this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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National debt is completely different than your personal debt.
Personal debt is when you buy a TV with your credit card. National debt is when a country invests into a highway or opens another school.
A closer example is when you take on a personal debt to fund a new business restaurant. You're still in debt but you're making money and employing people.
And your business is highly successful but never profitable because you're always in debt and so are most of your employees and customers.
While opening a business is closer to the situation than personal debt the analogy still breaks down here. The state controls the size of the money supply itself as well. It creates money through issuance of debt/bonds, and can get rid of it it via taxes and interest payments on the debt. Through the federal reserve it controls that as well. And the job of government isn't to generate a profit. There's just no good perfect analogy. A country should be carrying a debt load to some degree, it's the ratio of debt to the size of the economy that's important and could indicate when it's getting to an unhealthy level. The national debt will never be paid off, and you'd never want it to be. Andrew Jackson found this out the hard way, very ironic he got put on money eventually given his hatred of central banks.
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/03/1024401554/the-time-the-us-paid-off-all-its-debt
US debt to gdp ratio is likely starting to get too high though and probably needs to be reined back some. Not a problem unique to the US after a lot of spending to prop things up during the pandemic. Best way to bring it under control is unwinding the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and increasing taxes on corporations, capital gains, and billionaires.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/debt-to-gdp-ratio-by-country