America has had much worse debt problems in its history and still did great.
Keep the economy growing and all will be good. Inflation and interest rates are low.
Stop whining and bitching all the time.
Your share (as a taxpayer) of the national debt is $188,000.
But wait...there’s more. Your share (as a citizen) of the nation’s unfunded liabilities is $389,000.
That’s a whopping $577,000. With politicians like we have in the DC Swamp you can be certain that number is sure to rise substantially. After all, that’s how they make THEIR money — putting us in debt.
Let the good times roll.
I have heard about the “debt” and “deficit” problem for 50 years. The closest we came to having an “issue” was not debt caused but was caused by overregulation and high energy costs of the early 1970s.
Not one of the “traditional” markers for debt-induced hyperinflation are present:
*high and rapidly rising prices of gold, silver, or other commodities.
*rapidly rising energy costs (quite the opposite, energy costs are flat or even falling) and portend to fall faster as the US continues to expand shale and other domestic production.
*high velocity of money
*ultra-high interest rates
As some of you know, for a long time I’ve had a theory of why this isn’t happening, and it involves the computer revolution and the total failure, so far, to properly value and price the new tech-heavy products by using pre-tech valuations. A smart phone, for what it does, should cost THOUSANDS, but doesn’t. That’s just one example.
But there is another factor of the “debt” that is distorted by American law. Apparently years ago Congress thought it wise to value ALL American assets at “purchase price”. So, say, Uncle Sam bought prime real estate in San Francisco to build “the Presidio,” in, say, 1910, that land and all the assets purchased at the time like buildings would be valued as what was paid in 1910, regardless of the fact that by 2000 (or whenever the Presidio was sold) the land and some of the buildings were astronomically higher. Same with gold prices. If gold was bought at $35 an ounce, that’s what it’s valued at today.
In the early 1980s, economist Robert Eisner calculated the value of American assets at MARKET value, and found that a national debt of hundreds of billions of dollars then was closer to one-tenth that in real valuations.
This always brings up the “What, Schweikart, you gonna sell the Washington Memorial?” No, but we might do what Donald Trump is already doing: move people out of DC, and sell off some of those office buildings for huge profits. We can unload massive amounts of federal land at reasonable prices that would bring massive profits; and so on.
I think these two factors-—utterly horrible current pricing/valuation and the legally required “old valuation” of US assets explain much of why the debt “doesn’t seem important.” Maybe cuz it isn’t.
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