41–50 of 234 posts
Isn't the "miracle" just a persistent unexpectedly higher level of inflation, over a long period of time, doing a soft-default and screwing over long bongholders? That seems like the most painless way out.
I think the _bongholders_ will probably come out pretty painless dude
Let’s answer this man with his own damn quote : > History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help in the future, without some caution. We can get negative confirmation from history, which is invaluable,…
Isn't he just saying it's inevitable from what's observable? E.g. approaching the point where servicing the debt itself becomes untenable? There's nothing historical or predictive involved that I can see. If a group of people are telling you again and again, for decades, that "we're just not ever going to even slow down the pace we're wracking up unrepayable debt, no matter what", isn't it just a case of take them at…
Does this correctly factor in that currently the US is the western worlds de facto military, more or less? Because as long as we hold that position I don’t imagine the US government will be shut out of the debt markets at all. This is part of the problem I wager is there is still enormous incentive to keep the scheme afloat by other nations too
The dollar is still backed by a heavy metal, it just switched from gold to plutonium.
We owe a bit more than 1 year's GDP. Most families that own a house owe substantially more than 1 year's income. Last time we reduced the annual deficit to zero, the usual debt hawks all reversed their position and said "this is terrible". We've demonstrated in my lifetime that we can do this. The fact that "we" don't want to right now has more to do with Republican attitudes towards taxation than anything else. MMT…
> The fact that "we" don't want to right now has more to do with Republican attitudes towards taxation than anything else. No, it has just as much to do with Democrat attitudes towards spending. You're right that the Republicans are partly to blame. But to balance a budget requires cutting spending as much as, if not more than, increasing revenues. The problem is that ~everyone thinks using their preferred approach (…
We owe a bit more than 1 year's GDP. Most families that own a house owe substantially more than 1 year's income. Last time we reduced the annual deficit to zero, the usual debt hawks all reversed their position and said "this is terrible". We've demonstrated in my lifetime that we can do this. The fact that "we" don't want to right now has more to do with Republican attitudes towards taxation than anything else. MMT…
Comparing a government's debt to its GDP is like comparing a couple's debt to their employers' total revenues. The country's government doesn't own all its residents' property, and is usually unable take their income streams. MMT says a lot of things, but people only seem to follow it when convenient.
No. It's more like comparing a merchant's debts to the value of the turnover of their inventory. Sure, their revenue isn't the same as their income, but their income tends to be proportional to their revenue. Similarly, while GDP isn't representative of federal income, because most federal income is derived from taxation of activities that contribute to GDP, they tend to be closely correlated. Per Hauser's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law), federal tax revenues have been roughly consistent with 20% of the GDP. Since increasing the share the government extracts from the economy produces net drag on the economy, you don't want to get in to a situation where you have to increase that ratio significantly without a dramatic change in what the federal government puts back in to the economy (which also generally doesn't happen).
So yeah, the experts who look at debt to GDP ratios aren't crazy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing a government's debt to its GDP is like comparing a couple's debt to their employers' total revenues. The country's government doesn't own all its residents' property, and is usually unable take their income streams. MMT says a lot of things, but people only seem to follow it when convenient.
Comparing debt to GDP is very much mainstream economics, not MMT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio > is usually unable take their income streams It takes a percentage of that, through taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about that solution, but we could elect representation that does the right thing(s), and not just the thing(s) that get them reelected.
We could choose, for instance, to restrict people to single terms. I don't think long term exposure to power is actually that helpful, and it creates brand names and political careers, none of which really seems to be that helpful. I think restricting the presidency to 2 terms is actually quite positive, and I wish we had a similar system in Canada (although generally it works out to be more or less the same)
But then their final-word wrap-up at the end is to shoehorn in pumping of specific stocks. (Including one of the most famously over-valued ones, right after the article just called out mis-valuations. Maybe not intentiona, but just an accident of the standard operating procedure of tacking pumping of any arbitrary thing, onto the end of any bearish message -- create a sense of problem, and present a "solution", for retail investors foolishly trying to stock-pick or sector-pick.)
Business 'news' at this point doesn't need an LLM to generate it -- you could do it with a small Perl script.
Congress-people have few incentives to restrain or reduce the national debt. There is plenty of talk, but little action. The event horizon may be distant, but the pull is inexorable. What could possibly solve this? Could we give representatives and senators bonuses for spending less and taxing more?
The only thing that makes the current situation tenable is being able to print money.
Put simply, the government doesn't actually view it as a problem. If you have an unlimited credit card you never have to repay, that's not a problem for you but for everyone else.
Bit of an unfortunate omission from the US constitution really. That's the only way they'd have kept it - otherwise the moment you get any "economic crisis" they'd just "suspend" it again.
We owe a bit more than 1 year's GDP. Most families that own a house owe substantially more than 1 year's income. Last time we reduced the annual deficit to zero, the usual debt hawks all reversed their position and said "this is terrible". We've demonstrated in my lifetime that we can do this. The fact that "we" don't want to right now has more to do with Republican attitudes towards taxation than anything else. MMT…
Comparing a government's debt to its GDP is like comparing a couple's debt to their employers' total revenues. The country's government doesn't own all its residents' property, and is usually unable take their income streams. MMT says a lot of things, but people only seem to follow it when convenient.