NASA

Trump has proposed an even worse budget

PNRJ current events, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

May 11 JDN 2460807

I didn’t really intend for my blog this year to be taken over by talk about Trump. But all the damage that Trump is doing to America and the world is clearly the most important thing going on in economics right now, and it’s honestly just hard for me to think about anything else.

Trump has proposed a budget. (Read at your own risk; what’s on the White House website is more screed than budget proposal. And it’s pretty clearly written by Trump himself, perhaps with some editing.)

It will come as no surprise to all of you that it is a terrible budget, even worse than what the Republicans recently passed.

First of all, Trump is cutting discretionary spending by $163 billion. This is a huge cut—it removes almost one-fourth of all non-military discretionary spending. Trump naturally claims that he’s just reducing waste, shutting down DEI programs (for the right wing this is considered a good thing), what Trump calls “Green New Scam funding” (read: anything remotely related to environmental sustainability or climate change), and what Trump claims are “large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people” (read: any other departments Trump doesn’t like, whether or not he actually understands what they are for).

And lest you think that these draconian cuts are being done for fiscal responsibility in the face of an utterly massive federal deficit, Trump also proposes to increase military spending by 13%; multiplying that by our current $850 billion budget means he’s adding $110 billion to the military; and he also says he wants to add a further $119 billion in the mandatory budget. This means he’s cutting $163 billion from non-military spending and adding $239 billion in military spending—which will actually increase the deficit.

Trump is ending programs like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (sure, let’s just let Chinese hackers in! Why not? It’s not like there’s anything important on those Pentagon servers!) and Fair Housing (amid a historic housing crisis), as well as slashing the EPA (because who needs clean air and water anyway?).

Unsurprisingly, he’s also ending anything that resembles DEI, which includes both some really good necessary programs, and also some stuff that is genuinely ineffective or even counterproductive. Most people who work at firms that have DEI programs think that the programs do more good than harm, but there are big partisan differences, so cutting DEI will play well with the Republican base. But I for one do not want to play the word game where we say out loud every time “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, because there is a big difference between the fundamentally laudable goals of diversity, equity and inclusion, and the actual quite mixed results from DEI programs as they have been implemented. It’s awful that Trump is cutting DEI with a chainsaw, but we really should have been cutting it with a scalpel for awhile now.

Trump is also throwing money at the border, increasing the budgets of CBP (whatever) and ICE (very, very bad!). This is probably the worst thing about the budget, though it also isn’t a big surprise. Part of the increased ICE spending is “50,000 detention beds”, which since ICE lately has been arresting and detaining people without warrants or trials and courts have specifically ruled that they are violating due process, I believe we can fairly say constitutes a concentration camp. If and when they start actually giving everyone—everyone, dammit—due process, then you can call it a detention center.

Trump is eliminating USAID and folding what’s left of it into DFC; but these institutions had quite different goals. USAID had two goals: Advance America’s interests, and make the world a better place. And while it did have significant flaws, overall it did quite a good job of achieving both of those goals—and indeed, publicly making the world a better place can advance America’s interests. DFC’s goal is to promote economic development by financing investments that otherwise could not be financed. That can also promote America’s interests and make the world a better place, but it excludes many of the vital roles that USAID has played in providing humanitarian aid and disaster relief as well as promoting democracy and advancing environmental sustainability. (And when I say “promoting democracy”, I don’t mean the way the CIA does it, by orchestrating coups; I mean things like helping Ukraine remove its dependency on Russia.) There is more to life than money—but I don’t think Trump really understands that.

Trump is canceling a bunch of subsidies to renewable energy, but honestly I’m not too worried about that; the technology has matured so much that renewable energy is actually the cheapest form of energy for most purposes. (And it kinda makes sense: The sun and wind are already there.) Removing the subsidies will make it harder to compete with oil (because oil is still heavily subsidized); but I still think renewables can win. Basically the past subsidies have done their job, and it’s probably okay to remove them.

There’s a really weird proposal involving food, which I think I will just quote in its entirety:

The Budget also supports the creation of MAHA food boxes, that would be filled with commodities sourced from domestic farmers and given directly to American households.

This sounds… kinda… Maoist? Definitely some kind of communist. Why are we circumventing the highly-functional capitalist market for food with massive in-kind transfers? (Despite scaremongering, groceries in the US are still pretty affordable by world standards.) And how are we going to do that, logistically? (Produce does need to be kept fresh, after all.) Does Trump think that markets have trouble providing food in this country? Does he not understand that SNAP exists, and already prioritizes healthier food?(Or does he plan to get rid of it?) Does he think that the reason most Americans don’t eat a very good diet (which is objectively true) is that they aren’t able to get fresh produce? (And not, say, subsidies for factory-farmed meat and high-fructose corn syrup, or mass marketing campaigns by corporations that make junk food?) I’m not so much against this program as I am really baffled by it. It seems like it’s trying to solve the wrong problem by the wrong means. (I’m guessing RFK Jr. had a hand in this, and I recently learned that he doesn’t believe in germ theory. He is a god-tier crank. Like, his views on vaccines and autism were bad enough, but this? Seriously, you put this guy in charge of public health!?)

There are some things in the budget that aren’t terrible, but they’re mostly pretty small.

One actually good thing about Trump’s new budget is the expansion of VA services. I don’t really have any objection to that. It’s a fairly small portion of the budget, and veterans deserve better than they’ve been getting.

Trump says he won’t be cutting Social Security (so perhaps we dodged a bullet on that one). Of course, if he actually cared in the least about the budget deficit, that’s probably what he would cut, because it’s such a huge proportion of our spending—about one-fifth of all federal spending.

I’m not sure what to think about the changes Trump is making to education funding. He’s shutting down the Department of Education, but it seems like most of what it does (including offering grants and handling student loans) is just going to be folded into other agencies. It doesn’t actually seem like there have been substantial cuts in their services, just… a weird and unnecessary reorganization. My guess is that after Trump had already publicly committed to “end the Department of Education”, some staffer quietly explained to him what the Department of Education actually does and why it is necessary; since he’d already committed to shutting it down, he didn’t want to pivot on that, so instead he shut it down in name only while preserving most of what it actually does in other agencies.

Trump is also investing heavily in charter schools, which… meh. Some charter schools are really good, some are really bad. There isn’t a clear pattern of them being better or worse than public schools. Overall, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the average charter school is worse than the average public school, but there’s a lot of variation in both, so the odds that any particular charter school is better than any particular public school are still quite high. (I recently learned about this measure of effect size, probability of superiority, and it’s now my new favorite measure of effect size. Eat your heart out, Cohen’s d!)

Trump is also diverting funding to apprenticeships; he’s introducing a new “Make America Skilled Again” (ugh) grant that States would be required to spend at least 10% on apprenticeship. I’m pretty okay with this in general. 10% is not a lot, and we totally could use more apprenticeship programs in fields like welding and pipefitting.

Another good thing Trump is doing is increasing funding for NASA; he’s clearly doing it out of a sense of national pride and hatred of China, but hey, at least he’s doing it. We might actually be able to pull off a human Mars mission (several years from now, mind you!) if this higher funding continues.

Trump is also redirecting DEA spending to Mexico, Central America, South America, and China; since most fentanyl in the US is made in Latin America from Chinese ingredients, this actually makes sense. I still don’t think that criminalization is the best solution to drug abuse, but fentanyl is genuinely very dangerous stuff, so we should definitely be doing something to reduce its usage.

Finally, and somewhat anticlimactically, Trump is creating some kind of new federal fire service that’s supposedly going to improve our response to wildfires. Given that we already have FEMA, a significant improvement seems unlikely. But hey, it’s worth a try!

These small good things should not distract us from the massive damage that this budget would cause if implemented.

It was not necessary to shift $160 billion from non-military to military spending in order to increase funding for NASA and the VA. It was not necessary to cut hundreds of programs and eliminate USAID—the agency which did what may literally be the very best things our government has ever done. DEI programs had their flaws, but it was wrong to eliminate all of them, instead of finding out which ones are effective and which ones are not.

And while it’s a tiny portion of the budget, the cuts to the EPA will kill people. Most likely thousands of Americans will die from the increased air and water pollution. It will be hard to pinpoint exactly who: Would that kid with asthma have died anyway if the air were cleaner? Was that fatal infection from polluted water, or something else? But the statistics will tell us that there were thousands of unnecessary deaths. (Unless of course Trump falsifies the statistics—which he very well might, since he routinely calls our world-class economic data “fake” when it makes him look bad.)

The large federal budget deficit will be in no way reduced by this budget; in fact it will be slightly increased. If we were in a recession, I’d be okay with this kind of deficit; it was actually a good thing that we ran a huge deficit in 2020. But we aren’t yet—and when one does inevitably hit (given the tariffs, I think sooner rather than later), we won’t have the slack in our budget to do the necessary Keynesian stimulus.

I don’t see any mention of what’s going to happen to Medicare and Medicaid; given that these two programs together constitute roughly one fourth of the federal budget—and nearly twice the military budget—this is a very conspicuous absence. It’s possible that Trump’s leaving them alone because he knows how popular they are, but this once again reveals the emptiness of Republican deficit hawkishness: If you really wanted to reduce the deficit by cutting spending, you’d do it by cutting the military, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those four things together comprise the majority of the federal budget. Yet it seems that Trump’s budget cuts none of them.

Mind you, I don’t actually want to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid; so I’m relieved that Trump isn’t doing that. I’m pretty okay with cutting the military, but I’ll admit I’m less enthused about that since the start of the Ukraine War (I think some moderate cuts are still in order, but we should still have a very big military budget to protect ourselves and our allies). But these are the only budget cuts that could realistically reduce the deficit.

What I actually want to happen is higher taxes on rich people. That’s how I want the budget to be balanced. And Trump very obviously will not do that. Indeed he’s almost certainly going to cut them, making our deficit even larger.

So we’re building a concentration camp, the Chinese are going to hack the Pentagon, we’re going to buy more tanks we don’t need, we won’t be able to properly respond to the next recession, and thousands of people will die from air and water pollution. But at least we got more NASA funding!

The real Existential Risk we should be concerned about

PNRJ ethics, futurism, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457458

There is a rather large subgroup within the rationalist community (loosely defined because organizing freethinkers is like herding cats) that focuses on existential risks, also called global catastrophic risks. Prominent examples include Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Their stated goal in life is to save humanity from destruction. And when you put it that way, it sounds pretty darn important. How can you disagree with wanting to save humanity from destruction?

Well, there are actually people who do (the Voluntary Human Extinction movement), but they are profoundly silly. It should be obvious to anyone with even a basic moral compass that saving humanity from destruction is a good thing.

It’s not the goal of fighting existential risk that bothers me. It’s the approach. Specifically, they almost all seem to focus on exotic existential risks, vivid and compelling existential risks that are the stuff of great science fiction stories. In particular, they have a rather odd obsession with AI.

Maybe it’s the overlap with Singularitarians, and their inability to understand that exponentials are not arbitrarily fast; if you just keep projecting the growth in computing power as growing forever, surely eventually we’ll have a computer powerful enough to solve all the world’s problems, right? Well, yeah, I guess… if we can actually maintain the progress that long, which we almost certainly can’t, and if the problems turn out to be computationally tractable at all (the fastest possible computer that could fit inside the observable universe could not brute-force solve the game of Go, though a heuristic AI did just beat one of the world’s best players), and/or if we find really good heuristic methods of narrowing down the solution space… but that’s an awful lot of “if”s.

But AI isn’t what we need to worry about in terms of saving humanity from destruction. Nor is it asteroid impacts; NASA has been doing a good job watching for asteroids lately, and estimates the current risk of a serious impact (by which I mean something like a city-destroyer or global climate shock, not even a global killer) at around 1/10,000 per year. Alien invasion is right out; we can’t even find clear evidence of bacteria on Mars, and the skies are so empty of voices it has been called a paradox. Gamma ray bursts could kill us, and we aren’t sure about the probability of that (we think it’s small?), but much like brain aneurysms, there really isn’t a whole lot we can do to prevent them.

There is one thing that we really need to worry about destroying humanity, and one other thing that could potentially get close over a much longer timescale. The long-range threat is ecological collapse; as global climate change gets worse and the oceans become more acidic and the aquifers are drained, we could eventually reach the point where humanity cannot survive on Earth, or at least where our population collapses so severely that civilization as we know it is destroyed. This might not seem like such a threat, since we would see this coming decades or centuries in advance—but we are seeing it coming decades or centuries in advance, and yet we can’t seem to get the world’s policymakers to wake up and do something about it. So that’s clearly the second-most important existential risk.

But the most important existential risk, by far, no question, is nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are the only foreseeable, preventable means by which humanity could be destroyed in the next twenty minutes.

Yes, that is approximately the time it takes an ICBM to hit its target after launch. There are almost 4,000 ICBMs currently deployed, mostly by the US and Russia. Once we include submarine-launched missiles and bombers, the total number of global nuclear weapons is over 15,000. I apologize for terrifying you by saying that these weapons could be deployed in a moment’s notice to wipe out most of human civilization within half an hour, followed by a global ecological collapse and fallout that would endanger the future of the entire human race—but it’s the truth. If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.

I’ve intentionally linked the Union of Concerned Scientists as one of those sources. Now they are people who understand existential risk. They don’t talk about AI and asteroids and aliens (how alliterative). They talk about climate change and nuclear weapons.

We must stop this. We must get rid of these weapons. Next to that, literally nothing else matters.

“What if we’re conquered by tyrants?” It won’t matter. “What if there is a genocide?” It won’t matter. “What if there is a global economic collapse?” None of these things will matter, if the human race wipes itself out with nuclear weapons.

To speak like an economist for a moment, the utility of a global nuclear war must be set at negative infinity. Any detectable reduction in the probability of that event must be considered worth paying any cost to achieve. I don’t care if it costs $20 trillion and results in us being taken over by genocidal fascists—we are talking about the destruction of humanity. We can spend $20 trillion (actually the US as a whole does every 14 months!). We can survive genocidal fascists. We cannot survive nuclear war.

The good news is, we shouldn’t actually have to pay that sort of cost. All we have to do is dismantle our nuclear arsenal, and get other countries—particularly Russia—to dismantle theirs. In the long run, we will increase our wealth as our efforts are no longer wasted maintaining doomsday machines.

The main challenge is actually a matter of game theory. The surprisingly-sophisticated 1990s cartoon show the Animaniacs basically got it right when they sang: “We’d beat our swords into liverwurst / Down by the East Riverside / But no one wants to be the first!”

The thinking, anyway, is that this is basically a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If the US disarms and Russia doesn’t, Russia can destroy the US. Conversely, if Russia disarms and the US doesn’t, the US can destroy Russia. If neither disarms, we’re left where we are. Whether or not the other country disarms, you’re always better off not disarming. So neither country disarms.

But I contend that it is not, in fact, a Prisoner’s Dilemma. It could be a Stag Hunt; if that’s the case, then only multilateral disarmament makes sense, because the best outcome is if we both disarm, but the worst outcome is if we disarm and they don’t. Once we expect them to disarm, we have no temptation to renege on the deal ourselves; but if we think there’s a good chance they won’t, we might not want to either. Stag Hunts have two stable Nash equilibria; one is where both arm, the other where both disarm.

But in fact, I think it may be simply the trivial game.

There aren’t actually that many possible symmetric two-player nonzero-sum games (basically it’s a question of ordering 4 possibilities, and it’s symmetric, so 12 possible games), and one that we never talk about (because it’s sort of boring) is the trivial game: If I do the right thing and you do the right thing, we’re both better off. If you do the wrong thing and I do the right thing, I’m better off. If we both do the wrong thing, we’re both worse off. So, obviously, we both do the right thing, because we’d be idiots not to. Formally, we say that cooperation is a strictly dominant strategy. There’s no dilemma, no paradox; the self-interested strategy is the optimal strategy. (I find it kind of amusing that laissez-faire economics basically amounts to assuming that all real-world games are the trivial game.)

That is, I don’t think the US would actually benefit from nuking Russia, even if we could do so without retaliation. Likewise, I don’t think Russia would actually benefit from nuking the US. One of the things we’ve discovered—the hardest way possible—through human history is that working together is often better for everyone than fighting. Russia could nuke NATO, and thereby destroy all of their largest trading partners, or they could continue trading with us. Even if they are despicable psychopaths who think nothing of committing mass murder (Putin might be, but surely there are people under his command who aren’t?), it’s simply not in Russia’s best interest to nuke the US and Europe. Likewise, it is not in our best interest to nuke them.

Nuclear war is a strange game: The only winning move is not to play.

So I say, let’s stop playing. Yes, let’s unilaterally disarm, the thing that so many policy analysts are terrified of because they’re so convinced we’re in a Prisoner’s Dilemma or a Stag Hunt. “What’s to stop them from destroying us, if we make it impossible for us to destroy them!?” I dunno, maybe basic human decency, or failing that, rationality?

Several other countries have already done this—South Africa unilaterally disarmed, and nobody nuked them. Japan refused to build nuclear weapons in the first place—and I think it says something that they’re the only people to ever have them used against them.

Our conventional military is plenty large enough to defend us against all realistic threats, and could even be repurposed to defend against nuclear threats as well, by a method I call credible targeted conventional response. Instead of building ever-larger nuclear arsenals to threaten devastation in the world’s most terrifying penis-measuring contest, you deploy covert operatives (perhaps Navy SEALS in submarines, or double agents, or these days even stealth drones) around the world, with the standing order that if they have reason to believe a country initiated a nuclear attack, they will stop at nothing to hunt down and kill the specific people responsible for that attack. Not the country they came from; not the city they live in; those specific people. If a leader is enough of a psychopath to be willing to kill 300 million people in another country, he’s probably enough of a psychopath to be willing to lose 150 million people in his own country. He likely has a secret underground bunker that would allow him to survive, at least if humanity as a whole does. So you should be threatening the one thing he does care about—himself. You make sure he knows that if he pushes that button, you’ll find that bunker, drop in from helicopters, and shoot him in the face.

The “targeted conventional response” should be clear by now—you use non-nuclear means to respond, and you target the particular leaders responsible—but let me say a bit more about the “credible” part. The threat of mutually-assured destruction is actually not a credible one. It’s not what we call in game theory a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. If you know that Russia has launched 1500 ICBMs to destroy every city in America, you actually have no reason at all to retaliate with your own 1500 ICBMs, and the most important reason imaginable not to. Your people are dead either way; you can’t save them. You lose. The only question now is whether you risk taking the rest of humanity down with you. If you have even the most basic human decency, you will not push that button. You will not “retaliate” in useless vengeance that could wipe out human civilization. Thus, your threat is a bluff—it is not credible.

But if your response is targeted and conventional, it suddenly becomes credible. It’s exactly reversed; you now have every reason to retaliate, and no reason not to. Your covert operation teams aren’t being asked to destroy humanity; they’re being tasked with finding and executing the greatest mass murderer in history. They don’t have some horrific moral dilemma to resolve; they have the opportunity to become the world’s greatest heroes. Indeed, they’d very likely have the whole world (or what’s left of it) on their side; even the population of the attacking country would rise up in revolt and the double agents could use the revolt as cover. Now you have no reason to even hesitate; your threat is completely credible. The only question is whether you can actually pull it off, and if we committed the full resources of the United States military to preparing for this possibility, I see no reason to doubt that we could. If a US President can be assassinated by a lone maniac (and yes, that is actually what happened), then the world’s finest covert operations teams can assassinate whatever leader pushed that button.

This is a policy that works both unilaterally and multilaterally. We could even assemble an international coalition—perhaps make the UN “peacekeepers” put their money where their mouth is and train the finest special operatives in the history of the world tasked with actually keeping the peace.

Let’s not wait for someone else to save humanity from destruction. Let’s be the first.