>Pic related.
Is the U.S. national debt a meme?
Ryan Murphy
Jacob Thomas
He doesn't count unfunded liabilities.
That's supposed to be over 200 trillion.
Liam Sanders
>He doesn't count unfunded liabilities.
Unfunded liabilities?
Jacob Campbell
any debt is a meme because they've become so large that debt is now money and most of them will never be paid off. every single nation around the world is cool with the banking cycle as it exists now where big banks who create money out of thin air loan it to them to spend and realistically they only ever have to pay the interest and never the principle
Adam Rodriguez
It's hard to truly know the total amount of US debt because of convoluted rules and constant changes. Unfunded liabilities are a just another part. They mostly consist of benefits, like healthcare, pensions etc that have not currently been paid for.
Check out this article, might help. It's quite a deep rabbit hole.
forbes.com
Parker Morris
The USA was forecast to collapse by just about every leading economist after it went off the gold standard and started borrowing money. It didn't. Here's the problem with economists: it's not that they're wrong, it's that when they're wrong, they don't tell you why. In this case, they were wrong for a simple and strange reason. When you examine the finances of an entity, you ask three questions:
>What's its revenue?
>What's its debt?
>What's its net worth?
Economists judge countries by taking its total debts, regardless of when it falls due, comparing it to one year's revenue, the GDP, and holding their heads while shrieking about the end of the world. You have to take a look at the national net worth to understand that Japan has withstood 25 years of crushing debt, which it should not have withstood, and likewise, the United States has withstood, because they both have an extremely high net worth. Iceland however, with a gross national product of one herring and eve online, wouldn't be able to withstand a much smaller hit. At the end of the day, size does matter. And you can't get away from the fact that the economists who analyze nations are not looking at the whole picture.
Instead, they should look at the structural capability of the nation and cost out the debt over time, which is how debt works, rather than looking at a single year's revenue as the source of the nation's wealth/power. Which is a complex way of saying if I took a look at your bank statements, some of you probably have car loans or mortgages that exceed your yearly income. So if I was an economist, I'd figure you're all bankrupt. But you're not, because you have assets.
Dominic Taylor
And when you bring up this point to an economist, they ask two questions: How can you measure the net worth? And how can you monetize it? Well monetization is easy: you print money, which is a flat tax against everybody. It's not completely exact, there are some things can't be monetized, but it works pretty well. How do you measure it? Well you can generate a value by using the financial formulation for a growing perpetuity given the GDP, the average market return, and the average growth rate. But honestly, it's really not all that important. Drive around the United States for a while, you'll see there's a lot of stuff there. You don't always need a quantitative analysis to know that "Hey, those guys are pretty rich."
All this is to say that anyone who tells you the national debt is something that will lead to imminent collapse isn't telling the whole story. Sure printing currency devalues the dollar. But with 25% of the world's GDP being American, currency manipulation isn't really all that hard to deal with. And if you're that worried about it, you can buy gold or stocks. But the overall point is that the national debt, while not a good thing, isn't something you need to panic over, and should start coming down when the baby boomers die off and their kids (another large generation) are in their 40s/50s and paying taxes on their peak lifetime incomes.
Cameron Hughes
This.
But yes, as long as OPEC is traded in dollars we ar at the top of the collapsing pyramid.
Angel Ramirez
Our gimmick is that debt is automatically transformed into money when it's redeemed (that's why all that shit's digital now), but we still pretend we have to pay it back so the party not in power can have something to complain about.
Christopher Jones
>what is petro yuan