Agent Steel wrote:Ok so I knew that the USA is in great debt, but it surprised me to find out that literally every country owes money to someone else.
How could that be?
Secondly, what will happen if the US never pays back its huge debt? How come people don't seem to care? Like everyone's ok with just increasing it more and more and more.
Public debt is "owed" to other nations, but also to corporations, pension funds, individuals, etc. Nothing at all strange or unusual about this arrangement. As an accounting identity, public debt is inversely proportional to private debt. A large public debt is suggestive of a healthy private sector, while a large
private debt signals an impending financial collapse.
It is absurdly simple to reduce public debt, btw. Simply reduce the level of new issuance of sovereigns to match the desire of private entities to purchase savings vehicles. It is pure superstition that sovereign currency issuers must issue new debt to offset deficit spending.
The entire debt/deficit hysteria is based entirely on superstition. The only relevant issues are employment, capacity utilization, and inflation - not arbitrary numbers on a budget. Both parties in the US act as though the deficit doesn't matter. They are correct, it doesn't. They only pretend the deficit matters when they want to cut social security and medicare. Nobody asks "how you gonna pay for it" when it comes to F-35s or a massive tax cut for billionaires.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci