Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics The Debt Ceiling

There is no such legal thing as the Debt Ceiling

In fact, U.S. debt is a key investment vehicle.

I think this explanation is correct. If the debt is incurred through good investment and results in benefits to the American citizenry and innovation, why not?

...because the Democrats proposed the programs being funded - therefore, the debt that programs generate must be bad policy.

The idea that the national debt is a rock solid, low risk investment is something that had never occurred to me.

Elimination, or even just reduction, of the debt would be a destabilizing event in our debt-based economic system.

Crazy...

Debt is, I think, a very poorly understood concept. How it became the basis for an economy is really a manifestation of dark sorcery - a confidence game of epic proportions. It is, just like money, a representation of agreement - not a tangible thing, just an agreement. And like all agreements it can be changed, either by new agreements, or by rude force.

In simplest form, debt is negative money - an expression of indirect barter. Money (including negative money) is a tool for increasing the flexibility of barter from direct trades - “I’ll give you eight boards for a ham and a pound of bacon” - to indirect, multiparty, elapsed time trades. Barter, too, is based on agreements (how many boards is a ham worth?)

What happens to an agreement when one (or all of the parties) dies, or otherwise disappears? The agreement evaporates.

It seems to me that debt, and in a similar way money, have become very narrow and selfish concepts as commonly applied, tending to obstruct natural and good acts like some kind of zombie spell.

When people band together in societies, which create governments - because, as it happens, people need to be governed because most of us are incapable of understanding and believing rationally and functionally in the common good. Often the common good isn’t directly good for everyone at the same time, but when evaluated in a lifecycle context the common good should lift all boats. As individuals, we are generally not skilled at working for the common good universally.

So we come to this notion of National Debt, what is it, exactly? First, it is debt because as a whole society we can’t summon the collective consciousness to pay up front for the common good. And sometimes the “common good” is actually narrow minded selfish splurging on things that don’t result in positive benefit (think invading Iraq or tax cuts for the rich). Con artists and bullies have their tricks for putting lots of uncommon good expenditures on the Community Credit Card, things which produce a negative return on investment, driving the debt ever up and up.

But debt owed to whom? The crazy debt has accumulated through a complex web of agreements, many of which were not all that agreeable - but now we want the context to be simple and straightforward. We have come to hold debt on a sacrosanct pedestal on the one hand, “Debts must be repaid!” But on another hand we use debt as a basis for our entire economy, completely oblivious to the variety of honest or nefarious origin or purposes behind it.

But in the end, debt is still just an agreement, and agreements are changeable.

Now, things like climate change, pumping aquifers dry, depleting the soil, killing off of species - those are real debts. No way to replenish those stores of wealth once they are used up. What we need to agree upon as humans is to eliminate that global debt.

Might possibly be one of the smartest observations on the National Debt I've ever read.

Golly…

The difference between a subsidy and an investment is a subsidy keeps something alive that would likely die without external support. An investment is supposed to result in benefits that exceed the initial cost.

If we could be rational and logical about what to invest in, then using debt for investment purposes makes sense. But return on investment has to be about more than money, and costs cannot be externalized.

As. nation, we should invest in honest lifecycle analysis modeling and make that a legislated requirement for expenditure decisions.

As far as I can tell the so-called debt is not even real. Everybody thinks that government money accounting is the same as it is for an individual. Its complicated but the simple fact is that the national debt is actually there for no real reason. There have been a number of legislators that have suggest that we just do away with it. The problem is that its a grand and great reason for politicians to have fights over.

Just a waste of time.

I think I will repeat my that that this nation REALLY needs a new Hoover Commission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission

We have a bureaucracy that needs a REAL study. There are, literally, hundreds of books written about bureaucracies and there are rules, etc. We need somebody to deal with it. When they did the Hoover Commission they saved huge amounts of money amongst other things. Its time...........

Most businesses hire somebody to do this job on a regular basis. Our government, however, does not. Instead they think they can get it done with inside folks. Any fool knows that inside folks is a terrible mistake and just contributes to the ongoing failure. Oh, example. The military was ordered to have a complete audit several years ago - they have yet to get it done:
https://blog.ucsusa.org/jknox/defen...pentagon-fails-its-audit-for-fifth-time/

That's just for starters. We give them billions, every year, and every year we give them more. Nobody actually knows where it goes or who gets it because they have such a mess that they can't even get an audit done!!

A lot of this debt is debt we owe to ourselves, just for starters.