I need help translating Progressive Speak. When I bring up the $1T in interest payments we will have to pay, the response is “We owe that to ourselves.” WTH does that mean?
The largest holders of U.S. debt (treasuries) are US govt entities. The last I read the Fed Reserve as #1 (quantitative easing since 2008) and Soc Security was #2. But the Fed Reserve may no longer be #1 because they've been letting their treasury portfolio expire without replacing them as much (quantitative tightening).
#3 would be all of the state pensions if you were to lump them together as one entity. Somewhere after that are foreign governments like China and Japan (usually China is the largest foreign owner of US debt, but every now and then they sell of some and Japan buys some making Japan the largest foreign debt holder).
So their argument is that when the US pays interest on treasury debt, most of the time it's going to entities within the U.S. IMHO that's a bad argument for their excuse to downplay our debt amount (and the rise in interest rates for future debt). But that's what they mean.
“’We owe that to ourselves.’ WTH does that mean?”
It means we will continue to spend until there is no more money to borrow. At that point we will determine who will pay and it won’t be “ourselves” it will be you.
It’s nonsense. We’re not taking out a loan to cover the national debt, we sell bonds to cover it. So the interest is cooked into the bond maturing, and we have to pay that to whoever buys the bonds, not to “ourselves”.