Hacker News: alwaysthiserror

New comment by alwaysthiserror in "Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks"

alwaysthiserror — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:59:10 +0000

Surprising. Is that something common in Econ literature or something? It's definitely not the norm in poli sci journals, unless something's changed in the decade or so since I looked at many of those, since it just crowds out and distorts things that do contribute to the deficit.

It does hold government debt, but that's not really useful and puts it in a totally different category from "spending that contributes to the budget deficit".

New comment by alwaysthiserror in "Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks"

alwaysthiserror — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:42:22 +0000

I expect the most relevant action to most people's lives will be some nasty budget showdowns (likely not affecting ICE, since they're funded for years already and attempting to touch that will not go well) and the really interesting thing to see will be whether Trump's administration attempts to reverse the executive-created (and rather arbitrary and silly) modern idea of what a "shutdown" is, or will attempt to significantly adjust the (again, kinda arbitrary anyway) traditionally categories for what does and doesn't continue to be funded.

AFAIK it's never been argued in court, it's just what someone in the executive branch in the late '70s decided should happen, and before that in the event of failure to pass a budget it was assumed that spending should continue as-is, until another budget is passed, more-or-less. It's not even clear it'd be illegal if he just went on like nothing had happened.

New comment by alwaysthiserror in "Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks"

alwaysthiserror — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:33:39 +0000

Serious attempts to analyze the budget with the goal of addressing over-spending generally omit Social Security, because it's paid for with a dedicated tax. Repealing Social Security entirely wouldn't do much to address the budget deficit, certainly nowhere near as much as naive "look at how bit that part of this pie graph is!" analyses suggest it would.