- JJust how much money can we put on America's credit card?
This has been a point of contention between the left and the right for years. No sensible person argues the sky's the limit on America's capacity to borrow. Pile on enough debt fast enough, and you will do serious damage to the economy. But are we close to that tipping point, as conservatives and the GOP argue? Or are we very far away from it, as progressives (like me) insist?
To definitively answer this question, we need data. Specifically, we need a real-world example of America pushing its borrowing capacity to the max. As it turns out, we've got one: World War II.
Yeah but does it really matter? It's not like this kind of analysis is going to change much. Sure an informed electorate is supposedly a dangerous thing but that's only if they're able to protest and congregate and create a collective to stand up and demand change. If people don't have the ability to do this because they're scrambling to make ends meet but are still just comfortable enough or downtrodden enough not to act up (not out)...It's time for America to treat itself but it won't, we can spend an extra $900 billion but how much of that would just go towards military since apparently we need to spend $1 trillion on upgrading our nuclear arsenal? I've had a shit day and I don't believe any of this matters. By the time society has moved along enough to do something the rules of the game will have changed (see: climate change and mass migration of refugees). Austerity austerity austerity.
Frankly, we could blow it all on bridges, tunnels and roads and still not have enough.
Don't you think the perfect Republican wet-dream of marrying public-private is to not provide enough funding to public transit thereby forcing it to shut down for extended periods of time, and rely on private industry to pick up the slack?
Sure - but historically, Democrats spend big on infrastructure. It's always appreciated, it always makes jobs, and there's never a shortage of falling-down bridges to point at. I'd argue that the TVA and other New Deal programs got as far as they did because there weren't enough roads to go around so they had to build all sorts of other shit.
This is one hell of a nice article setting precedent for what conservatives (in my view) are pulling their hair out over. So, if my tiny 20 y/o brain can wrap my head around this article, then America's current deficit spending with regards to it's GDP is relatively low? The author's point I derived being, "We have tons of room to start spending more." On this topic, this will sound like a stupid question, but there really isn't any serious issue with deficit spending here? Further, where the hell would that extra money be put toward? Lord knows there's lots of reformation and streamlining (looking no further than, but not limited to, healthcare) that could happen in the different facets of the system before throwing money at any industry willy-nilly.
Current economic "thinking" stretches all the way from the gold standard to cryptocurrency. From currency warfare to trade isolationism. From fractional reserve banking to microbarter. It is truly a practice involving impossible things and breakfast. The basic issue is that governments can print money. This gives them more money. Each unit of money is worth less. Suddenly people are burning million Deutschmark notes for fuel. That's the downside. The upside is if you have sovereign debt accounted in your currency, you print all the currency you need and poof you're out of debt. Obviously this tends to piss off your creditors but it's not like it isn't done. So. We can point at Germany, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Argentina, all sorts of places with runaway inflation and say ZOMG SUPERBAD!!!one but then some wiseass starts pointing out that the United States in 2016 isn't exactly Argentina in 2000 or Germany in 1922. But how different is it? And that's where the debate starts getting really arcane and people throw around terms like Bretton Woods and shit but at the end of the day, nobody really knows. There were a couple hot-shit economists who thought they did. Turns out they didn't know how to run Excel.
Ahh, just so I understand correctly: the premise is your currency's inherent value is backed (in someway) by debt owed? That's meta as hell if I'm reading this all right.The upside is if you have sovereign debt accounted in your currency, you print all the currency you need and poof you're out of debt.
Depends on which side of the New World Order you stand. If you're the USA, your debt is marked in dollars. Need to pay it off? Print dollars. If you're Zimbabwe, your debt is marked in dollars. Need to pay it off? You're shit outta luck. But you can pay all of your domestic responsibilities - government salaries, pensions, etc - in Zimbabwean dollars which throws your entire country into a depression. If you're somewhere in the gray area - Argentina, for example - you have a little of this and a little of that. You print Argentinian pesos and pay off everyone you can, then the people who are owed dollars whinge and bitch and demand your money and you try to say "fuck off, we're a sovereign nation, you'll take pesos" and then they sue. Not sure how they think that's going to get collected. Sanctions? See, all this shit is theoretical until it isn't.