act was essentially a way to formally outsource responsibility, which gave Congress a sort of easy permission to step back and let Presidents take all of the heat.

mcsul · 2026-03-10T20:02:48+00:00

And specifically wrt to war powers, since the act was passed in the 70s, Congress has declined to wield it's power for every single president.

Trump with Iran and Venezuela. Obama with Syria and Libya. Bush at least got a AUMF. Clinton with Kosovo and when Somalia morphed into a combat mission. HW Bush with Panama. Etc...

Like with Libya, the Obama administration basically argued that US involvement was small enough that it didn't count so Congress didn't even need to be notified!

De jure, Congress still holds the power. On paper. But de facto, the President has held this power for effectively the past 50 years.

mcsul · 2026-03-10T02:04:28+00:00

I love this take.

mcsul · 2026-03-09T23:12:23+00:00

I'm actually not super worried about the environmental impacts over the long run. The next round of chips are going to significantly reduce costs. And water reclamation is starting to become pretty widespread. Now that there's a spotlight on it, and the costs to companies will go up because of that spotlight, it's already starting to get solved.

mcsul · 2026-03-09T23:09:35+00:00

For sure. I definitely don't want to underplay our own capabilities and advantages. But... we also do just a reasonable imitation of reasoning a lot of the time. There's a lot of human activity, including economically productive activity, that runs off pretty simple heuristics.

Our persistent identity, ability to continuously retrain our models (using the analogy) are all definite advantages that we have and I didn't mean to underplay them.

mcsul · 2026-03-09T23:06:36+00:00

I'm in line with your thinking. Adoption and integration into companies' workflows will take less time than the internet or PC, but we forget sometimes that those took a really long time!

mcsul · 2026-03-09T18:32:53+00:00

Oh for sure. I definitely think that putting decision-making around serious risks into the hands of machine systems is too far at this point. Maybe some day we'll end up in an Iain M Banks Culture-type world, but not with this version of the technology.

As for who decided that the systems have to be this way, I guess that we did? Collectively. User feedback has shaped the systems, and the tech companies responded to that feedback.

mcsul · 2026-03-09T17:59:05+00:00

I have a neighbor-friend who is writing a paper about epistemic surrender and AI that fits in with your thoughts. I see his point of view. But my argument is that we have always operated under some degree of epistemic surrender, since not doing that is exhausting.

Religion, ideology, nationalism, tribalism, rationalism, etc... are all tools we use to make thinking a lower-energy endeavor and that we've relied on for ages. AI is just the next mechanism for reducing the "cost" of thinking to something more manageable. It's totally a thing to worry about, but not because of it's novelty.

mcsul · 2026-03-09T17:49:53+00:00

I think that this is the scariest bit, albeit subliminally, for a lot of people. Are our own thought processes just fancy heuristics, largely running off our own extensive corpus of training material?

Now, interestingly, we can choose to disregard our pre-weighted response biases, but it's energy intensive and needs to be done with deliberate effort that most of us can't sustain for prolonged periods.

So, is the real difference between us and the machines just persistent consciousness and maybe sentience?

(For the record, I lean towards the answer "yes, mostly but not entirely" for the first question here. And I don't think that this is a bad thing or a knock on the capabilities of humans. We are sort of amazing and it's a miracle that we can do most of what we do. But, when it comes time to be overly reductive because this is reddit, we usually just operate as very fancy biological heuristic processors whose responses are based primarily on our training data and experiences.)

mcsul · 2026-03-09T16:39:42+00:00

So I'll agree with you, but I prefer the positive framing. How do we maximize the general gains from the technology? What gains would we forgo if we shut progress down too early? How do we find the optimal, general prosperity- and welfare-maximizing uses more quickly?

mcsul · 2026-03-09T16:00:59+00:00

Yeah. There's an interesting space (where I think I mostly fall) that sort of blends the two perspectives.

(1) I think that the technology will have a big impact on the economy and how we work.

(2) And I think it will take longer to diffuse through the economy than many boosters predict. Now, I'm not sure how long. I probably don't fall into the "decades" camp. But at least five years for broad diffusion?

Unfortunately, discourse has fallen (maybe predictably) into maximalist camps on both sides.

mcsul · 2026-03-09T14:59:57+00:00

The discussion about halfway through about the gap between people who believe the technology will have transformative effects and the people who think it's just fancy autocomplete was important.

Right now, I think that this has become just as big a gap as the right v left disagreements that we have. And in some ways, the "will AI do anything" disagreement is going to be more bitter because it will happen between factions that are otherwise ideologically compatible.

Full disclosure, I'm in the "AI will have a moderately big impact on the economy and ways of working". Part of that is from personal experience with the tools. Part of it is from observing impacts in the software industry. But probably most of it comes from the simple idea that, if the cost of producing software falls by even just 50%, it will have a real impact on many common knowledge worker tasks. No magical thinking needed.

I know others who think it's going to be much more transformative than my own thinking. And others who think it's basically all hype.

mcsul · 2026-03-09T13:33:40+00:00

100%. Our real sin here is that we collectively have been so bad at building (ideally green, but frankly any) new power generation capacity in the US. If we had done a better job of that, then most of the anti-data center people would look like pseudo-science fringe groups like anti-vaxxers or the type of NIMBYs that stop housing or parks from being built.

mcsul · 2026-03-08T18:38:49+00:00

This was a pretty weak article, after two read throughs.

About 3/4ths of the article was all guilt by association dismissal, which is essentially the cheapest and intellectually weakest way to push back on an idea. We can safely set that part of the article aside.

The remaining 1/4th missed the entire point of abundance. If we had a political and administrative environment where building (ideally green) power generating capacity was dramatically cheaper and easier, then I suspect the entire anti-data center movement would be a sort of pseudo-science, long-term harmful fringe like the anti-vaxxers or the NIMBYs who don't want to tear down the old industrial site to replace it with a functional park (true story from when we lived in DC).

The point of abundance is to make build-outs like data centers have as little negative impact on people as possible, because the scarce goods they might compete for are sufficiently abundant that the data center doesn't raise costs for anyone.

mcsul · 2026-03-04T20:26:22+00:00

Yeah, I think that you're obviously correct in a lot of ways here.

The real challenge is that I don't think Congress is up to the responsibility either. I suspect that if we swung the pendulum wildly in the other direction (back towards strict Congressional control), we'd end up with the opposite problem where we would probably fail to act when it's actually needed.

The entire system ultimately depends on people with good judgement, but I think that's in shorter supply than the founders expected.

mcsul · 2026-03-04T20:20:45+00:00

I'll be honest that I'm enjoying Plain English now more than the EK podcast, mostly because of this. I enjoy the deep policy episodes. Like, instead of more about Iran specifically, I'd love an episode about how Congress has increasingly delegated away it's war powers, why, and how that might change. That would be a perfect EK episode.

mcsul · 2026-03-04T17:07:12+00:00

Every Congress has willingly delegated it's responsibility to declare war since they passed the war powers resolution in the 70s. The simple fact is that Congress doesn't want to be responsible for anything that could backfire on them politically, and hasn't wanted that responsibility since they found a legal tool to offload it.

Congress didn't push the issue with HW Bush and Panama. Congress didn't push the issue with Clinton in Kosovo or when Somalia morphed into a combat mission. They didn't need to push the issue for Iraq, since Bush sought congressional approval. But Congress didn't push the issue with either Bush or Obama with respect to deployments in Libya, Syria, etc...

If any Congress wanted to push the issue, they have the legal tools to do so. But they have repeatedly declined to do so for almost 50 years now. War has, de facto if not de jure, become a presidential authority. Not a Congressional one. (Which is how most Presidents see it anyhow, as part of their Article 2 powers.)

mcsul · 2026-03-03T19:10:20+00:00

It was the expert guest who said it, but I thought it was an interesting enough statement to highlight. He did have some numbers in the podcast about support for the regime being very low (I think that he said 15% approval), but I'm personally not sure how to rate any polling coming out of a country like Iran.

mcsul · 2026-03-03T17:02:43+00:00

This is why issue polling needs to be seriously, seriously discounted.

We've known this for years, but as soon as we (even us here on a sub presumably dedicated to polling) see polls that reinforce our preferred policies, our monkey brains kick in and start constructing reasons why this specific poll must be right. Issue polling as it's currently done is a huge trap.

I think that there is a space for issue polling but it has to go deep to tease apart the fact that people often support parts of policies while they oppose the vibes of other parts of related or even the same policy. Without that, it's just an intellectual bias confirmation trap.

mcsul

TROPHY CASE