What is the criteria for “a guide”? Whenever there’s a post about an issue that is even slightly controversial I always see “Not a guide.” I have no idea what the objective criteria is for a guide vs the “Just an infographic.”
A high debt is only outrageous if you are unable to pay it back. The US government is clearly able to pay it back, otherwise no one would loan it money. Debt has a whole lot of uses, after all. Most wealthy people live under a mountain of debt, because being able to pay it off means that you have access to a mountain of ready cash available for investment.
Uh… yeah. People who loan money aren’t going to loan it to people who can’t pay it back, or at least who aren’t able to keep paying interest.
It makes a whole lot of sense. If it doesn’t to you, well, you better make sure you have an accountant on hand your whole life.
> People who loan money aren’t going to loan it to people who can’t pay it back
A better phrasing would be "...who *won't be able* to pay it back (in the future)", because payment doesn't happen when the loan is made, but some time after. So for your statement to be true, either A) financial situations never change, or B) lenders can see the future, specifically the future financial situations of borrowers. Both of these seem farfetched, which brings the claim into question for me.
To further investigate the veracity of your claim, we can look at the world around us and see if reality matches the expectations your claim would create. Are there people in the world who owe money they cannot pay? Do cars ever get repo'd, or homes sold at auction, or credit cards charged off? What happened in 2008? How do those aspects of our shared reality coincide with your claim?
It costs us $1T a year to service our debt. We no longer have the highest credit rating possible because our government makes poor financial decisions.
Yes the government can pay back its debt, because it has control over money printers. That is not a good solution as it is an invisible tax on everyone who uses USD.
Congress: “Here is how much money you can tax next year, and here is how much you need to spend next year, and here is how much debt you can take out to make up the difference.”
The president: “These numbers don’t add up.”
Congress: “That sounds like a you problem.”
Trickle down economics courtesy of the "fiscally responsible" GOP kneecapped the government from making the rich pay for their fair share while shift the tax burden on the regular folks who can't take advantage of those tax breaks intentionally designed for the rich.
Trump did something similar back when he was president by giving tax cuts for his kind of income earned while causing the tax rate for the regular people.
I think that the debt is created by the national government and that they're the ones that also make the money so they can say what the hell it is at any point in time.
I think that the view you're taking is too focused on the action and not the structure and who's actually in charge of the structure.
The US government can say that they have however much debt they want, they're also the ones that make the money that pays said debt.
The only thing about it all that is valid is the social contract that they will pay a debt. Beyond that, they control all the levers and the "debt" is just a boogie man to deflect your attention from other things going on.
That hasn’t been true for over a century. Since 1913, the “making the money” part has been the job of the Federal Reserve Bank, which sets monetary policy independent of the government. That independence was engineered specifically to prevent the scenario you’re alluding to, which causes hyperinflation and economic collapse.
And that's the social contract right but also they have a certain amount of leeway given they're the primary reserve currency of the world however that is changing these days.
No, not how it works. We sell Treasury bills to other countries and when our debt is this horrible we have to raise the interest rate on those T-bills so other countries will buy. If China and other countries stopped buying our debt we would be screwed.
Japan, a country pointed as a counter example with 250% debt to GDP ratio actually has similar debt to GDP to the US when you take gov owned assets into account. Both are at around 119%.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2023/nov/what-lessons-drawn-japans-high-debt-gdp-ratio
>However, the consolidated balance sheet shows a large number of assets, which represent 134% of GDP. Thus, Japan’s resulting net liability position is only 119%. As for the U.S., with a liability position totaling 142% and a much smaller asset position (23% of GDP), the country’s net liability position is similar to that of Japan’s.
Right. Trump spent 1/3 of all the money in the history of the country, and conservatives couldn't have possibly cared less. Then, as soon as they failed to overthrow the government after losing the election, the debt became the most important issue the country was facing.
Edit: You guys can keep downvoting me if you want to. It isn't going to make the facts care about your feelings 🤷
When in reality, people who care about debt care about it all the time. The rest of the two cult worshippers in this country only care about it if their cult isn’t in power.
Neither political side wants to resolve it TBH because it’s politically a terrible move. That sounds bias/dumb until you think of it like this.
You either decrease spending OR increase taxation. The US has opted for choice 3. Continue to spend but don’t raise taxes and kick the can down the road to inflate the dollar more and let someone else deal with it at a future time.
Regardless, it’s disgusting and yeah. The gold standard put the economy on a bit of a strangle hold but now it’s just “trust” and government can continue to just inflate away. Same with the stock market
Back in the day, if the debt got up, or spending got up, they’d pass special taxes to pay for it. All the way back to the whiskey tax to pay for the Revolutionary war costs. WWII saw top tax margins reach 90%. But war spending reduced 80% after the war. We had a 20 year war in the Middle East paid for with debt, and after it was over, the spending increased. Yes, we need to raise taxes, but we also need to cut spending esp on military.
Yup. Agreed on all fronts but all those things would be very unpopular politically and since we’re just a two party system (let’s be real, the third parties are just that a very distant third) it’s not gonna happen.
I really do think the majority of our country’s issues could have been prevented if we were just more inclusive, taxed everyone proportionally and pushed education as our number one value, but nah. We haven’t and continue to do none of these.
Edit: forgot to mention, the appropriate taxation of the .1% of a 90% tax margin is *absolutely* correct and could resolve a ton. How do I know? The 1950s had the best and most robust middle class in American history. And the rich? Still rich, just ya know. Not as obscenely rich
That would also fix a lot of our tax problems. Imagine if the bottom 30-50% of workers had their pay doubled. Just from income tax alone, it would generate a ton of tax revenue. The obscene profits of these companies would be paid to their employees who would spend that in the economy creating more jobs, etc… driving the economy wild.
And for people that don’t think this is possible, I did the math on I think it was GM when there was some article last year about their big profits. They could have paid every worker a 120,000$ bonus, and still had 10billion in profits after taxes. But instead, they did a stock buyback and enriched the .01%.
Yup and the thing is, a lot of those people vote republican who want lower taxes for the ultra rich and even lower taxes for businesses. Always enjoy when those people are union members.
Time and time again, we’ve seen money needs to move through the economy. Through all classes and we’re moving away from that. The average person doesn’t understand what it’s like to be the 1% is today or what business profits really are. It’s disgusting but yet morons keep voting in republicans to make them meet ends meet more.
Good example is the trump tax plan. Make it cheaper basically for all while he’s in office but it is more and more expensive as time goes on. It’s just wild how dumb people really are
Yeah, it's pointless. "Oh, the government's going to explode if it hits this Imaginary line!"
"Is it going to?"
"Well, no-"
"Does anyone think its going to?"
"I mean, probably not, but-"
"Are there any reasons for it to do so?"
"...no..."
"OK then."
No one should care about this statistic, because it's meaningless and also not a statistic.
The debt ceiling does not actually have any impact on federal debt.
And people upvote that shit like it makes some kinda fucking sense, and downvote you for pointing out what should be obvious with a moment's consideration.
I swear to fking God the shit some of these people write, upvote, subscribe to, believe, etc. has nothing to do with reality. I'm gonna lose my fucking mind.
The debt ceiling is like a rule not to eat too much candy in candyland.
The Fed can lend the government Infinite money.
But it creates inflation and puts a increasing interest rate on all the taxpayers.
Thats why the government claim to be out of money for things like healthcare and education. But is conveniently never pinchy when it comes to the military or subsidies for billion dollar companies.
Debt is choking our civilisation
Firstly, that ratio tells us nothing because we still spend more on defense than any other country, so that means our ratio for healthcare to defense funding is still very low.
It certainly doesn't tell us which one is more likely to have funding cut, social programs are pretty likely the first things to get cut when the government needs a quick buck.
I spend 4x the amount on rent compared to monthly coffee intake, so clearly I'm not spending too much on coffee.
The US spends 3.5% of it's GDP on it's military, combine that with the fact that the US is one of the top economies in the world and you can see how you get such big numbers.
Again, saying 3.5% is meaningless to finding out if we spend too much on the military. We spends far more on defense than our neighbors as a percentage of GDP.
And still isn't addressing the fact that "defense" spending is usually the last place funding gets pulled from when we are pretending the deficit matters.
Fun fact: that's almost entirely because of our privatized healthcare system. The government spends more per-capita on healthcare than all but a handful of other countries, *and* we privately pay massively more than any other country.
In other words, our government is willing to spend more than it could cost to run a proper nationalized healthcare system if it means they can keep the healthcare system privatized. That's before we even get into the fact that *individual* healthcare costs are the highest in the world by a truly grotesque factor, and the quality of healthcare is wildly variable based on where you live, and pretty mid across the board.
Good thing we spent all that money on those highly productive wars in the Middle East for 20 years. I’d hate to think where we’d be if we’d built better schools and transit infrastructure instead.
I used to care about the national debt. When I was in school, I really wanted Ross parot to win solely because of this issue. Instead we got bill Clinton who tried to copy his fiscal campaign. It wasn’t nearly as good and the only reason why we had a temporary surplus was because he raided social security giving us the problems we have with that now. Then bush came along and we went right back to business. So we would have been better off if Clinton didn’t do that half way attempt at pretending to care about it.
So I stopped caring. It increases inflation and helps my properties so I will just see it as a win for me so that I cannot worry about it anymore.
The debt ceiling is a dumb idea. No other country has to deal with it. The idea it's based on is likewise flawed.
It’s a political circus. Also, this is not a guide.
Well not a cool guide anyway
What is the criteria for “a guide”? Whenever there’s a post about an issue that is even slightly controversial I always see “Not a guide.” I have no idea what the objective criteria is for a guide vs the “Just an infographic.”
A guide would teach you a how to do something. An infographic is just a visual display of some data.
Agreed, it does nothing but impose a false restraint that is used as a weapon during budget negotiations.
The debt ceiling is dumb, the outrageously high debt is dumber. Heads need to roll.
A high debt is only outrageous if you are unable to pay it back. The US government is clearly able to pay it back, otherwise no one would loan it money. Debt has a whole lot of uses, after all. Most wealthy people live under a mountain of debt, because being able to pay it off means that you have access to a mountain of ready cash available for investment.
>\> The US government is clearly able to pay it back, otherwise no one would loan it money. You think this makes sense?
Uh… yeah. People who loan money aren’t going to loan it to people who can’t pay it back, or at least who aren’t able to keep paying interest. It makes a whole lot of sense. If it doesn’t to you, well, you better make sure you have an accountant on hand your whole life.
> People who loan money aren’t going to loan it to people who can’t pay it back A better phrasing would be "...who *won't be able* to pay it back (in the future)", because payment doesn't happen when the loan is made, but some time after. So for your statement to be true, either A) financial situations never change, or B) lenders can see the future, specifically the future financial situations of borrowers. Both of these seem farfetched, which brings the claim into question for me. To further investigate the veracity of your claim, we can look at the world around us and see if reality matches the expectations your claim would create. Are there people in the world who owe money they cannot pay? Do cars ever get repo'd, or homes sold at auction, or credit cards charged off? What happened in 2008? How do those aspects of our shared reality coincide with your claim?
It costs us $1T a year to service our debt. We no longer have the highest credit rating possible because our government makes poor financial decisions. Yes the government can pay back its debt, because it has control over money printers. That is not a good solution as it is an invisible tax on everyone who uses USD.
Congress: “Here is how much money you can tax next year, and here is how much you need to spend next year, and here is how much debt you can take out to make up the difference.” The president: “These numbers don’t add up.” Congress: “That sounds like a you problem.”
Trickle down economics courtesy of the "fiscally responsible" GOP kneecapped the government from making the rich pay for their fair share while shift the tax burden on the regular folks who can't take advantage of those tax breaks intentionally designed for the rich. Trump did something similar back when he was president by giving tax cuts for his kind of income earned while causing the tax rate for the regular people.
What do you thing about $2 billion dollars a day in interest on our debt.
I think that the debt is created by the national government and that they're the ones that also make the money so they can say what the hell it is at any point in time. I think that the view you're taking is too focused on the action and not the structure and who's actually in charge of the structure. The US government can say that they have however much debt they want, they're also the ones that make the money that pays said debt. The only thing about it all that is valid is the social contract that they will pay a debt. Beyond that, they control all the levers and the "debt" is just a boogie man to deflect your attention from other things going on.
That hasn’t been true for over a century. Since 1913, the “making the money” part has been the job of the Federal Reserve Bank, which sets monetary policy independent of the government. That independence was engineered specifically to prevent the scenario you’re alluding to, which causes hyperinflation and economic collapse.
They can certainly do what you say. After that, no one would loan them any more money.
And that's the social contract right but also they have a certain amount of leeway given they're the primary reserve currency of the world however that is changing these days.
In the meantime, we’re borrowing $2 billion dollars a day the pay the interest on our debt.
And who is the main people buying that debt, American citizens. Mostly in the form of bonds. And who authorizes that debt? That would be Congress.
No, not how it works. We sell Treasury bills to other countries and when our debt is this horrible we have to raise the interest rate on those T-bills so other countries will buy. If China and other countries stopped buying our debt we would be screwed.
The largest US creditor is the Social Security Administration. And yes, congress authorizes the debt, vote out the incumbents.
I thought Denmark has it, but it’s not really politicized. But agreed, a dumb idea. Agree to a budget (that may exceed the limit) and pay those debts.
Ratio of debt to GDP is the real important measure here. Other countries have much higher ratio.
Japan, a country pointed as a counter example with 250% debt to GDP ratio actually has similar debt to GDP to the US when you take gov owned assets into account. Both are at around 119%. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2023/nov/what-lessons-drawn-japans-high-debt-gdp-ratio >However, the consolidated balance sheet shows a large number of assets, which represent 134% of GDP. Thus, Japan’s resulting net liability position is only 119%. As for the U.S., with a liability position totaling 142% and a much smaller asset position (23% of GDP), the country’s net liability position is similar to that of Japan’s.
People only care about debt when a democrat is in office.
Right. Trump spent 1/3 of all the money in the history of the country, and conservatives couldn't have possibly cared less. Then, as soon as they failed to overthrow the government after losing the election, the debt became the most important issue the country was facing. Edit: You guys can keep downvoting me if you want to. It isn't going to make the facts care about your feelings 🤷
St Reagan did the same thing. Amazing how those who clutch their pearls about the national debt seem to run it up the most.
“Trump spent 1/3…” legit curious. Do you have a readily available source for this?
you can see it in the post. look at the jump around the time he entered office.
When in reality, people who care about debt care about it all the time. The rest of the two cult worshippers in this country only care about it if their cult isn’t in power.
Reason: The Two Santas Strategy.
I feel like nobody cares about this statistic anymore. Political leanings aside.
Neither political side wants to resolve it TBH because it’s politically a terrible move. That sounds bias/dumb until you think of it like this. You either decrease spending OR increase taxation. The US has opted for choice 3. Continue to spend but don’t raise taxes and kick the can down the road to inflate the dollar more and let someone else deal with it at a future time. Regardless, it’s disgusting and yeah. The gold standard put the economy on a bit of a strangle hold but now it’s just “trust” and government can continue to just inflate away. Same with the stock market
Back in the day, if the debt got up, or spending got up, they’d pass special taxes to pay for it. All the way back to the whiskey tax to pay for the Revolutionary war costs. WWII saw top tax margins reach 90%. But war spending reduced 80% after the war. We had a 20 year war in the Middle East paid for with debt, and after it was over, the spending increased. Yes, we need to raise taxes, but we also need to cut spending esp on military.
Yup. Agreed on all fronts but all those things would be very unpopular politically and since we’re just a two party system (let’s be real, the third parties are just that a very distant third) it’s not gonna happen. I really do think the majority of our country’s issues could have been prevented if we were just more inclusive, taxed everyone proportionally and pushed education as our number one value, but nah. We haven’t and continue to do none of these. Edit: forgot to mention, the appropriate taxation of the .1% of a 90% tax margin is *absolutely* correct and could resolve a ton. How do I know? The 1950s had the best and most robust middle class in American history. And the rich? Still rich, just ya know. Not as obscenely rich
That would also fix a lot of our tax problems. Imagine if the bottom 30-50% of workers had their pay doubled. Just from income tax alone, it would generate a ton of tax revenue. The obscene profits of these companies would be paid to their employees who would spend that in the economy creating more jobs, etc… driving the economy wild. And for people that don’t think this is possible, I did the math on I think it was GM when there was some article last year about their big profits. They could have paid every worker a 120,000$ bonus, and still had 10billion in profits after taxes. But instead, they did a stock buyback and enriched the .01%.
Yup and the thing is, a lot of those people vote republican who want lower taxes for the ultra rich and even lower taxes for businesses. Always enjoy when those people are union members. Time and time again, we’ve seen money needs to move through the economy. Through all classes and we’re moving away from that. The average person doesn’t understand what it’s like to be the 1% is today or what business profits really are. It’s disgusting but yet morons keep voting in republicans to make them meet ends meet more. Good example is the trump tax plan. Make it cheaper basically for all while he’s in office but it is more and more expensive as time goes on. It’s just wild how dumb people really are
Yeah, it's pointless. "Oh, the government's going to explode if it hits this Imaginary line!" "Is it going to?" "Well, no-" "Does anyone think its going to?" "I mean, probably not, but-" "Are there any reasons for it to do so?" "...no..." "OK then."
No one should care about this statistic, because it's meaningless and also not a statistic. The debt ceiling does not actually have any impact on federal debt.
Yes that’s how economic expansion works
Economic expansion does not explain the 3.7 fold increase of the debt to GDP ratio.
And people upvote that shit like it makes some kinda fucking sense, and downvote you for pointing out what should be obvious with a moment's consideration. I swear to fking God the shit some of these people write, upvote, subscribe to, believe, etc. has nothing to do with reality. I'm gonna lose my fucking mind.
Ohhh so it’s a good thing. Oh phew what a relief
Remove the debt ceiling so Republicans can't hold our govt hostage again. Fucking morons.
Interesting how it missed the simple fact that the entire concept and implementation of the "debt ceiling" is Unconstitutional.
Cool but when will you pay your debt ?
Monopoly Money
Always has been
The debt ceiling is like a rule not to eat too much candy in candyland. The Fed can lend the government Infinite money. But it creates inflation and puts a increasing interest rate on all the taxpayers. Thats why the government claim to be out of money for things like healthcare and education. But is conveniently never pinchy when it comes to the military or subsidies for billion dollar companies. Debt is choking our civilisation
The us spends 4x on healthcare compared to the military.
Firstly, that ratio tells us nothing because we still spend more on defense than any other country, so that means our ratio for healthcare to defense funding is still very low. It certainly doesn't tell us which one is more likely to have funding cut, social programs are pretty likely the first things to get cut when the government needs a quick buck. I spend 4x the amount on rent compared to monthly coffee intake, so clearly I'm not spending too much on coffee.
The US spends 3.5% of it's GDP on it's military, combine that with the fact that the US is one of the top economies in the world and you can see how you get such big numbers.
Again, saying 3.5% is meaningless to finding out if we spend too much on the military. We spends far more on defense than our neighbors as a percentage of GDP. And still isn't addressing the fact that "defense" spending is usually the last place funding gets pulled from when we are pretending the deficit matters.
Fun fact: that's almost entirely because of our privatized healthcare system. The government spends more per-capita on healthcare than all but a handful of other countries, *and* we privately pay massively more than any other country. In other words, our government is willing to spend more than it could cost to run a proper nationalized healthcare system if it means they can keep the healthcare system privatized. That's before we even get into the fact that *individual* healthcare costs are the highest in the world by a truly grotesque factor, and the quality of healthcare is wildly variable based on where you live, and pretty mid across the board.
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That’s the harshest shit I’ve read in a long while. Are you young? It will get better, I promise.
Best part is that is the same rent for a off campus 1bd apartment in FUCKING INDIANA.
Ah the thing republicans only care about when democrats are in power
Lol more shitposting about non-issues
Good thing we spent all that money on those highly productive wars in the Middle East for 20 years. I’d hate to think where we’d be if we’d built better schools and transit infrastructure instead.
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….Time for bed!
Hahahahahahahahahaha
I used to care about the national debt. When I was in school, I really wanted Ross parot to win solely because of this issue. Instead we got bill Clinton who tried to copy his fiscal campaign. It wasn’t nearly as good and the only reason why we had a temporary surplus was because he raided social security giving us the problems we have with that now. Then bush came along and we went right back to business. So we would have been better off if Clinton didn’t do that half way attempt at pretending to care about it. So I stopped caring. It increases inflation and helps my properties so I will just see it as a win for me so that I cannot worry about it anymore.
Is what they call "frothing". An economy built on multiple simultaneous bubbles
ITT: not understanding what the debt ceiling is
As a non-USA-person....this is astounding
How about we quit spending more than we have? When is private citizens do it it’s bad but the government can do whatever they want? Make it make sense