Sanity with McArdle

I link to interesting things, but sometimes underestimate how important simple sanity is in national affairs.  Razib interviews Megan McArdle. The Follies of Populism part is more his than hers, though she doesn't disagree.  Her strength is economic issues. 

 We're gonna have a fiscal crisis, what that means is up for debate. We're gonna have a fiscal crisis in the sense that at some point we are gonna get into a bad situation where the interest rates on our debt are rising enough - Okay, let me qualify this. If we reach super intelligence, I don't know the universe gets wierd, economics is riding around in the sky, we're all like living on clouds.  at that point I don't know. But assuming that we do not get super intelligence that rips through the economy and raises the GDP growth to 35% and/or super intelligence just looks around at all the carbon based life forms, and is like, why? This is very untidy. We should get rid of that. It's those uses could be those, those resources could be put to better use for silicone production. But assuming that neither of those things happens, we're just kind of past the point of no return to getting a good outcome. I've been screaming about this literally for my entire writing career. And when I started, I would say this is coming in the 2030s and people would it was as if I might have, I might as well have said, this is coming in the year 40,000 ad. It's just didn't register. No one was interested. It was so far off that no one paid attention. And that was the point at which we could have had very good outcomes. There were lots of ways to make small tweaks to Social Security, to bring it into balance, to make small tweaks to Medicare. We did not do that. You know, to lightly raise taxes, to lightly change the rules for getting benefits. We did none of that. Instead, we spent more on Medicare, and we did not reform Social Security. And at this point we're less than a decade off, yeah, the solutions are much harder.