Anti-Trust Enforcement: Pro. Break up big companies! Break up monopolies, especially tech monopolies! Disapprove mergers!
Measuring wealth: We should not conflate these separate concepts:
- How much money someone has
- How much wealth someone has
- How much market capitalization of stock does someone have
I discuss this in People Think Elon Musk Has a Trillion Dollars, because Elon Musk does not have---and has never had---a trillion dollars of money, nor even a trillion dollars of wealth.
Debt ceiling: Opposed. As I write in The Debt Ceiling Is Unconstitutional, and Biden Should Just Say So, the debt ceiling is, well, unconstitutional. Default would be disastrous, and there are other mechanisms to keep budgets in line.
I go over this again in Debt Ceiling, Redux.
Government spending: Pro. Money has to come from somewhere, and the government is likely to spend it on good projects like infrastructure, rail, and climate technology, whereas the private sector is likely to spend it on consolidating monopolies and dumb tech feds, like AI and blockchain. Discretionary spending should focus on technological development and infrastructure, rather than military, and it should be an investment: it should try to grow the economy by a multiplier of the amount of the spending.
Regulations: Nuanced. Regulations should be effective but simple. Adding bureaucracy for limited benefit can be very bad, even if the purported goals are good.
Deficit spending: Pro. The government should always have at least a mild deficit, specifically in the US. Total debt is a bad metric for anything, but it can just monotonically increase, as GDP also grows (see next point). Debt per GDP should probably stay steady, although it might have to increase and decrease in various situations depending on economic conditions.
Growth: Pro. Green growth is possible. Saving the planet will be accomplished by building technology, not by asceticism or de-growth or “going without,” because that means the death of billions and massive human suffering, on the scale necessary to fix environmental problems and especially climate change. The economy can and will continue to grow as technology improves.
Taxation: Taxes in the US could be mildly higher. Tax increases should be careful to focus on the actual rich rather than the upper-middle class and small businesses. More important than increasing taxes is simplifying them, closing loopholes, funding enforcement, and getting rid of the arcane requirement in the US to file our own taxes. Just tell me how much money you want, IRS!
Entitlements: Entitlements should be universal rather than means-tested. For example: Everyone should get food stamps, funded by a tax that the poorest won’t pay anything for.