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U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

nytimes.com

101–110 of 227 posts

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#101

Welp, I am just glad I have no debts or loans myself; paid all my student loans off well over a decade ago. Excited to not have a credit rating whatsoever.

You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#102
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financially ledger is just a social construct; the IOUs of the past are never paid off as they never mattered. Finance shit just keeps innumerates and those ignorant of physics believing wild end of the universe theories. For more look up Debt jubilee's; humans wiped the debt of the dead off the books and no black holes opened within the sun, no gods descended from Olympus and slaughtered the children Fucking mesmeri…

US Treasuries happen to be a significant part of many peoples retirement savings. So I think your hot take is pretty uninformed.

[flagged]

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#103
And who's going to hold the US responsible for repayment? Way I see it, US has the power to just tell any creditor that they won't be repaying, whether through structuring it as some economic package or just straight up saying go suck it. The former's been done before (1933); maybe eventually we'll see the latter, if a nation has the balls to ask. And talking about it is pretty pointless, like talking about how wet you'll get swimming in a pool.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#104
What if we viewed national debt like CPI? It’s not that it’s ridiculously higher now, it’s that money works differently now.

What used do seem implausible is now accepted as normal, and tough luck if your income and wealth fell behind / didn’t keep pace.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#105
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is special because it’s the only asset that can be used to purchase goods and services. If I have a pile of 10 year Treasury bonds worth $500, and I want to buy a TV, I have to first convince someone with $500 in cash that they’d rather have my bonds than buy their own TV.

No thats not true. It operates under expectations - the more liquid the asset, the more likely you'll be OK with accepting it in the context of a trade. The discount is for illiquidity.

> No thats not true.

I'd love to see someone buy a TV with those bonds.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

the history has demonstrated these are Republican problems. Democrats are shit for other things, but not for fisical stupidity like cutting taxes and rasing spending.

Why does nobody post references anymore!? These are simple facts that nobody should be arguing about.

https://www.investopedia.com/democrats-vs-republicans-who-ha...

> Republican presidents added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913.

> Democratic presidents have added a total of $18 trillion to the national debt since 1913 (adjusted for inflation), while Republicans have added $17.3 trillion

So everyone downvoting and flagging people saying it's a problem with both parties should be ashamed. Tribalism is stupid.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#108

Welp, I am just glad I have no debts or loans myself; paid all my student loans off well over a decade ago. Excited to not have a credit rating whatsoever.

You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.

I don't actually. I paid the last of my monthly student loan payments off in 2013 when I was an ex-pat. The rest had long ago fell off my credit report. I know this because I pulled my credit and was told I have none also by a couple of apartment owners, when I looked at places.

I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008.

Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#109
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.

You are conveniently ignoring the other half of finance - one party includes plans to actually pay for what they want to spend while the other cuts revenue to make rich people happy. This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.

Biden's infra plan was $550bn in new spending, which was offset in only $50bn of new revenue and $110bn of spending reductions. So, on net, it was massively inflationary and toasted the budget.

That was just one proposal with half a trillion.

Re: U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues

#110
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.

The spending floodgates have been reduced in the past. Under democratic presidents.

Clinton made a serious effort to pay down the debt, but none of the Democrats since did.

Clinton was also not a Democrat if you compare him to current Democrats. His admin was more right wing than the Trump administration. Clinton's crime bill, serious immigration crackdowns. I mean, Trump did partial criminal justice reform in his first term. That's the complete opposite of the Clinton crime bill, which skyrocketed incarceration.

Clinton's IIRAIRA bill laid out the blueprint currently being utilized for rapid deportations. In fact, 'expedited removal' is a core feature of the bill. Also, he architected the concept of administrative warrants currently being used by ICE for deportations.

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