wat0n wrote:What's your point? I don't know of any country that doesn't have even some national debt.
The point is that Puffer Fish claimed that deficits now mean cuts to have surpluses later, i,e. soon (not 100 years from now).
wat0n wrote:The issue is whether that debt is sustainable in the long run or not. At some point, if you have too much debt you'll go bust. It doesn't matter if you are an individual, a business or a government - if your debt stock is too large you'll have to make the corresponding periodic payments and these will be too large for your income. And it will be worse if your income decreases or the debt becomes more expensive (rates go up).
Sir, you don't grok MMT. MMT all stems from the fact that the world is off the gold standard, and the US has its own fully fiat currency. This means that the US debt is voluntary**. That the US, not the bond market, sets the interest rates, because there is zero risk of default on interest or principal.
. . . [It is not true for nations that use the euro or are in the EU.]
. . . Therefore, it
does matter if you (to use your word) are a user of the currency or the issuer of the currency. It makes all the differency in the world.
. ** . The debt is voluntary because it is not necessary for the US to issue bonds. Pres. Lincoln printed and spent greenbacks in the Civil War, and that was during the gold standard. There didn't seem to be any blowback from that. Japan has had the BoJ buy about 40% of the outstanding Japanese bonds. I just saw a report that in Aust., in the last year the RBA (Reserve Bank of Aust.) has bought over 93% of new Aust bonds over the last 1 year.
With all due respect, sir, I am certain that in 1985 nobody in the US could have imagined that a US debt of over $10T could be sustained without inflation. Now you are worried about a debt over $25T. And, yet we are seeing inflation in only some things (houses, used cars, lumber, etc.) This localized unflation can be explained as being totally the result of the worldwide economic dislocations caused by the pandemic and resulting worldwide lockdowns.
. . . The fact that everyone was totally wrong in 1985 means that you can be (and almost certainly are) wrong now, because your mind is very like the minds of all people in 1985.
OTOH, do I, or any MMTer, claim that deficits cn never be too high?
NO, we do not make that claim. I claim that the US deficit can be a little or somewhat larger that the sum of net savings plus the net trade deficit.
wat0n wrote:MMT people somehow can't understand something as basic as the above, and what they get right is something that mainstream economics gets right too.
So, NO! The problem is that in your mind you are still living in a world with the gold standard. You have not groked that fiat currencies are very different from gold coins.