This is just a miss so I hope its just a meme.
Pretty sure if it was a Chinese project the reaction would be exactly the opposite.
Anyway money is fake and doesn’t matter anyway. In the US case It isn’t a zero sum game, its not like money from say education is going to the military. The actual fact is they don’t want to spend it on those things.
The US government can afford an essentially unlimited budget. The reasons things don’t get done are entirely ideological period.
At the end of the day, if you had the power to say, reduce the US military budget substantially and actually invest in the public good then you obviously already won the class war and the US is no longer ruled by capitalist class interests. In that case, sure go ahead and bean count, otherwise it really doesn’t matter. The alternative is to pretend the US is some liberal/sucdem shit country that must have a balanced budget, “oh noes money going to random stupid science project is money not going to public healthcare”. No that is not how it works at all, that is liberal/neoliberal economics shit.
These science projects are important IMO because quite literally nobody else would do them otherwise. Heck I would even say its one of the very few good things the US and co actualy do for humanity.
idk why we’re talking about the us since cern is mainly funded by western europe but anyway,
“oh noes money going to random stupid science project is money not going to public healthcare”. No that is not how it works at all, that is liberal/neoliberal economics shit.
the us federal budget goes to:
contracts awarded to industry/military interests who have enough influence one way or other to sell themselves as a national priority or a job creator etc (e.g. building random stupid science project, or just roads or whatever)
sops to the proletariat to keep us passive
so how do these things stay at the levels they do, instead of e.g. zero social spending or another $100 billion of military spending or transcontinental hsr? it’s reductive to say that they simply don’t want to spend more, there’s a dialectical interplay between opposing forces. mainly no bourgeois ever wants to pay taxes to benefit another unless they receive at least roughly equal benefits back from the system, and this equilibrium only holds up to some point where most segments can still make a profit organically since their capital can’t expand only (or at all) off tribute. the lowest segments (i.e. reactionary petty bourgeois) see relatively less direct benefit from spending relative to the taxes they pay and this is where you find the social basis of fiscal conservatism. fiscal hawks are false friends bc they’re so compromised by industrial capital that they generally try to rip the throat out of social programs first, but they do have an interest in lowering personal taxes (more take home pay means they have to pay their employees less) and especially in keeping bank capital circulating to provide them cheap credit (as opposed to being parked in treasuries to finance the federal deficit) - so when some porkbarrel contract is excessively enriching one slice of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the rest, they’re politically well positioned to go after it. big bourgeois move the needle less bc they’re so integrated with financial capital that they see benefit on either end anyway - e.g. food stamps cost money but they own shares of the grocery store etc
all this is to say that there is a tug and pull regulating taxation. some bourgeois want it higher bc they stand to benefit, some want it lower bc they don’t, others don’t mind either way. effective tax rates move up and down over time as the opposing pressures continually balance out. the poors are powerless in all of this up to the point that we can reproduce our labor power, but it should be obvious to at least say that we benefit when taxes are lower assuming that social spending doesn’t fall faster than net pay raises. in other words, it does help when they cut some useless spending that doesn’t benefit us, because that whets the appetite of some other bourgeois that would be putting upward pressure on taxation otherwise
(the mmt-brained counterargument you made, that money is fake and taxation doesn’t matter because the government can spend whatever it wants, only makes sense in this context if you forget that money is a claim on finite productive capacity in the first place. the state can either fund the budget directly with taxes, or it can print money and effectively “flat tax” everyone exposed to the currency through devaluation, or it can take on debt and withdraw money that would otherwise be putting downward pressure on interest rates. no matter what way you slice it the above inner connections between the forces at play are unchanged from what I described above)
so that all leaves us with an easy formula for telling if something is a worthwhile spending item: does it benefit us, i.e. as a class, or does it not?
These science projects are important IMO because quite literally nobody else would do them otherwise.
this still leaves the question open: does it benefit us, or not? you could just as well say that it’s important to build a giant snow globe around alaska bc nobody else would do it otherwise
This is just a miss so I hope its just a meme. Pretty sure if it was a Chinese project the reaction would be exactly the opposite.
Anyway money is fake and doesn’t matter anyway. In the US case It isn’t a zero sum game, its not like money from say education is going to the military. The actual fact is they don’t want to spend it on those things. The US government can afford an essentially unlimited budget. The reasons things don’t get done are entirely ideological period.
At the end of the day, if you had the power to say, reduce the US military budget substantially and actually invest in the public good then you obviously already won the class war and the US is no longer ruled by capitalist class interests. In that case, sure go ahead and bean count, otherwise it really doesn’t matter. The alternative is to pretend the US is some liberal/sucdem shit country that must have a balanced budget, “oh noes money going to random stupid science project is money not going to public healthcare”. No that is not how it works at all, that is liberal/neoliberal economics shit.
These science projects are important IMO because quite literally nobody else would do them otherwise. Heck I would even say its one of the very few good things the US and co actualy do for humanity.
idk why we’re talking about the us since cern is mainly funded by western europe but anyway,
the us federal budget goes to:
so how do these things stay at the levels they do, instead of e.g. zero social spending or another $100 billion of military spending or transcontinental hsr? it’s reductive to say that they simply don’t want to spend more, there’s a dialectical interplay between opposing forces. mainly no bourgeois ever wants to pay taxes to benefit another unless they receive at least roughly equal benefits back from the system, and this equilibrium only holds up to some point where most segments can still make a profit organically since their capital can’t expand only (or at all) off tribute. the lowest segments (i.e. reactionary petty bourgeois) see relatively less direct benefit from spending relative to the taxes they pay and this is where you find the social basis of fiscal conservatism. fiscal hawks are false friends bc they’re so compromised by industrial capital that they generally try to rip the throat out of social programs first, but they do have an interest in lowering personal taxes (more take home pay means they have to pay their employees less) and especially in keeping bank capital circulating to provide them cheap credit (as opposed to being parked in treasuries to finance the federal deficit) - so when some porkbarrel contract is excessively enriching one slice of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the rest, they’re politically well positioned to go after it. big bourgeois move the needle less bc they’re so integrated with financial capital that they see benefit on either end anyway - e.g. food stamps cost money but they own shares of the grocery store etc
all this is to say that there is a tug and pull regulating taxation. some bourgeois want it higher bc they stand to benefit, some want it lower bc they don’t, others don’t mind either way. effective tax rates move up and down over time as the opposing pressures continually balance out. the poors are powerless in all of this up to the point that we can reproduce our labor power, but it should be obvious to at least say that we benefit when taxes are lower assuming that social spending doesn’t fall faster than net pay raises. in other words, it does help when they cut some useless spending that doesn’t benefit us, because that whets the appetite of some other bourgeois that would be putting upward pressure on taxation otherwise
(the mmt-brained counterargument you made, that money is fake and taxation doesn’t matter because the government can spend whatever it wants, only makes sense in this context if you forget that money is a claim on finite productive capacity in the first place. the state can either fund the budget directly with taxes, or it can print money and effectively “flat tax” everyone exposed to the currency through devaluation, or it can take on debt and withdraw money that would otherwise be putting downward pressure on interest rates. no matter what way you slice it the above inner connections between the forces at play are unchanged from what I described above)
so that all leaves us with an easy formula for telling if something is a worthwhile spending item: does it benefit us, i.e. as a class, or does it not?
this still leaves the question open: does it benefit us, or not? you could just as well say that it’s important to build a giant snow globe around alaska bc nobody else would do it otherwise