They never cared about you... For obvious examples, check out how they killed Avro via the auto-pact in particular, or the Canadian industrial base via NAFTA in general.
Everything is a zero sum game for them. The orange guy is just waking people up to the fact, since he does not care to put up a nice face.
Nowhere do I say "print unlimited money". The US govt has been printing money - lots of it. The US banks have been printing tens of times of that. Where's the hyperinflation then?
There's a lot of numbers between zero and infinity. We need to print at least some money - printing money is the only way we get to have money, after all - but that doesn't mean we should go to infinity.
In reality, the question is nowhere near unlimited money. The question is not whether we should print infinity money, it's more like whether we should print 700 or 800 money. And this question has been successfully handled since the US left the gold standard. It's just when one learns about this they get weirded out, much like one gets grossed out when they learn that bacteria exist. Nothing about the world changes at that learning moment, but your perception does. Then you take a deep breath and understand that you have already been living with the bacteria, and nothing happened, so whatever.
Nowhere do I describe inflating away the debt. There is no reason whatsoever to do that. Zero. Nada. Zilch. I'll say this again: the term "US govt debt" is just a number that keeps track of the amount of money the govt has printed. A technicality that raises from the fact that the govt prints money not by issuing dollars, but by issuiong IOUs.
When a govt is the issuer of their own money, their debt does not follow the rules of your household debt anymore. This is the fallacy in the whole "govt debt bad" argument. You need to get your money from someone else to pay your debt, and you need to work for it. The govt doesn't, they can just print more money, and they do. The meaning of the word "debt" for you is completely different for the meaning of the word for the govt. Forget about the word and understand that these two things are completely different beasts.
You need to let this sink in.
Nothing about what I'm describing is leading to inflation, either. What I'm describing has been going on ever since the US went off the gold standard, and no one noticed. To reiterate my previous point, 95% of the money in circulation has been printed by banks, not the govt, and we see no issue nor hyperinflation from that. The govt could easily triple their output without a significant influence on money supply, and therefore, without any problems whatsoever. There will be a point where you start to create inflation, sure, but we are nowhere near that. And where you get runoff inflation is where your actual real economy is no longer functioning.
A part of this problem thinking is that people have not given thought about where the money that we currently have in circulation came from. There is no magical correct amount of money in the economy, and even if there was, we wouldn't have the faintest idea about it. And more importantly, the amount we currently have was not handed to us by God, the founding fathers, the aliens, or whatever. What we have right now, we just printed. That's it. We can print more, if we want to. In general, if you have deflation, you maybe want more, if you have inflation, maybe less, but the tools to fix the problem are much more dependent on the reasons of any such deflation or inflation. Like our current inflation problems, plain ol' corporate greed in the US and lack of cheap Russian energy in Europe. There's nothing about the amount of money in the economy in those problems, and there's nothing that the amount of money in the economy can fix about them. You first need to solve the real economy problem underneath, and then you can oil the machine by money.
In a more broader sense, govt money output is best seen as a counter-cyclical tool. Most importantly in a recession the govt should raise it's money output by building infrastructure - an investment in the future - and in doing so, create jobs and thus, customers. The new customers will spawn new companies that go to satisfy new consumer demand, and the economy will recover. This is how the New Deal was done, and the US has been coasting on that ever since, but the fumes are running out by now. These days instead we have austerity, because a recession is seen as an opportunity by the rich to buy up troubled assets on the cheap, so they pressure the govt to reduce it's money output to help further reduce the economy.
TL;DR there is huge leeway available between a recession and hyperinflation. We have been operating in that leeway since '71 without much of a problem, yet knowledge of the mechanisms of that operation have not really spread in the public.
No country that is the issuer of it's own money can ever be unable to service it's debt. All it takes to service it is to print some more money. Now as to whether that would create any problems, well about 95% of the money in circulation has been printed by private banks via fractional reserve banking, that is, by creating loans. We don't see much problem from that, and a bit more of govt printed money is not going to make a difference, either. Where the problems do start is when you lack an actual real economy to base said accounting off of. And I would argue that the US has been on that road about 45 years now, since the start of the age of neoliberal economics, and the results are coming in, as witnessed by the political upheaval in the last decade or so. As a result of the policy of these 45 years the middle class is dying, and nobody is fixing that, and so the problems are only going to get worse.
Other countries accept the dollar for their goods because the dollar is, for historic reasons, 1) the medium of international trade and 2) the world foremost reserve currency. 1 and 2 have been adding together to the historically accurate expectation that one can always sell their dollars to buy whatever they want. The US, having weaponized the dollar by confiscating the reserves of Afghanistan and Russia, whatever you think of those countries, has shot a big hole in both of those it's feet, and the world is slowly turning to make something else happen. Once that something else gets in gear, there will be big trouble for the US indeed, but it won't be the deficit. It will be the fact that the US has forgotten how to manufacture what it needs, and doesn't have anything to sell that anyone else needs. There won't be any deficit if there won't be any trade.
Taxation, other than govt income, has another very important, yet underrated function. It creates the demand for govt money. Without it, everyone would be free to choose whatever money makes most sense for them, and the govt would lose it's ability to finance itself via money printing, too. Whether anything would be popular is not the way to look at it. Political ideas, in the US, and elsewehere, are not popular because they are good ideas or make sense. Political ideas are popular because someone spends the ad and pr money to make them popular. Like, the very same idea that US govt debt is bad is a prime example of that - it's not popular because it has actual merit, it doesn't, it's popular because it's hammered into voter brains over and over and over again until they become one with it. And inb4 you go "well at least my party...", no, your party ideas too. Your party is as much a part of this hammering, and of neoliberal economics as the other party. Destorying a country goes one step at a time, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, and everyone's singing a merry marching song of whatever the drill sgt conjures up as they go.
The debt is nothing but an accounting tool. It measures the amount of money the govt has printed. It's printed in the form of debt to make the big banks swallow it - they get to profit off of it. When a bond comes home to mature, all you have to do is print another one to cover it.
Nothing about the big debt number is a problem. Actually, it's one of the best thing the US has - the dollar is the biggest export article the US has. And there you have another stupid talking point - nothing about the large trade deficit is bad, either. If the rest of the world is willing to sell the US their products, and all they want in return is dollars - which the govt can pring as much as it wants - any country would happily have such a problem.
The US has a lot of problems, but these two aint it. But they sure help to rally voters to support whatever policies are on the table.
China is investing in renewables more than the rest of the world does in fossil fuels. Pretty much all of their curent economic growth comes from renewables, and they are carrying the worlds 2030 goals pretty much singlehandedly.
Make no mistake, they are still investing in fossils, too, but there seems to be a certain direction they are heading. No surprise there, too, they are going to be hit hard by climate change by mid-century, and they are doing what they can to soften that blow.
Case in point: Starfield.
Or from another industry, good 'ol "holding it wrong".
Woven my ass. There already is a word for a corporate utopia, and it's dystopia. We know very well what all of this tech will be used for: surveillance and control. Case in point: the aforementioned security drone. Place is not even open yet, and they already have crime, I guess it must be the Minority Report kind, with everything that follows. And why do I get the vibe that sooner or later you'll have to get chipped to hang around...
Good luck with the vending machines and the self-service ad-filled coffee shop, I guess.
In the neoliberal/neocon world, the purpose of govt spending is to hand out money to those who paid the campaign bill. If the telecoms paid a part of the bill, they get "broadband initiative" money. If defence contractors paid a part of the bill, they got to build Obamacare. Which as we remember basically had to be built again, because who on earth has defence contractors write web services. I guarantee you, whoever is building the charger network got their hand in the pie the same way. Look into any of the govt spenging programs and it's the same pattern pretty much everywhere.
The results of the charger network funding is not chargers. The results of the broadband funding is not broadband. Ther results is that the president got elected, and now has to own up their IOUs. It would be rather tone deaf for him nose around in what actually happens with that money.
A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. -- D. Gries
