What ever happened to the fiscal conservatives in congress?
Was that all just a lie until they could openly bleed us dry?
Always … liberals / democrats manage economy to balance budgets but no one sees the results because economic effects take time
By the time time effects are felt, conservatives / republicans come into power and everyone associates the economy to them … conservatives / republicans than gut the economy and give money to wealthy owners which degrades the economy
Public get tired of bad economy, support liberals / democrats to do something about the economy
Rinse … repeat … rinse … repeat
Public get tired of bad economy, support liberals / democrats to do something about the economy
Then people forget who was in charge when the bad times started. Was fun talking to my mom recently about COVID and how the economic downturn and lockdowns were primarily under Trump. Not even trying to blame it on him or anything; just stating those coincided and were during his term because having an a basic timeline is apparently hard when it goes against the narrative you want to push, even when you actually know the years and months those events happened.
Yep the trumpaholics I know can’t answer basic facts about his actions or remember who was president in 2020
Economic effects don’t have to take time.
See: tariffs
Canada has the same issue where we are somehow delusional in thinking the right is more economic, which is technically true but only if you’re in the business owner or significant investments class.
Similar, not quite the same issue. Conservatives are zero sum legislators on behalf of rich psychopaths, Liberals are non-zero sum on behalf of rich psychopaths and NDP actually care about a functioning, equitable system that works for everyone and doesn’t cater to psychopaths.
The NDP does not really listen to what people want though.
They absolutely blew this election and it’s NOT just because the liberals changed leaders. If they listened or looked at the polls, they would have known their leader was cooked.
Their platform was fine, but their campaigning and communication was awful.
Yes
Remember when the Clinton administration balanced the budget? And then we actually had a surplus for a few years?
As I recall, there were some fiscal shenanigans with that, which led to the budget looking balanced/with a surplus but it wasn’t exactly that way. Something about kicking some debt into future years.
But still, your point is still good. We were far better fiscally then than we are now. It’s pretty horrifying to see how far we have gone off track over the last 25 years. Especially since the ‘party of fiscal responsibility’ was the one that send to have caused the majority of that debt.
Yeah, it wasn’t actually balanced as in not spending more money than being made. It was balanced as it was no longer accelerating. Like instead of taking on $2000 of debt when you took out $1500 in debt last year, you only took out $1500 more debt this year. So the debt was still increasing, just not faster than before. (Which is fine still as long as the money being borrowed is making more money than what you borrowed it at.)
Uh…W made a huge deal about giving back the surplus with those tax refund checks. Sent everyone a picture of him and his wife along with it. You don’t do that over “smaller deficit”
Yeah but a republican might. You have to understand that they’re ideologically opposed to the government having and using money. Even in places they demand government attempt to turn a profit like USPS and Amtrak (which I’m theoretically not opposed to them doing if they provide vital services at a good price and quality) it’s with the ultimate goal of spinning them off into private companies
But my point is, we DID HAVE A SURPLUS. For about 4 years. Then W gave it away THEN started multiple trillion dollar two decades long wars
just to be clear folks. they are talking debt to gdp for both greece and italy so this is not some sort of apples and oranges comparison.
I hate the name of that bill even more than the use of baby-terms like “maga” and “maha”. Utterly meaningless.
I saw some Democratic politician call it “the big beautiful betrayal” or words to that effect. Far more accurate.
Another reason to start learning how to grow potatoes in one’s backyard.
the IMF predicts the US will see its debts climb from 125% to 143% of annual income by 2030, while Italy’s will flatline at about 137%.
Greece is on track to cut the ratio of debt to gross domestic product (GDP) from 146% to 130% over the same period.
That’s still pretty low. They can do way more spending and I bet they will to prop up AI assets as they start cracking.
GREECE?!?!! The famously in debt, constantly in need of foreign aid and sustenance Greece? Fuck me
Deficit Hawkery is the economics equivalent of vaccine skepticism. It’s bad science espoused by evil assholes.
Like, it fucking sucks that we’re only ever allowed to run deficits to fund mass execution of brown people and foreigners-we-consider-communist. But the raw theory behind the national debt being bad is that a federal government shouldn’t be allowed to trade a surplus of dollars for a scarcity of material goods and skilled laborers.
It is dollar fetishism at an international scale. We are saying that we are sacred of being too credit worthy. We’re scared of being the global reserve currency. We keep talking about hyperinflation being around the corner, every time a politician suggests hiring more doctors or teachers or civil engineers through the public trust, presumably because these professionals never perform labor more useful than the salaries they collect.
What Trump is doing is fucking horrendous for so many, many, many reasons. But paying ICE agents six-figure salaries to do work for the government isn’t bad because its expensive. It isn’t bad because taxes aren’t high enough to cover the deficit. It isn’t bad because it means selling more treasuries to China.
My god, imagine what kind of country we’d be living in if we were hiring nurses and rail construction workers and water conservation engineers at this rate? Imagine handing out little green pieces of paper to create real material improvements to the interior of the nation.
Debt is fine in a strong global economy, but it creates big problems when there is no market for the debt.
Someone is still paying for it - by buying Treasury bonds. The more debt, the more interest has to be paid to make it appealing. That means tax money going to pay (mostly wealthy) bondholders.
It’s still not comparable to Italy or Greece, because the US prints its own money while Eurozone nations can’t.
The real problem is less that the US is accumulating debt and more that it is destroying demand for dollars with sanctions. If China doesn’t want USD anymore then every dollar still on the market becomes less valuable.
Yep, if China is selling of its US bonds, they we have to ask who is going to buy them. Overall weakens the USD.
Debt is fine in a strong global economy, but it creates big problems when there is no market for the debt.
It creates a big problem for the lenders. And you’ll forgive me if I can’t shed a tear for someone sitting on several hundred billion dollars in treasury notes.
Someone is still paying for it
With an expectation that they’ll receive a return larger than what they spent. People buy treasuries for the yield, not out of any sense of charity. Sometimes they even buy treasuries with negative yield, because the rate of loss is lower than the rate of anticipated decline in their spent currency.
Even then, the initial outlay - the origination of the next dollar in the money supply - is just a liability on a balance sheet. Nobody “pays” for it because nothing is being bought. You’re just moving numbers on a ledger. The real machine of public commerce is taxation - effectively a fee for residency - set against public spending - intended to improve the productive capacity of the region over time - with the expectation that this give and take in the money supply results in an accumulation of valuable assets and surplus consumer goods.
Debt is predicated on economic growth. Growth then provides the yield on the debt. The problem you run into is when public spending fails to grow the economy. Not merely that public debt increases over time.
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I think you just made my point, but harder. Debt is actually great for “the lenders,” i.e. whoever buys treasury bonds. If the government wants to spend money on something, they have to issue a bond. The bondholders are paying for it. If you run out of bondholders, you have to increase the interest offered to make it more appealing than other investments.
It’s not just “moving numbers on a ledger.”
That would be essentially the same as printing more money,* which is what leads to hyperinflation and the collapse of economies. The higher the total debt, the more taxes go into paying interest on debt, rather than services (the nurses and water engineers mentioned above). There is a whole other discussion on where that spending on services spending should be prioritized.
Where does that Tax money go? Obviously it’s a payment to bondholders, which are generally wealthy individuals, corporations, or nations, but can also be held by the US Government (maybe that’s what you mean by “moving numbers on a ledger?”).
![Who owns US Debt? [pie chart]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/37c7db49-fbee-4e2c-98cf-f7c6e9fdb79d.webp)
Edit: source
*The Fed does change the money supply through interest rates, which can generate inflation.
If the government wants to spend money on something, they have to issue a bond.
But when they control a Federal Bank (as with the US Reserve, the ECB, the PBC, the Banco Central do Brasil, etc, etc) the buyer and the seller are joined at the hip. The real risk of this strategy is that you release more of a currency than there exists downstream demand. That’s where taxation functions as an implicit guaranteed demand for currency. And then the real focus isn’t on who buys debt or who pays taxes, but who contributes value-adding activity to the economy.
That would be essentially the same as printing more money,* which is what leads to hyperinflation
If printing money leads to hyperinflation, every country that issues currency is in a state of hyperinflation. They all - at one point or another - printed an original allotment of currency. They all expand the supply to meet domestic (and, for global reserve countries, international) physical currency demands. This does not result in double and triple digit annual increases in currency-denominated prices.
Where does that Tax money go? Obviously it’s a payment to bondholders
Tax money does not “go to pay bondholders”. Taxation destroys currency in an inverse to government spending creating currency. Spending - including paying interest on debt - is inflationary and taxation is deflationary. The only relationship between taxation and interest on debt is in maintaining this equilibrium or adjusting it as need demands.
The Fed does change the money supply through interest rates
The Fed changes the M1 money supply, which is money lent from the bank for a length of time. All this M1 money has to be repaid periodically. And because the money carries an interest rate (presumably higher than 0% - although, in the era of ZIRP, not always) it is net deflationary over time as you’re paying the bank back more than you borrowed.
The M0 money supply is printed currency, which a government needs to release - and periodically expand - in order to meet the basic demands of the national economy as a mechanism of exchange. Historically, governments release this money through spending. Super historically (ie, go hit up David Grabber’s “Debt: The First 5000 Years” if you want a lesson in anthropology) it was a means of paying soldiers while abroad. The coinage falls into circulation among conquered peoples and taxes on the providence levied in the currency paid to the soldiers effectively becomes a mechanism for a populace to pay for its own subjugation.
Over time, the role of government evolved beyond “army of thugs that periodically loot your crops and rape your children”. And now we have an M0 supply that finances everything from pensions to health care to highways (but still plenty of looting and raping, depending on which military base you’re stationed). But it all still comes from the state, with credit being downstream of the origination of currency itself.
Bottom line, a state that wants to control its own money supply has to produce money and distribute it. The question then becomes who gets their hands on the currency first and on what terms.
Yeah month to month deficits, which includes tarriff revenue, has been higher than ever before for the us. This should really be talked about more.
Democrats shouldn’t clean this up. Give the people the things we want. National Health Insurance, Free Childcare (with providing individuals paid well), well paid teachers, UBI, and gun control/legalizing grenades and high explosives.
Trump gets paid so why should he care?
Trump gets paid while also illegally massively profiting from his presidency so why should he care?
FTFY :)
Who cares. It is better that the government has a shit ton of debt, then almost everybody else. At least if it is used well. Company debt serves the rich and private debt has much higher interest then public debt. So if used well it is not a problem at all. Especially if you borrow in your own currency.
In reality both the US and Eurozone should just forgive the debt their central banks have bought. That if anything is what QE is for.
