As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices

sharts•15 minutes ago

Why does US debt even matter? Why does GDP even matter? Just print some cash and cancel the debt if the borrowers and creditors are two pockets on the same pants. All these abstractions don’t measure what matters anyway.

ericpauley•about 1 hour ago

The GDP-relative amount of US debt held by foreign investors has actually gone down on since 2014: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S

tardedmeme•about 3 hours ago

100% debt-to-GDP sounds like some fundamental threshold when it's actually just a Schelling point. It's 1.00 GDP-years of debt, which is a number with an arbitrary time unit in it (why not GDP-month or GDP-decade?)

croes•about 2 hours ago

Yearly income is a usual metric

scuff3d•about 2 hours ago

We don't hear anything about it because the Republicans are in charge. If a Democrat was in the White House right now you wouldn't be able to shut Fox News and it's ilk up about how the national debt is a harbinger of doom for the entire country.

SilverElfin•about 2 hours ago

It’s not just US debt that’s a problem. It’s also state level and local level. Every part of our government is spending irresponsibly. A lot of the debt is hidden too. A pension with more future liabilities than it can pay for isn’t going to show up as deficit on this year’s budget. A state putting out bonds may count interest payments in the budget numbers that show up in press conferences, but the actual total debt isn’t talked about much.

I’m not sure why anyone expects differently. Politicians corruptly waste money to helping themselves, their careers, their party, and their causes. It’s other people’s money that they are spending. And most of them never had substantial experience in private industry to learn the skills it takes to manage billions of dollars of budget. Governments are far, far more wasteful and inefficient than anyone realizes.

dangus•about 1 hour ago

A lot of American waste and spending is due to our incredibly wasteful and short-sighted perception of what urbanism looks like:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-pon...

I very often think about how much money Americans spend just on basic infrastructure needs compared to people who live in places built at a more sensible scale.

If I got a job in Arlington Texas right now, I’d first need to load myself up with a car payment and spend 4-5 figures per year just for basic needs like groceries and work, even if I lived within walking distance of that job.

Arlington, with a population of over 350,000, has no scheduled route public transportation service.

American towns and cities never seem to think about things like like “how many feet of sewer line/streets/utility lines and miles of road do we need for each resident?” or “how much population/economic activity per acre do we need to break even on services?”

15155•34 minutes ago

Did you ever consider the idea that not everyone wants to live in the typical "urban" environment?

Not having public transportation or high-density housing nearby is a feature and a desirable property.

> I’d first need to load myself up with a car payment and spend 4-5 figures per year

Also a feature: if you can't afford this, perhaps that isn't the community for you?

This is a fairly typical agenda: "I want to spend your money turning your city into something you don't want it to be so some theoretical utopia can be actualized."

No matter how much crying and extolling of virtues you do: nothing is going to make me ride the bus. No matter how many "road diets" you impose, no matter how many lanes you kill by dedicating them to buses: I'm not going to ride your bus system. I'll just take my tax dollars (which far exceed that of typical bus ridership) elsewhere.

I ride the subway everywhere in NYC, but not every city needs to become NYC.

expedition32•about 2 hours ago

Remember the Tea Party?

But yes you don't hear anyone about this because politicians waste no time on things they know they can't fix. DOGE was a fucking embarrassment.

In the 1930s the Dutch cabinet knew very well that they likely couldn't keep up neutrality. But they also knew there was no chance in hell that they could build up an army in 3 years that could stop Hitler. So what did they do? Lie to the public and secretly open Canadian bank accounts.

As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices

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