I am also totally against funding video games as art, but mostly because of this

Ugh. Yes, what we need is to provide excuses for someone to make some annoying Pitfall clone where every other screen is a text dump about the abortion debate, or something else equally "deep" that they don't feel the need to make playable.

Also, off topic (like the debt debate)
...Uhm, television?

I agree with the logic but to me, if painters, sculptors and film makers can, its only fair. Thats an argument on how NEA is unwise in what they fund, not on video games as an art form.

Nah, I didn't forget that.

I like your plan. I guess there's just something of a difference that needs to be distinguished between "what can realistically be achieved" and what I'd "idealistically like to see." It's the difference between what Democrats can privately hope for and what they should publicly lobby for and expect.

Furthermore, the mere fact that the tax increases and spending cuts that you've outlined would theoretically balance the budget within twenty years doesn't change the fact that there are other sectors you've left untouched where additional superfluous expenditures could be cut.

Finally, an element of my argument that you may have forgotten or misinterpreted is that I'm advocating substantial increases in spending into fields such as environmental regulation and healthcare, which would mandate further cuts in other programs in order to balance the budget. The 14 trillion dollar is daunting enough as it is, but it's even more daunting when you add to that the desire to spend hundreds of billions more each year to invest into clean energy, greenhouse gas mitigation and climate change adaptation costs.

Seriously my Advanced Environmental Law class calculated the projected costs for the state of Alaska alone to relocate thirty indigenous Inupiat communities threatened by erosion and flooding caused by global warming in the Arctic now, and it came up as $2.6 billion dollars. If you assume as my class did that global warming is going to become progressively worse and more serious, with devastating impacts on coastal communities throughout the world, then I think it becomes easier to appreciate my stance on cutting back on discretionary spending because the government's going to have to spend a fuckton of money just responding to climate change, and we can't seriously toss video game companies grants when that shit's going down.

EDIT: Said Alaskan Inupiat communities are not going to be relocated before they sink into the Chukchi Sea because Congress was like "fuck no, we're not providing federal funding for that." So it's just kind of frustrating when Congress is funding art projects but not funding any systemic approach to Climate Change adaptation and relocation.

I kind of want to see this go through just so we get a whole bunch of arthouse videogames that no one plays. Nobody watches arthouse films, nobody is going to play arthouse video games. They not really going to be like current videogames.
I'm waitingfor the videogame equivalent of Wavelength- which locks up your comptuer and means you can't cloe it or shutit down and you have to push a single key faster nd faster aand faster till it lets you go.
And halfway through a guy outside your house dies but if you go save him you have to start the game over again.

actually the giant flaw in Krylo's plan is you are taxing money from the rich. you know, the people that decide who gets taxed. Even if politicians themselves weren't rich, their families, friends, and lobbyists are.

You are putting "why this won't happen" in a discussion about what *should* be done. They are not discussing whether or not it will happen, because arguing that is pointless. Thus, bringing up "well it won't happen anyways" is besides the point.

I left a lot of sectors alone because I'm not an economic major and don't understand exactly where a lot of military spending goes. I have just enough knowledge to know dealing with that kind of stuff would just be all wrong.

Like pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan would cost an obscene amount of money for carriers and other transport and blah blah blah.

And I'm not sure what effects cutting military spending in general would have on tax revenue, because depending on where you cut/how you cut you could have people losing jobs equating to less tax revenue, and you could end up spending money to restructure organizations to be cheaper. It would no doubt be worth it in the long term, but would it be worth it in a 20 year long term? I'm not equipped with the numbers to really answer that.

And the same goes for cutting from other areas. Like public works, or art grants. I don't know what the full effect they have on the economy is. I could look up how much they cost us, but it's require significantly more research to figure out how many jobs they are creating, and how that money going in at the bottom is truly affecting the economy as a whole and how much extra tax revenue it's generating, and then compare the human costs vs the monetary costs and try to figure out what's worth it.

As such, I left a lot of areas alone.

ALSO just for simplicity's sake. The point was we could go almost 800 billion in the black ONLY cutting the drug war if we increased taxes on the rich. And honestly, we could probably afford to increase taxes more than that.

I think part of this should be figuring out what environmental practices are worth spending money on. For instance: I don't think I'd bother relocating those inuits. At most I'd spend some money telling someone they should probably move inland, and leave it to them.

You'd also have to ask yourself questions like "How many years to pay off the debt is acceptable?" and "Will I be spending 700 billion on these new environmental protections?"

And, moreover, "Could I somehow design environmental protections to MAKE me money rather than cost me money?" For example, rather than paying government money to help companies create more green plants, charge them an extra whatever percentage if they don't do it themselves.

Edit: Could even do this with more humanitarian concerns. Like charging huge tariffs on imports (even from US companies) on products made with slavery or in sweatshop conditions, which would increase point of sale cost for those products, which would decrease the company's profit, which would incentivize the companies to pay working wages and create decent working conditions even in third world countries, which itself would considerably cut into the amount of money they are saving by making things off shore and shipping them in, WHICH would incentivize more US jobs, which would create more tax revenue, all while actually MAKING the federal government money instead of costing them money.

I would.

Individuals who are forced to spend monstrous amounts of money to relocate their homes were by no means responsible for the global warming crisis. Punishing impoverished Inupiat natives for daring to have lived in coastal areas in the Arctic Circle for centuries seems grossly unfair, given they've left virtually no carbon footprint that contributed to the problem and given that the destruction of their communities is not something they could possibly have the financial resources to rebuild from. The average Inupiat family in those communities makes under $30,000 a year.

I guess my broader point is that it just seems ridiculous to me that we're comfortable doling out grants for entertainment industries while we're not doing the same for people who desperately need the money for far more noteworthy reasons. Our nation's discretionary spending is somewhat ludicrous, and the way Congress actually operates at times seems dysfunctional. We'll pay millions to build a new bridge with marginal value because it fits neatly into a preexisting grant program, but we won't pay the same amount of money to actually relocate a community in imminent danger of being washed away because no preexisting grant or preexisting agency exists to confront the problem.

TLDR: Congress is fucked up, the entire system is fucked, let's implode everything and start from scratch.

Also, I make under 10,000 a year. 30,000 sounds like being rich to me.
 

I see what you're saying, but 2.6 billion is a LOT more money than 161 million (NEA's entire budget). And the arts aren't as ephemeral as it's so easy to think. Societies are measured by their art, and their art has a symbiotic relationship with their growth.

You would have to completely defund the NEA 20 times to pay for that community. It just doesn't make sense to even compare the two in any way. The spending toward NEA is so miniscule that it's hardly even a bleep on our government spending.

Like yeah, if it was a matter of "We can spend this 200 million relocating people, or funding the arts" well I guess relocating people, but defunding the NEA will do absolutely nothing for anyone.

Arts are essential to society. They increase happiness which is essential to productivity. They encourage the flow of ideas and education which is also essential. Opposition to repression ovften arises from the artisic communities- they have historical always lead the flow of ideas and political reform.
You can't just cut that off