this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
309 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
1454 readers
59 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's no public debt crisis. People don't understand how government debt works. One casualty of this is the slow green transition which will cost us dearly in the future.
Yep. Debt is an investment to increase taxable value later to make up for it. It's also mostly owned by Americans, so the money paying for debt is going back into the economy, which is then creating more taxable value. As long as debt is used to make more money later, it isn't bad. People understand this on a personal level (taking on debt to open a business can be a good decision, for example), but they been mislead by some people that for a nation it's bad. They say this for a reason though, and it isn't because they actually think debt is bad.
I developed this intuition for myself that I think kinda works. I think of govt debt a bit like stock investment in a large corporation. People "put money" in it because they believe it delivers returns and will keep delivering returns. And as you said, this is actually much easier for the government to do than a corporation as simply the fact of releasing the money into the economy generates returns. So instead of thinking about the size of the debt, one should be thinking about the ability of the government to function well. Ironically, it seems like this is also the way the market looks at it. It keeps throwing money at it and it only knocked off its credit rating due to the threat of dysfunction around the debt ceiling.