Abaddon_Ambrosius posted:
Crippling oneself and one's people with ongoing massive debt -- beyond short-term debt which you can easily rotate in 1-3 years -- is a self-destructive choice.
Water and air are not choices.
You can certainly remove water and oxygen. Although usually we choose not to.
Certainly you can find examples of countries with debt in their own currency who self destructed.
This would be a very different conversation if the US had their debt in peso's and relied on the Central Bank of Mexico.
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I have a checking account, a money market account and a brokerage account.
If I move $5,000 from checking into the money market account for 6 months with the plan to move it back into checking at the end of that term....have I crippled myself with debt? I dont think I have. But your understanding of national debt says so.
I owe myself $5,000. This is not a real bad situation. You are unable to view debt in the aggregate...you can only see it as if you owe the bank money. But thats not at all the situation with US debt.
For the most part, US taxpayers have lent the US government money. Eventually the US government will have to go to the US taxpayers to raise more money to pay back the US taxpayers. This gets all melty in your head....but its not the disaster situation you keep wanting it to be.
The debt may (and likely will) get passed on to a future generation of taxpayers, but the bond payments will also fall to a future generation of US taxpayers.
The ultimate trump card is the ability to create new dollars to pay back taxpayers. The negative consequence here is a fall in the value of the dollar....but the result of that is a large boost to US production and exports (and the associated job growth and wage growth)...so its not clear that the negative is really that bad.
