You can’t get credit without paying off debts, so good luck trying to wrestle the high score from the country that is trillions of dollars in debt. 😌
Consumer debt and national debt are entirely different
National debt is basically where money comes from in the first place. Unless you are willing to change the most fundamental, basic nature of how modern money even works, you cannot run a (major) country without debt. It’s not even just a question of good or bad fiscal policy, it is literally mathematically impossible.
The US was on track to becoming debt free by 2030 under Clinton in 1999. Then Bush was elected and dramatically increased spending while simultaneously giving tax cuts.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/andrew-jackson-national-debt-reaches-zero-dollars
TLDR: the last time someone that didn’t understand economics paid off the national debt, it didn’t end well.
If there is a finite amount of money you can print before suffering the effects of inflation, deficit spending allows you to increase the amount of money in circulation without just printing more. If I owe you 100 trillion dollars, you owe Japan 100 trillion dollars, and Japan owes me 100 trillion dollars, this is good for the economy. Yes, it probably sounds like voodoo magic. No, I’m not qualified to help with that.
Now, there is still an upper limit on how much debt is okay, generally tied to interest rates. We’re beginning to scratch that upper limit thanks to deficit spending during covid, but it’s by no means problematic and things would overall probably have been worse without the extra spending.
At the same time, the way it was done might have been the issue, right?
Maybe…but we did less during the financial crisis of 2008 and had a worse outcome. When we analyzed that data from 2008, we decided that it would probably work better if we spent more next time, which is what we did this time…and the result matched the prediction, which is pretty much how you prove something works scientifically. Make a prediction, test the prediction, and if the test results match your prediction, that is evidence for your hypothesis. So, the evidence we have says it’s probably better to increase deficit spending to avoid economic collapses. This isn’t a lab, so we can’t control for every variable to really prove it, and we probably never could…we can just keep evaluating our results after a problem and see if the changes we made resulted in a better or worse outcome than we predicted.
I meant, the way the debt was repaid was possibly what caused the crisis, it’s possible to repay a country’s debt through better economic policies as a very long term project instead of just selling land…
Except a nation with no debt and a negative trade balance has negative wealth.
The government debt is the private sector surplus when there a negative trade balance.
The government is literally the source of money. Every dollar created is part of that “debt”.
Every dollar is an IOU issued by the federal government that it will be accepted to relieve tax obligations.
" Zero national debt " means zero dollars left in circulation after taxation.
Except a nation with no debt and a negative trade balance has negative wealth.
You can’t sneak negative trade balance into an argument about public debt.
A nation with no debt has the ability to take on more debt than if it already has debt.
" Zero national debt " means zero dollars left in circulation after taxation.
You can have debt for circulation while maintaining a net surplus in all accounts. For example Norway has a per capita debt of $42k USD while maintaining a surplus of $295k USD per capita.
It’s similar to how a company like Apple holds debt of $108 B USD while maintaining a $162 B USD surplus.
Which is why the trade balance is crucial when talking about financial assets. Because then all of these are financiall assets in foreign countries.
Literally every Republican ever too.
Can you give a short explanation or give me something where I can read something about it? I’m not sure what to search for to find something useful
Fiat money is basically an IOU of the government. It has its value because it is the accepted currency. It is the accepted currency, because you can pay your taxes with it.
In order to create money the government first needs to make debt that it hands out the IOUs for.
That is the core of the concept. It is then mediated through an independant central bank and all sorts of private actors and institutions in between. But the account of the government at the central bank cannot go into a plus. It is always a minus, which increases with the debt handed out to private entitities and it is deleted by the tax coming in.
Then why was it a plus in the Clinton Era where there was no national debt but a surplus?
They reduced the debt in this years by having a budget surplus. Still the debt was not zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States
Very short, commercial banks loan money from national banks. That creates money. It has to be paid with interested. Where does the money for that interest comes from? From other loans. So the whole thing becomes an ever increasing pile of loans.
And government loans from national banks to spend money, so creating and distributing money. If government pays back the loans, money disappears.
And because the whole thing is loans on loans, if population would decrease (what is starting to happen) and growth stops, loans decrease and the whole thing starts to wobble.
Not very easily. Concise, easy to understand and correct explanations of how modern money (arguably since 1971) works are not easy to come by, and also the system just is a bit weird and counter intuitive. (Concise, easy to understand, but wrong explanations are, of course, all over the place. Almost everybody thinks they know how money works. Almost nobody actually does.)
One source that explains some of it would be “Debt: The first 5000 years” by David Graeber, but a) it’s a fairly lengthy book with quite a lot of historical background and b) it has a fairly strong politicial spin to it.
This is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). I recommend “The Deficit Myth” by Stephanie Kelton
It helped me to realize that a federal government that’s in control of their own money doesn’t use or even have money, and basic terms that we take for granted mean something different in that context. A federal government creates money through spending and destroys money through taxes. It is necessary for a federal government to spend money in order for money to exist in the economy. So a national debt just means that the federal government is creating more money that is destroying
A social credit score is more humane than a financial credit score
Do not laugh, Slovaks, it applies to you too.
What the hell is a fico?
The biggest credit scoring institution in the USA.
Cool, I’m not american.
Oh, it’s not the country. It’s a small group of corporations aggregating, selling and losing your private data without your consent or opt-in, in order to determine how likely you are to keep your word and pay back a loan.
The country take lots of debts and always pays them. By credit companies’ standard their credit score is crazy high. In fact, USA’s score is the highest in the world.
Credit score is based on things which nominally correlate with financial trustworthiness (or something like that).
This is a very big improvement over a system where loans are denied because a racist bank employee doesn’t like you. It is definitely not a perfect system, and we should definitely strive to make it better, but the concept isn’t (IMHO) a bad one.
Also, as others pointed out, personal and national debt are…different.
The party has decreased your social credit score by -37. You can no longer access public transportation. Thank you for understanding.
Also, your credit score goes up from having debts that you make payments towards.
The US hasn’t missed a payment since the War of 1812.
Hey, a religious zealot of a snake oil salesman is right once in a while.
The government doesn’t give you a credit score, 3 for-profit companies give you a credit score. In fact, a government issued credit score would be an improvement, they would report it for free instead of charging you if you check more than once a year. It would force more transparency into the financial sector and would undermine the 3 companies. If it ever comes up on the ballot (it won’t), you should vote for it.
The party has increased your social credit by 22. Thank you for your loyalty.
It always pays its debt. Do you?
National debt is completely different than your personal debt.
Personal debt is when you buy a TV with your credit card. National debt is when a country invests into a highway or opens another school.
A closer example is when you take on a personal debt to fund a new business restaurant. You’re still in debt but you’re making money and employing people.
And your business is highly successful but never profitable because you’re always in debt and so are most of your employees and customers.
While opening a business is closer to the situation than personal debt the analogy still breaks down here. The state controls the size of the money supply itself as well. It creates money through issuance of debt/bonds, and can get rid of it it via taxes and interest payments on the debt. Through the federal reserve it controls that as well. And the job of government isn’t to generate a profit. There’s just no good perfect analogy. A country should be carrying a debt load to some degree, it’s the ratio of debt to the size of the economy that’s important and could indicate when it’s getting to an unhealthy level. The national debt will never be paid off, and you’d never want it to be. Andrew Jackson found this out the hard way, very ironic he got put on money eventually given his hatred of central banks.
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/03/1024401554/the-time-the-us-paid-off-all-its-debt
US debt to gdp ratio is likely starting to get too high though and probably needs to be reined back some. Not a problem unique to the US after a lot of spending to prop things up during the pandemic. Best way to bring it under control is unwinding the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and increasing taxes on corporations, capital gains, and billionaires.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/debt-to-gdp-ratio-by-country
Man, this is probably the best joke any Steve Harvey has made in a while.
It’s a company giving you the FICO score and not the country.
Country finances are extremely different from corporate and personal finances.
Weak meme…
Who regulates the financial sector?
Who regulates the financial sector echo?!
;)
(Edit: proper response is obviously “nobody, very well”)
Who regulates the financial sector?
Image 404, got it again?
The link works if I don’t embed it… That’s annoying
In the second share option, image HTML, you’ll find an embeddable direct link:
Just laugh. C’mon Jack!
Don’t tell me what to do
The only kind of correct on Lemmy is technically correct. Sorry, buddy.
Thanks jerkface!
Dumbass thinks the government gives credit scores. It does not. And the only reason anyone knows anything about their score is because government requires the lending industry to tell us.
