Zero sum nature of politics

Miscellaneous General
1

Seeing the debt ceiling drama in the US, I am struck by something.

There is a push for a 100% version of the plans that everyone wants. The proposals keep getting shot down, because everyone in Congress or Senate wants a 100% fulfillment of their ideals.

On the other hand, you have businesses like Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, Apple,.etc that keep releasing 90% of the software they initially intended to release, and patch it up later. They never wait for the 100% version of what they want.

“Wait a minute, Prateek, haven’t the US political parties all made huge compromises?”

That’s not all of what I am necessarilly talking about. When private businesses start a project, they don’t decide everything in advance what they are going to do. They have a wait and see approach to many things, because they know everything is uncertain, and because it’s expensive to commit to a decision early.

The US Congress and Senate has to show predetermined plans for what they are going to do with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,.etc in the next few years. Why is there no “Let’s try as we go” approach? Why can’t they just go ahead, borrow a little more money while it’s still at 2% p.a. (and borrow a little more time), and then decide what part of the budget can or can not be cut, maybe recalling a military base or two abroad, seeing results, recalling another few bases, and so on?

This is called the planning mentality. While businesses see every activity as a discovery procedure, government wants to decide and commit everything in advance.

2

You’re…you’re kidding right?

I’m confused…we do want a planning mentality? Or we don’t?

3

I am saying we don’t want a planning mentality.

What I mean is - assuming that we all want a deficit reduction in the long term, we still have to keep other factors in mind. Some things are impossible to cut at the given moment, due to the political backlash it may cause, or the adverse short-term consequences of it. Now, we’ll have to take those impossibles as a given, and see where else we can make adjustments.

Basically, a gradualist approach, where you cut down on a program to the extent that the current situation allows, wait and see, cut a little elsewhere, and so on. People might object that this will cause time to be lost and the deficit to be worsened. But that’s not an issue. US treasury bond prices are so high and interest rates so low that no deficit crisis has yet happened! As long as that is the case, of course they can afford a wait-and-see approach. So in the meantime, let the US government take the money that people are so eager to voluntarily give to them at negative real interest rates, and raise that old debt ceiling.

PS: This sort of “You’re kidding, right?” snarkiness is merely a means of hiding your personality behind crude language, instead of actually discussing anything. Very bad manners.

4

“Some things are impossible to cut at the given moment, due to the political backlash it may cause, or the adverse short-term consequences of it.”

Name one thing that it would be impossible to make cuts to…

Who suffers the political backlash other than the poiticians who may olose their position of power and authority?

What adverse short-term consequences have you worried my friend?

5

None of us has to hold fondness for politicians, but there are problems of business uncertainty due to regime uncertainty, and riots on the streets due to proposed cuts.

Business uncertainty affects us all, on a global level, and that is why we might consider worrying about political backlash.

Yes, this is all a bit too much of a realpolitik, but you must understand that I have no core principles at the moment (reading debates on morality has led me to feel that almost no moral position is invulnerable), and I mostly think of issues from realpolitik these days.