The Number go up rule: Why America refuses to fix anything
29 comments
·July 18, 2025mikewarot
Embedded growth obligations have had deranging effects on our institutions. At some point, likely soon, the ability to kick the can down the road any longer will end.
The current administration seems to have the goal of acceleration of that end.
amanaplanacanal
I think I would say it's more of an unintended consequence than a goal.
os2warpman
Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, Vance, and all of the other Project 2025 acolytes have explicitly and directly stated that the dismantling of every single civic institution and incumbent system is their goal.
Not reform, not improvement-- destruction.
They have literally written down, stated in interviews, repeatedly, that these are what their goals are.
They want to cripple the government, neuter every check on their power, and use the ensuing chaos to reshape the United States into a series of neofeudal states where "accountable monarchs" (tech billionaires who think they're gods) rule over the masses.
This isn't hyperbole.
And they are using the bloated, dementia-addled, shambling corpse of a god-king to do it while half of everyone stands around refusing to believe that they are doing what they stated and wrote down they were going to and the other half cheers them on because they're "sticking it to the dirty Mexicans, DEI welfare queens, and trannies".
"Unintended consequence" my ass.
What is happening, and will continue to happen, is by active conscious choice and design.
sidewndr46
Did you mean "Yarvin" instead of "Yavin" - like Curtis Yarvin?
tmaly
There are a lot of things that come to mind when I read this.
First, it use to be the case that companies provide jobs for life and they were more tuned to helping society rather than just looking at the bottom line. That has changed over the years.
Healthcare in the US has been on a steady decline. HMO middlemen and insurance companies with a deny claims profit model are only making it worse. Luigi event comes to mind. Hospitals in other countries offer same if not superior service for a fraction of your US copay. The ICE article on Medicaid data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605618 seems to has some ulterior motive to reduce the Medicaid usage by non-citizens.
The two tiered system of justice has always existed, we just have better ways to highlight it with mobile devices and social media. If we look at how the Arab Spring was enabled by Twitter, more of this is happening. But at the same time deepfakes are offering a new way to discredit truth tellers.
Large entrenched monopolies love new regulation as it builds a regulatory moat that prevents new, smaller competitors from entering the market. This will only drive people to markets outside of the US or to find ways to use AI to reduce the number of human jobs needed.
AI whether we reach AGI or not is already good enough to replace a good chunk of jobs. Larger companies that are not model companies move a little slower and it will take a year or two to catch up before people realize what happened. Education has not adapted slow enough, so there will be a large number of college grads in debt who will not be able to find jobs.
The US 35 trillion debt is not helping car loan rates and mortgage rates. There will be a whole generation of young people who will not be able to afford a house, part of the American dream. This will further push the divide between the Elite and boomers and the younger generations.
readthenotes1
A friend wants observed to me while I was ranting about something:
They would solve the problem if it weren't so valuable.
sebastiennight
Off-topic but I'm curious, so please bear with me: did you dictate this message or type it? As an ESL speaker, I'm always super surprised as to what native speakers might mis-type phonetically (in ways that would never occur to non-natives), like "wants" for "once".
BuyMyBitcoins
As a native English speaker, I am actually shocked that I didn’t notice the wants/once discrepancy until you mentioned it. My brain must have either autocorrected or it was in ‘phonetic mode?’ when I read it.
olddustytrail
Me too. I'm usually pretty good at proof reading but my mind skipped that one entirely!
navane
As a non native speaker I make these errors in my own as speech to text machine which is my brain and body. I'd sometimes write the wrong word that's phonetically ~~different~~ the same while typing, if I'm tired or in a hurry.
jsqu99
not OP but as a native, that's a speech-to-text error 100%
newsclues
Why have health care when you can make more treating symptoms without a cure or prevention?
Why have enough housing when rents go up during scarcity?
Why make life better for your working class citizens when you can import fresh ones to exploit?
Seems like there is a systemic problem that is causing the same issues in many countries.
darth_avocado
On the healthcare front, it would actually more profitable for insurance companies to fund preventative health care and healthier lifestyles. Instead they focus on denying coverage as a way to generate profits.
wpm
Don't have to pay for the costs of denying preventative care if we just deny coverage for the expensive stuff too! taps forehead
newsclues
For insurance, but health care is bigger than insurance.
Pharmaceutical, hospitals, equipment manufacturers.
Not everyone profits maximally from healthy people.
null
bell-cot
Almost no mention of America's dire affordability/availability problems with housing. Nor spiraling costs of education - though that might be more of an out-of-control arms race, or negative-sum game.
roenxi
In fairness, the US has so many problems (mostly of its own making) that it would be hard to enumerate them and give them fair treatment in one article. Plan A appears to be monetising the debt, which as far as I'm aware hasn't worked out well for any major power, ever. And it isn't clear that is a top-few problem right now what with the multiple-front military issues they are facing, some fairly important parts of the political system breaking down and the apparent problems manufacturing goods and services.
The issue seems to be that the US voting public is overwhelmed by the complexity of understanding what a good idea looks like or what is in their own interests. A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the Boomers though. Hopefully they pull through, the US has historically had a remarkable ability to lurch out of disaster and sort of shamble on into accidental prosperity.
cool_dude85
>The issue seems to be that the US voting public is overwhelmed by the complexity of understanding what a good idea looks like or what is in their own interests.
I can't agree. The highest profile elections we are offered have, in the recent past, been choices between absolutely terrible options. In 2016 we could choose between a largely reviled Iraq War supporter and Trump, in 2020 the senile Biden and Trump, and in 2024 a continuation of Biden's term, represented by a poor politician hand-picked by the party and Trump, the one-term loser.
In my adult life, the best candidate I have been able to vote for is a guy whose signature achievement in office was passing a heritage foundation Healthcare bill centered around fining me for not bolstering Blue Cross' bottom line. How am I supposed to vote in my interests?
yifanl
It starts with the understanding that there's no such thing as a national politician whose every policy will align with your interests, unless you are the politician in question.
no_wizard
How was Harris - who would have at the very least continued the sane economic policies of the Biden administration, a “terrible option” compared to Trump who repeatedly and with much enthusiasm, said he would pursue as much disruption as possible with tariffs, ice raids, and poor foreign trade policies?
How are these equivalent to each other? That’s such false statement I don’t know how anyone can give it a pass at this point
bigstrat2003
This is why I continually advocate for more federalism in our government (the way we used to have, before the Civil War and the New Deal rebuilt the country around the federal government). The presidential elections encompass so many issues, with so much at stake, that they invariably become messy elections which suck all the oxygen out of the room. What we need instead is to make the presidential office (and Congress too!) as boring and limited as we can get away with, and let those decisions be made as locally as possible. Obviously not all things are practical to solve locally (defense being the classic example), but a lot of things are. For example, there is no need to have the federal government dictating standards for education, let states do that. There's no need to have the federal government dictating what drugs are legal, let states do that. When we limit the power of the federal government, the government as a whole will become more responsible to the will of the people, because your political power won't be filled diluted the way it is now.
The number go up, until it doesn’t. The whole philosophy of prioritizing short term profits over all else is counterproductive for the same people who want the number to go up. Boeing and SpaceX are good examples on this front. Boeing management has been prioritizing profit by cutting corners to maximize the shareholder returns quarterly. And eventually you cut enough corners that your company starts declining. Meanwhile SpaceX keeps working on long term goals and eventually starts taking away contracts from Boeing.