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Answer me this More

Answer me this

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  • I presume you mean money that the government owes to various debtors (including to the American people, or to itself). If so, then paying it back still has some economic value to the country as a whole. Because in the end, with our economy so hopelessly intertwined with the economies of other countries, it is important to maintain a good credit rating with those other countries. Even if we only cared about trading partners that don't view us as the great satan or otherwise want to destroy us (thankfully Canada is still - last time I checked - the largest trading partner for the US), the US government still needs to keep its books in order well enough to keep doing business since our own country seems to no longer be interested in manufacturing much of anything anymore.

    Now if we could take on a truly isolationist approach to international economics (for the sake of argument - not saying I would endorse such an idea), then perhaps we could just ignore all the outstanding debts and let the pieces fall where they may. However as the system is currently set up I'm not sure the US economy would in any meaningful way survive if tomorrow morning the US government defaulted on all of its outstanding debt.

  • Besides the fact that it would piss off the entire world, make our currency worthless for items not produced in this country, shut down all foreign investment, and basically destroy our countries economy for 20-30 years? No.

    Really, we could just fuck the social security people for a year, and pay the whole thing off with enough left over to have a big fucking party. That's got it's own problems though (roving gangs of pissed off octogenarians, riots at the bingo halls).

    It seems like a huge deal right now be

    • I'm not following you. Why would our currency be worthless? Borrowing a trillion dollars that we're not ever going to pay back is the same as printing money. No difference, except that we pay bankers a lot for their trouble. We're still printing money. And as far as I can tell, we can still buy things with our money.

      Seriously, I'm trying to understand why we can't just print up money and give infrastructure jobs to poor people. I don't see the difference from what we are already doing - except that we proba

      • Printed money is like shares in the country...Like, if Apple split its stock today, and doubled the amount of stock it offered, the stock wouldn't be worth zero dollars. It'd be worth less, sure, but Apple is the shiznit, and people would believe that they're still worth it. The same is true with the country, regarding printing more money...You can print as much as you like, but it's worth less and less. "The dollar today fell against the yen, the euro, and blah blah." It's a measure of how strong our econo

        • Money isn't actually worth anything, so that doesn't make sense. It's just paper. But if you're referring to inflation, I don't think your explanation is quite right either.

          Inflation is when you have too much money chasing too few goods. That's the situation you have when the economy is maxed out and you're still printing money. But here we don't have that situation. We've got far more goods, far more economic capacity, far more unemployed people, than we have money to pay for. We can print a metric fuckloa

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