@previous (Name of Matt's family IRL)
I see you have drunk the "everyone is Matt" Kool-Aid too. You and TGComix should hide in the bushes together.
also for a country that brings in 16 trillion in debt, it would be like someone who makes 160k a year having a house with a 140k mortgage. that's actually fucking awesome, considering that most individuals are paying on mortgages that are many times more than their yearly salary. having a national debt is not the same thing as paying the minimums on credit card debt every month, which is i guess what people thing the US gov is doing. we are far from broke, very, very, very far from broke. 14 trillion just sounds like a lot when you don't compare it to GDP. if we stopped taking on new debt entirely we'd have the deficit payed down in like 7 years, probably less since GDP grows every year. so it's really not nearly as big a deal as people think, because more than anything the ability to carry large amounts of debt is a sign of strength, not weakness.
kinda like a guy that can walk in and buy a Lamborghini with a credit card. not everyone can do that, but those that
can most certainly have the means to back up their purchase. and just because they now have 100k in credit card debt that doesn't mean they are going bankrupt
(Edited 1 minute later.)
actually i think a lot of people think that we aren't paying the National Debt down, they think it's just going up because we can't pay it back or whatever. like the debt is the sum off all the shit we haven't payed back over the years and now we've got this 14 trillion dollar debt that's just getting bigger and everyone is going unpaid because we lack the money to pay it back.
but really paying off the debt is like filling up a bucket with a hole in it. you can keep filling it up forever and even raise the water level by altering the in/out flow rates. So new debt is taken on while old debts are paid off, and eventually the new debts become old and flow out the bucket as they are paid. the size of the bucket doesn't really matter, as you can see the national debt bucket is 14 trillion fucking gallons, the only thing that matters is the strength of the economy to carry that bucket. and right now we're carrying that bucket just fine.
@570,408 (squeegee)
I disproved you once re: mortgage vs . national debt and again, your analogy is shit. The neat thing about mortgages is that they
don't keep going up. If you have a mortgage of 140k, it starts at 140k and every payment brings it down a bit until 30 years hence it's down to
zero. The national debt doesn't work like this: it goes UP every year, under Republican (even under St. Reagan) and Democrat alike. A better analogy would be someone with a 160k income and a 140k credit card bill.
Of course the US will never "default" because the Fed can just print eleventy trillion gazillion dollars on demand (if you think I'm joking, see Paul Krugmans article about the trillion dollar platinum coin) and cover the debt.
@previous (Metæ)
yeah, alright, so just assume personal debt vs. national debt. national debt is just personal debt on a much grander scale, and the same things that bankrupt people are the same things that would bankrupt the US government. so as long as the US government doesn't make the stupid obvious mistake many individuals will (carry so much debt they don't have enough income to pay for it all) then it'll be fine.
and so here's something:
Aggregate consumer debt increased in the fourth quarter by $241 billion, the largest quarter to quarter increase seen since the third quarter of 2007. As of December 31, 2013, total consumer indebtedness was $11.52 trillion, up by 2.1% from its level in the third quarter of 2013.
http://www.newyorkfed.org/householdcredit/2013-Q4/HHDC_2013Q4.pdf
so technically speaking
america as well as americans owe a collective total of something in the neighborhood of 30 trillion dollars. and what's kind of interesting about the consumer debt is that the vast majority of it is
mortgages, so if you scale up my original statement about mortgages to more than a single individual then comparing mortgage debt to national debt works just fine. You'll always have people getting new mortgages and others paying them off. but you're right, it's not entirely fair to compare aggregate consumer debt with public debt. consumer debt is mostly house loans, student loans, and auto. everything else is a small fraction of the big 3. and all that is different than what the national debt is, since some of that debt is in the form of securities and bonds and whatnot. the public debt isn't really the same thing as paying back a 5 year car loan or a 30 note on a house.
anyway, the 30 trillion dollars of debt doesn't actually take into consideration business debt. so we can look at that too:
Total Business Sector is at a current level of 12.18 trillion. now that's just the non financial sector.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/debt_outstanding_domestic_nonfinancial_sectors_total_business_sector
i'll just let wiki tell the long and short of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States#Financial_sectorAs of the first quarter of 2010, the Federal Reserve estimated that total public and private debt owed by American households, businesses, and government totaled $50 trillion, or roughly $175,000 per American and 3.5 times GDP.
now that was 5 years ago. right now financial sector debt is somewhere around 14 trillion now. that plus everything else brings me to a very, very rough estimate of 56 trillion dollars in
total debt carried by all of america right now.
total population: 318.9 million. average debt $175,603 that's the same as it was in 2010, sitting at 175,000.
so even though the "national debt" is getting bigger, it's only like 30ish % of the ever expanding debt bubble.
and let's be real here, the problem everyone sees with "the national debt" is the amount of debt that's foreign
owed.
> Foreigners own more than $15.6 trillion of US financial assets.
that's a lot! but
> Americans own $11.5 trillion of foreign assets
so collectively our foreign holdings pay for about 80% of our foreign owned "national debt". the rest of the debt is owned by americans and american companies and whatever.
more interesting though, in my mind, than the amount of foreign owned "public debt", or "govmn't debt" is that foreigners hold 24% of all domestic
corporate debt.
so really, who is beholden to foreign interests? especially considering how much corporate money is now involved with politics. so players like donald trump who want to lambast the debt the US government carries and not even talk about the other 60% that actually does
worse with its money (since about 3% of all private and business debt is in bankruptcy) and carries 10%
more foreign debt.
the "national debt", or public debt, whatever you want to call that 18 trillion dollar strawman, is not the only problem. it's not even the
biggest problem.
(Edited 3 minutes later.)