Agreed, unfortunately. The amount of people that actually care about the national debt is near zero in reality, despite many stating otherwise.
When their party of choice comes into power, it's always "spend, spend, spend" - how else do you do all the things you want to do while in power? Then the table turns and they pretend to care while the other party takes a turn.
Round and round we go, deeper and deeper in debt, spending like a there's no tomorrow.
This is only possible because the taxation is obfuscated through debt or inflation, both of which effectively are a tax but a less obvious one allowing duping of the populace.
We don't need a new party necessarily, just a constitutional amendment that the government can only spend money from direct tax proceeds, with no pre-emptive withholding.
how so? Alupis explains the mechanism why not. In two party system, new electives are incentivized to achieve their program. Reducing spending hinders that, and loss of those voters who care about that betrayal doesn't really matter because they're a tiny group anyway, and realistically, where are they going to go, the other party? They have the same incentive, just for different program. That's the cycle.
Sure but the bigger debt gets, and the more negative impact it has on the population, the bigger that group gets. It’s not big enough yet but that doesn't mean it can’t be. We’ve seen such tipping points with other issues.
You should tax behaviours you want to disincentivise.
Taxing smoking, cars and sugar are great (but not always popular) ideas.
Taxing second homes, property ownership for companies, foreign owned property, and so on is much more important than taxing unrealised wealth, inheritance or capital gains and income.
Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
We should figure out what they do with their wealth that makes it worthwhile amassing so much, then tax that.
EDIT: sorry, I should have echo’d the chamber instead of thinking about a situation critically.
The wealthy find loopholes because they are often the people having the legislation drafted. It’s actually not hard to pass clear solid tax laws. It’s only hard to get it passed.
Anything you can think of to make wealthy people cease to exist is easily bypassed, so the best way is to find ways to tax behaviour instead.
The point of money is how you use it, if you have a 50,000x tax on super yacts and private aircraft, then the ultra rich are forced to pay your tax or try skirting around it by using smaller boats or coalescing their private jets into a private airline.
But if you tax stocks, then people will invest in other ways. If you tax individuals owning large property then they’ll move their property ownership into a company, if you tax inheritance then they’ll put the money into a fund instead which has debts that will be written off in time. All kinds of fancy tricky accounting.
The other solution is to tax everyone on unrealised gains, which makes every home owner (including pensioners) suddenly liable for huge ongoing bills.
Elon himself for example is pretty cash poor, but owns a lot of stock in a “high value” company meaning his wealth on paper is pretty extreme. He takes on debt (which has no income tax) and then pays it off with stocks, where it also avoids being taxed as its never realised.
I think its a harder problem than you give it credit.
How would it work if we treated money obtained by borrowing against stock holdings as "realized gains"? That seems like a loophole that could be closed.
It would be an easy strategy to defeat - the two biggest Democratic states, California and New York, are close to the top in terms of cost of living. I know fiscally conservative doesn't mean "cheap to live" but most people see them as the same.
In a way it's just Maslow's pyramid, no? People who can't get housing, or good enough housing, don't care much about the image of the US abroad and may even support foreign aggression if they believe it'll help their situation.
Only once you're very secure and comfy in your little corner does "your image abroad" even have any meaning at all.
We have a high cost of living but we also have the highest taxes. Up to 10% depending on where you live. In return for that we get next to nothing. Public money is spent poorly, with no oversight, and no accountability.
The Republican policy has been to starve the beast for 40 years. They are willing to bury the country in unsustainable levels of debt in order to force their agenda for government because they can't reach their goal electorally. They care more about that goal than the financial health of the nation or what the impacts of destroying the financial health is on all of us. They would rather intentionally make us too broke to function so that we can't afford government than have us rich but with a functional government. This has been their publicly stated policy for 40 years.
The Republican party is wholly a party for the Rich and wealthy.
All other claims to the contrary are attempts to deceive people that this is not the case.
Is this not theoretically the libertarian party? (Of course in reality it’s often the Republican-lite party). It hasn’t proven to be a winning strategy
The Libertarian Party is solely focused on reducing the liabilities side of the balance sheet in the interest of reducing the income side by lowering taxes. Try showing up to to a libertarian convention with "give me some money to invest in a program that will benefit our whole society" and see how far you get.
I understand that claim. I will not even argue against it. But, as you pointed out - there are two options only, so they must be evaluated against each other. Ds would need to go quite a bit further in the direction of being fiscally conservative to justify overlooking their other issues (in the eyes of R voters) in order to capture significant voter counts from the R side.
"How tasty would the beer need to be to justify the burned rancid steak, to make this diner better than the other one?" -- basically
The media environment is so right wing (yes really) that Democrats don't get the credit for that kind of thing while Republicans don't get the blame for absolute ransacking of the country.
Fiscal conservatism only exists as an ideology when paired with hurting brown people. It does not exist as a meaningful political camp otherwise.
There is a reason that fiscal conservatives spend all their time on food stamps, environmental regulations, and a few random research projects and not even examining any of the top four costs that make up the overwhelming bulk of US spending.
To be fair they usually want to reduce the benefit of Social Security and Medicare, because they're "unsustainable", while tax cuts and defecit spending is apparently sustainable.
This is basically how the Democratic party is trying to operate now and it's not working. They've been trying to cater to moderate Republicans who became disillusioned with Trump and it's gotten them very little in the last decade.
Government debt gets resolved eventually through inflation. There's never a point where we have to "pay it all back" and get the debt down to zero. We just end up paying of a $1 loan with a dollar that's worth only 50c.
So there's never a particular point that it "comes back to bite us" - if anything, the "bite" is happening already right now for all of us. Inflation is a form of taxation on currency. It's less like credit card debt and more like wage garnishing.
It's also worth pointing out that young people are less affected by inflation than old - retirees and people with savings. Inflation is good for people in debt. So it's not so much your children you have to worry about with today's debt level so much as it is yourself.
> Government debt gets resolved through inflation.
This is misleading.
US debt as GDP percentage is higher than for any other nation except Italy and Greece, and was much lower historically, too (<50%ish for basically the last century instead of >100% now).
So the status quo is not how government spending gets typically resolved.
Racking up public debt risks runaway inflation, which is unpleasant for everyone.
Comparing a currency issuer like the US to currency users like Italy and Greece is a category error. You can compare Alaska to Greece or California to Italy. But you should compare the US to other currency issuers - like the Eurozone, Japan or the UK.
It’s rather more simple than that. In a floating exchange rate world, which is the one we live in a dollar is just a 0% bearer bond.
So when a government bond matures it is replaced automatically with a simple bank deposit. It’s nothing more than an asset swap.
“People with savings” are precisely why there is a “debt” in the first place. When they spend those savings they pass tax points which then creates the tax that retires the “debt”.
To put it in simple terms the “grandchildren” will “service the debt” using the counterparty “savings assets”inherited from their “grandparents”.
Don’t fall for the standard narrative. It’s not true.
As GDP percentage, only two countries are higher: Italy and Greece (edit: and Japan).
Public debt is a significant political talking point in both cases (and even in Germany, with a much lower debt percentage).
The current US administration (and the last republicans in general) did an excellent job in pretending to be the ones fighting public debt when they are actually exacerbating it; I'm curious if there is gonna be a reckoning at some point.
You are absolutely right. I did not realize that my dataset was missing most of Asia/Africa. Japan ist at ~230%, but interestingly decreasing pretty quickly (decreased their debth from almost 260% GDP in 2020).
I have sadly no idea how much focus this gets in japanese politics, would be very curious if anyone knows.
There's a LOT of nuance in any answer to this but the short of it is: we've already been downgraded by all the major agencies over the last 15 years, despite this - the market doesn't really seem to care. Partly because while our actual debt # is high - we're also giga rich, leaving us around #10 for debt-to-GDP right next to Italy, Canada, and France. Furthermore, the gap between places to ~#8-#20 is pretty small so its even less severe in practice. These numbers will shift a little bit based on which estimates you look at, but the spirit shouldn't change. So, its not a major issue today but it could become one if spending continues to accelerate.
GAO and CBO are under Congress directly, fortunately.
They're both awesome. Anyone who starts talking about all kinds of obvious ways to cut waste in government and isn't dropping references to GAO and CBO reports all over the place, is almost certainly bullshitting you (glares at Elon Musk).
The GOP has hated them for quite a while because they consistently tell them that no, of fucking course cutting taxes won't "pay for itself", but they haven't yet had the votes to get rid of them. Trump can't, they're some of the few government functions that fall under Congress (possible because they don't really administer government, they just issue reports, largely on request, so they're more like research librarians than administrators)
Apparently the debt is keeping the Fed from raising interest rates as much as they did in 1979 when a similar crisis happened. Raising interest rates would increase the debt servicing costs pushing the US into a debt crisis.
I already don't understand the beginning of the article:
> Imagine you’re the queen or king of a sovereign country. You decide to mint and issue a bunch of tin coins that your people will find useful. You use those coins to buy stuff from people in the private sector, and pay them to do work. Voilà, the people have money.
This describes how you create money. People give work and the government gives money. But that isn't what national debt is? That would be when the people give money to the government and don't get work in return, but the promise to pay more money back. This then means that some amount of taxes can't go back to things the government wants to give back to the people, but needs to go to the interest holders instead.
Given that I already don't understand the intro, the whole article sounds like nonsense to me. What am I missing?
I'm sort of surprised to see this on the HN front page. Typically the US national debt is only a mainstream topic of discourse when there isn't a Republican in office.
Republicans just play whatever meta will win them power until they get into office. It's a time-honored tradition at this point, so any time they tell you what they believe, what they say their beliefs are and what they actually do, will often be two separate things.
Republicans are only deficit hawks when it comes to spending money on things every day people benefit from. If they actually gave even a single shit about the deficit, they wouldn't hand billionaires massive tax breaks every single time they take power.
And then blew up the deficit and started our massive accumulation of debt. A pattern gleefully followed by every single Republican administration since. Every single Democratic administration since has reduced the deficit the "spend and give tax breaks" Republicans have run up. But it's a losing battle clearly.
The accounting for the current conflict is far from straight forward. The money was largely already allocated to military things, and there's fixed constants of payroll, food, fuel, munitions etc that would be spent regardless on training, operations, readiness, and just existing.
The media doesn't differentiate these things to deliberately inflate the figures.
So what do you think the cost of the war is, then? $50bn? Seems like splitting hairs or missing the point. Even $50bn is too much for a war that congress nor the American people approved.
When's the last time Congress approved of a war? How about the American people? Maybe that first six months of Afghanistan? Maybe...
The President doesn't need approval for military action, and hasn't for decades. In a not so subtle way, we elect Presidents to make decisive decisions, such as when to engage in a conflict.
And to address your question, the cost is probably neutral so far. We'll need to replace many of the munitions, but we do that anyway. The loss of life is probably the most costly aspect of this conflict thus far.
> House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., responding to a CNBC question Thursday, said he has “not heard anything official from anybody” on the $200 billion number. But he said the figure could also include things that would otherwise be sought in the fiscal 2027 spending bill.
> Hassett, speaking on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” said at that time that he did not think the U.S. needed to ask Congress for more money for the war effort “right now.”
> The massive figure would increase production of the critical munitions that the U.S. and Israel have used to strike thousands of targets since the conflict began, three other people familiar with the matter told the Post.
> U.S. military operations against Iran, which began Feb. 28, have already cost $12 billion as of Sunday, according to Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council.
And a reminder, the $12B figure includes all of the normal things that would be spent regardless if we are in a conflict or not.
What leads you to believe $12B includes normal things that would be spent regardless? The source of that quote makes no such claim. They have every incentive to quote as low a price as they can reasonably defend, and it would be very easy to defend a quote that only includes new and additional expenses that are directly attributed to the war.
The $12B figure[1] is almost exclusively munitions used so far. The US didn't buy munitions and use them, they already had them.
The cost reports (updated as the conflict goes on) will also include payroll, fuel, food, supplies, etc. Everything needed to conduct the war - but much of that is already spent even if not at war.
Well, as long as you bomb countries on the other side of the world. Someone else (the long suffering US allies) can deal with all the displaced peoples then.
Economists often say that the national debt isn't analogous to consumer debt, because the US has a number of means to address it that the average consumer does not have, including the ability to print money.
And while that's true ... perhaps we as citizens and taxpayers would be better off ignoring that technicality and treating this debt as more like consumer debt.
Eventually, it's going to come back to bite us or our children, and we need to be willing to make some hard choices now to avoid having to make even harder choices later.
I used to think that way, but now I don't believe that the debt ever needs to be repaid by anyone's children. The public sector debt is basically just a record of net private sector liquid assets, and repaying it would amount to the private sector losing all of its liquidity, or having to replace it with private debt instead. That's basically what happened throughout the roaring '20s preceding the Great Depression, and I don't think it really ends up being a good move.
Yes, it's independent of the absolute level of debt. A 500 trillion dollar debt means the private sector is proportionately awash in 500 trillion of liquid assets. This will be reflected in a proportionately high (dollar-denominated) GDP, tax revenue, and consumer price level (absent any big changes in population or productivity).
Of course, to get from 40 trillion to 500 trillion would mean that prices are basically 12x higher, which would mean a lot of inflation will have happened in the meantime. So it would be very bad if the government debt increased by that much in the timespan of one year, because it would basically mean hyperinflation over that span of time. But if that same growth in the debt happened over 400 years, it would be no problem.
So the relative rate of growth of the government debt certainly matters, because that influences inflation, which is the thing that actually causes problems. Not the size of the debt itself. That is, if G is outstanding government debt, then the figure that matters for inflation is approximately (1/G) dG/dt. But not the absolute level of the government debt G itself.
This also means that compounding interest doesn't really affect the calculation. As the debt grows larger, and the interest payments grow larger, directly in proportion to the size of the debt, and therefore the economy as a whole -- they don't outgrow it. Assuming a steady interest rate, at least. If the interest rate were to grow without bound, then yes, that would be a problem for the government debt. But that would be a pretty weird thing to happen and wouldn't happen just because the debt figure itself hit some large value, but probably instead because of a currency crisis (eg. the country owes debts to other countries in currencies it does not control).
I don't see such a clear benefit to eliminating the debt, actually I see a lot of downsides that would likely be worse for our children. The way I understand it, the primary concern is whether the debt is growing faster than the economy can support and whether we're using it for productive purposes or not. A government isn't like a household: treasury debt also functions as a safe asset, a tool of monetary policy, and a store of value for pensions, banks, and investors around the world, a majority of the debt is also a domestic asset. Trying to eliminate the debt would likely mean austerity and major tax increases, which can be more damaging the debt itself.
I don't think people realize that a large share of the government's debt is also a domestic asset. It is still something to be wary of and manage carefully but it is not something that I think is wise to eliminate either. The main concern should be making sure it is being used productively and is not exceeding what the growth of the economy can support (which happens when its used unproductively).
This would not be a good idea. Government "debt" expands the money supply, and if government spending gets us infrastructure and social services.
The only big issue here is the interest, which we force ourselves to pay by requiring the issuing of bonds in the first place, and is a big transfer of tax payer money to the large bond-holders.
not just eventually. Its coming back to bite you now and for the last 10 years and the next 10 years. if you sell a house (and you're past the 500K exemption), or any kind of equities or gold, you're going to be a world of pain. Most of the "capital gains" aren't gains at all, it's just devaluation of the dollar. Let's say dollar devaluation is roughly 7% per year, that means you're paying 2% to 2.5% of your houses value every year in "capital gains" tax. sure, you don't pay it until you sell, but rest assured, it's accumulating. so 2M house means 40K to 50K per year! and if you think i'm overstating the 7%, just look at the case shiller housing index for the last 10 to 15 years!
and if you're holding cash or bonds, you're even worse off. even if the dollar is devaluing at just 7% per year, that's a 50% loss in just 10 years and that compounds to 75% loss after 20 years.
At some point it becomes better option just to take the money you get paid back and instead of loaning it out again buy something... Anything else really... And then it gets worse.
It's something that the US could uniquely do without going into hyperinflation due to it's status as a reserve currency.
That all, of course, changes if other countries decide they've had enough of our shit and switch over to different reserve currencies like BRICS. And, of course, printing currency to get out of debt is something that would make countries consider dumping the dollar as a reserve currency.
If Elon Musk hadn't sacked those government workers it would probably be less than 39 trillion as he had to pay termination packages and hire back people he accidentally fired.
…add on another $1T for the student loans that will never be repaid. Those aren’t counted? There’s a shocker. Mr. Market lost his Marker up his ass a long time ago y’all. Plan accordingly.
- Won't start a war
- Won't speak like a 5yo kid
- Won't run around and desert you
When their party of choice comes into power, it's always "spend, spend, spend" - how else do you do all the things you want to do while in power? Then the table turns and they pretend to care while the other party takes a turn.
Round and round we go, deeper and deeper in debt, spending like a there's no tomorrow.
We don't need a new party necessarily, just a constitutional amendment that the government can only spend money from direct tax proceeds, with no pre-emptive withholding.
It's not hard, you just have to make rich people pay taxes. This is an enormously popular idea.
You should tax behaviours you want to disincentivise.
Taxing smoking, cars and sugar are great (but not always popular) ideas.
Taxing second homes, property ownership for companies, foreign owned property, and so on is much more important than taxing unrealised wealth, inheritance or capital gains and income.
Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
We should figure out what they do with their wealth that makes it worthwhile amassing so much, then tax that.
EDIT: sorry, I should have echo’d the chamber instead of thinking about a situation critically.
> Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
Sounds like we should get rid of these wealthy people then...
I’m a socialist, but I have a brain.
Anything you can think of to make wealthy people cease to exist is easily bypassed, so the best way is to find ways to tax behaviour instead.
The point of money is how you use it, if you have a 50,000x tax on super yacts and private aircraft, then the ultra rich are forced to pay your tax or try skirting around it by using smaller boats or coalescing their private jets into a private airline.
But if you tax stocks, then people will invest in other ways. If you tax individuals owning large property then they’ll move their property ownership into a company, if you tax inheritance then they’ll put the money into a fund instead which has debts that will be written off in time. All kinds of fancy tricky accounting.
The other solution is to tax everyone on unrealised gains, which makes every home owner (including pensioners) suddenly liable for huge ongoing bills.
Elon himself for example is pretty cash poor, but owns a lot of stock in a “high value” company meaning his wealth on paper is pretty extreme. He takes on debt (which has no income tax) and then pays it off with stocks, where it also avoids being taxed as its never realised.
I think its a harder problem than you give it credit.
Only once you're very secure and comfy in your little corner does "your image abroad" even have any meaning at all.
We have a high cost of living but we also have the highest taxes. Up to 10% depending on where you live. In return for that we get next to nothing. Public money is spent poorly, with no oversight, and no accountability.
It seems more like an abandoned stance than a lie at this point.
How about “socially progressive and fiscally effective”?
"How tasty would the beer need to be to justify the burned rancid steak, to make this diner better than the other one?" -- basically
See also: X, Meta, Blackwater…
There is a reason that fiscal conservatives spend all their time on food stamps, environmental regulations, and a few random research projects and not even examining any of the top four costs that make up the overwhelming bulk of US spending.
So there's never a particular point that it "comes back to bite us" - if anything, the "bite" is happening already right now for all of us. Inflation is a form of taxation on currency. It's less like credit card debt and more like wage garnishing.
It's also worth pointing out that young people are less affected by inflation than old - retirees and people with savings. Inflation is good for people in debt. So it's not so much your children you have to worry about with today's debt level so much as it is yourself.
This is misleading.
US debt as GDP percentage is higher than for any other nation except Italy and Greece, and was much lower historically, too (<50%ish for basically the last century instead of >100% now).
So the status quo is not how government spending gets typically resolved.
Racking up public debt risks runaway inflation, which is unpleasant for everyone.
Japan is much higher-- I did not have that in my dataset, appears to be at 230% debt but decreasing pretty rapidly (down from almost 260% in 2020).
So when a government bond matures it is replaced automatically with a simple bank deposit. It’s nothing more than an asset swap.
“People with savings” are precisely why there is a “debt” in the first place. When they spend those savings they pass tax points which then creates the tax that retires the “debt”.
To put it in simple terms the “grandchildren” will “service the debt” using the counterparty “savings assets”inherited from their “grandparents”.
Don’t fall for the standard narrative. It’s not true.
Public debt is a significant political talking point in both cases (and even in Germany, with a much lower debt percentage).
The current US administration (and the last republicans in general) did an excellent job in pretending to be the ones fighting public debt when they are actually exacerbating it; I'm curious if there is gonna be a reckoning at some point.
I have sadly no idea how much focus this gets in japanese politics, would be very curious if anyone knows.
I know us is buyoed by the petrodollar, but surely that only goes so far.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/03/16/when-will-highe...
Well, we found another agency that won't last much longer in this administration...
They're both awesome. Anyone who starts talking about all kinds of obvious ways to cut waste in government and isn't dropping references to GAO and CBO reports all over the place, is almost certainly bullshitting you (glares at Elon Musk).
The GOP has hated them for quite a while because they consistently tell them that no, of fucking course cutting taxes won't "pay for itself", but they haven't yet had the votes to get rid of them. Trump can't, they're some of the few government functions that fall under Congress (possible because they don't really administer government, they just issue reports, largely on request, so they're more like research librarians than administrators)
That chart doesn't include WWII, which might be the only time that comes close.
Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? - https://evonomics.com/isnt-time-stop-calling-national-debt/
> Imagine you’re the queen or king of a sovereign country. You decide to mint and issue a bunch of tin coins that your people will find useful. You use those coins to buy stuff from people in the private sector, and pay them to do work. Voilà, the people have money.
This describes how you create money. People give work and the government gives money. But that isn't what national debt is? That would be when the people give money to the government and don't get work in return, but the promise to pay more money back. This then means that some amount of taxes can't go back to things the government wants to give back to the people, but needs to go to the interest holders instead.
Given that I already don't understand the intro, the whole article sounds like nonsense to me. What am I missing?
From https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/d...
3/19/2025 $36,214,467,819,348.16. --> 3/17/2026 $39,016,762,910,245.14
Yet strangely all Republicans are silent
The media doesn't differentiate these things to deliberately inflate the figures.
The President doesn't need approval for military action, and hasn't for decades. In a not so subtle way, we elect Presidents to make decisive decisions, such as when to engage in a conflict.
And to address your question, the cost is probably neutral so far. We'll need to replace many of the munitions, but we do that anyway. The loss of life is probably the most costly aspect of this conflict thus far.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/hegseth-iran-war-budget.html
> Hassett, speaking on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” said at that time that he did not think the U.S. needed to ask Congress for more money for the war effort “right now.”
> The massive figure would increase production of the critical munitions that the U.S. and Israel have used to strike thousands of targets since the conflict began, three other people familiar with the matter told the Post.
> U.S. military operations against Iran, which began Feb. 28, have already cost $12 billion as of Sunday, according to Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council.
And a reminder, the $12B figure includes all of the normal things that would be spent regardless if we are in a conflict or not.
The cost reports (updated as the conflict goes on) will also include payroll, fuel, food, supplies, etc. Everything needed to conduct the war - but much of that is already spent even if not at war.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-hassett-national-economic...
Schrödinger‘s immigrant, doesn’t work and takes American jobs
And while that's true ... perhaps we as citizens and taxpayers would be better off ignoring that technicality and treating this debt as more like consumer debt.
Eventually, it's going to come back to bite us or our children, and we need to be willing to make some hard choices now to avoid having to make even harder choices later.
Of course, to get from 40 trillion to 500 trillion would mean that prices are basically 12x higher, which would mean a lot of inflation will have happened in the meantime. So it would be very bad if the government debt increased by that much in the timespan of one year, because it would basically mean hyperinflation over that span of time. But if that same growth in the debt happened over 400 years, it would be no problem.
So the relative rate of growth of the government debt certainly matters, because that influences inflation, which is the thing that actually causes problems. Not the size of the debt itself. That is, if G is outstanding government debt, then the figure that matters for inflation is approximately (1/G) dG/dt. But not the absolute level of the government debt G itself.
This also means that compounding interest doesn't really affect the calculation. As the debt grows larger, and the interest payments grow larger, directly in proportion to the size of the debt, and therefore the economy as a whole -- they don't outgrow it. Assuming a steady interest rate, at least. If the interest rate were to grow without bound, then yes, that would be a problem for the government debt. But that would be a pretty weird thing to happen and wouldn't happen just because the debt figure itself hit some large value, but probably instead because of a currency crisis (eg. the country owes debts to other countries in currencies it does not control).
I don't think people realize that a large share of the government's debt is also a domestic asset. It is still something to be wary of and manage carefully but it is not something that I think is wise to eliminate either. The main concern should be making sure it is being used productively and is not exceeding what the growth of the economy can support (which happens when its used unproductively).
The only big issue here is the interest, which we force ourselves to pay by requiring the issuing of bonds in the first place, and is a big transfer of tax payer money to the large bond-holders.
and if you're holding cash or bonds, you're even worse off. even if the dollar is devaluing at just 7% per year, that's a 50% loss in just 10 years and that compounds to 75% loss after 20 years.
That all, of course, changes if other countries decide they've had enough of our shit and switch over to different reserve currencies like BRICS. And, of course, printing currency to get out of debt is something that would make countries consider dumping the dollar as a reserve currency.
How it'd likely start is we print to cover a shortfall in debt. Maybe it's 500B, maybe it's 1T.
And we could do that for a bit before entering hyperinflation.
Hyperinflation would start when the TBill rate ends up exploding because people start pricing in dollar printing into the bond rates.
And, as I said, it would be something that would cause countries to start looking at ditching the dollar.
It's not great fiscal policy, but it is something that the US can currently uniquely do and enjoy without the absolute risk of hyperinflation.
Are you feeling those tremendous efficiency gains yet?
much worse in reality, many have been replaced by government contractors we are paying 2.5/3x more
But everything else is just numbers. Stock markets, commodities, gambling, collectibles. real estate... Everything...