[FlownScepter]

Who the fuck do we owe, the Martians? How long before we just accept that money is made up and free ourselves of this make believe game? Just give people what they need to survive and let the unwieldy and inefficient private sector die, we're propping them all up with tax money already anyway and they still barely tread water.

[PragmaticPulp]

This headline includes private sector debt. Most of that number is private debt.

If you have a mortgage or a car loan or a credit card, you’re part of that number. And you certainly owe real money to real lenders.

Likewise, government debt is still real debt. A not insignificant part of your taxes goes to servicing interest on government debt. That’s because it’s still a real debt owed to real people who expect real interest payments.

Money isn’t some made up concept. We can’t simply print more and declare it all good. Don’t confuse money with wealth, which is a separate concept that underpins this system.

[CuriousNinja]

> Don’t confuse money with wealth, which is a separate concept that underpins this system.

How would you differentiate between the two?

[FlownScepter]

> If you have a mortgage or a car loan or a credit card, you’re part of that number. And you certainly owe real money to real lenders.

Yes and on an individual scale like that, it makes complete sense. It's borrowed against my future income, and that I will someday pay off (I mean probably not I'll buy a different house but you know what I mean.)

I'm saying, on a scale of Nations and megacorporations, it's fucking bananas nonsense. According to the Goog, US national debt is 27 trillion. Who do we owe? How did we qualify to borrow that, apart from being if not the center, at least a good chunk of the center, of the world economy? Is anyone in a position to say we can't borrow it? Is there a credit check? Who fails that check, if there is one, because we haven't despite the last several decades of absolutely racking it up.

At this point to analogize the US to a single person (which is reductive and useless but bear with me, I'm making a point), we'd be someone with hundreds of thousands in credit card debt, making a lot of money to be sure, but also carrying four mortgages and making interest only payments, and the bank in question is just still handing us money. And like, I don't think that's great, but also, it's been chugging along more or less fine for as long as I've been around. So... why don't we just stop pretending it means anything? We "owe" some foreign banks... do we? Says who? Who's gonna enforce that? Are they gonna foreclose America? The only time I've ever seen countries actually brought to their knees by banking is when a tiny one gets too uppity about getting screwed on the global economy scale, at which point we send in Marines to remind them who's in charge. Who's gonna do that to us?

[PragmaticPulp]

Government debt is literally sold. You can go buy it and invest in America, and you will receive your interest payments right on time like clockwork.

Likewise, when you pay your taxes, some of that goes to servicing that debt. You can look up how much of your federal tax bill went to paying debt holders.

The system only works as long as its trusted. If we just stopped paying interest on our debt, that trust would vanish overnight. As a result, the price of borrowing would skyrocket because who would invest in something that has demonstrated it doesn’t care about paying you back?

Likewise, if we do too silly monetary policy stuff, the trust will also disappear. Despite what the memes say, we can’t literally print infinite money and call it good. Fiscal policy isn’t a secret, it’s done in the open. The buyers of our debt know what they’re buying.

[ChrisLomont]

>Who do we owe?

You can look this up. 21T is owned by the public (think retirement funds, pensions, etc., a lot of which own treasuries). Simply blowing off paying them would wreck the US economy and destroy lots of people. So it's real money owed to real people.

Foreign govts own around a third of the debt - same thing - they invested in US treasuries and those assets are intertwined in their economies, just like ours. Of this Japan has 1.3T and China 1T.

State and local US govts own around 1T for their pension funds.

So we owe it to any actor that has purchased US Treasuries, and that's a lot of people, big and small.

>it's fucking bananas nonsense

No it's not. It's simply big, but then again, so is the US and world economy. There is no goofy, ill-conceived, wholesale ignorant corruption going on.

> Is there a credit check?

Yes, it's the rate at which buyers willingly buy Treasuries on the open market. If enough people/institutions lower their trust, rates go up. It's as simple as that.

The main question is not how much debt the US carries, but can it afford to service the debt, and so far, that is a yes. Servicing the debt is around 10% of federal receipts, which is a decent chunk, but by no means debilitating.

[selimthegrim]

American assets can be repossessed abroad if a judgement is served - look at what happened to Argentina in NY. Plus you want Americans to be free from money but everyone else use our currency at gunpoint?

[dang]

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[FlownScepter]

> American assets can be repossessed abroad if a judgement is served - look at what happened to Argentina in NY.

Yeah, that happened to Argentina, who is not America. I'm saying if that's the consequence, which you seem to agree it is for nonpayment, then America is immune from that consequence. If someone tried that shit on a US Naval ship, they would be bombed out of existence.

Mind you, this is brutally unfair to the Global South. That's my point. Global capitalism just exploits countries to small too play the game like we do, and the countries that do play said game, do so largely with stolen wealth from those same exploited countries.

If America owes money but the mechanisms to enforce that don't exist, then why do we owe it? We owe it exactly as long as we agree we owe it. And this is not to say America should just move on, this is to say the world should move on.

> Plus you want Americans to be free from money but everyone else use our currency at gunpoint?

Fuck no, I want no one to use money.

[neural_thing]

We've borrowed from our future selves, as well as our children. We brought consumption from the future into the present.

[calebm]

It's like stealing candy from a baby.

[FlownScepter]

And we've been doing it for as long as I've been alive. I'm certainly never going to make enough to pay it down, and nobody else in my generation is. So like... who's paying it and when? Or again, do we just acknowledge this whole thing is just a Ponzi scheme to direct more money to the same boardrooms who already have more money than they could ever conceivably spend?

Take all of Bezo's wealth away, and just leave the number there. He'll never know nor will anyone else, because there is nothing you can do with that much money. There's nothing to buy.

[PragmaticPulp]

I’ve responded to some of your other comments with corrections. You’ve been stating falsehoods as facts throughout this thread. If you really believe that we could “take all of Bezo’s wealth” or that it would improve the situation rather than worsen it (seizing private assets to punish business owners is the fastest way to ensure no business owners want to operate in your country) then it’s clear that you don’t understand how basic economics works.

We’re not going to get anywhere productive as long as the goal is to punish the rich no matter the cost. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where every dollar of Bezos’ net worth is a dollar subtracted from the poor. Amazon had created value across the economy, far beyond Bezos’ net worth. Likewise, arbitrarily destroying Amazon or Bezos would likewise destroy value across the economy, as well as destroy the institutional trust that enables the economy in the first place.

[FlownScepter]

> I’ve responded to some of your other comments with corrections. You’ve been stating falsehoods as facts throughout this thread. If you really believe that we could “take all of Bezo’s wealth” or that it would improve the situation rather than worsen it (seizing private assets to punish business owners is the fastest way to ensure no business owners want to operate in your country) then it’s clear that you don’t understand how basic economics works.

Your imagination is limited. I don't care about business or business owners. I'm exploited by every business I interact with, either as a consumer or an employee. They don't have my loyalty.

> We’re not going to get anywhere productive as long as the goal is to punish the rich no matter the cost. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where every dollar of Bezos’ net worth is a dollar subtracted from the poor.

Yes, it literally is. Amazon makes money by selling whatever product at a cost higher than it cost them to complete the logistics to get that product to a consumer. That means their profits are whatever they can scrape off of paying people to shuffle boxes through their warehouses, drive their trucks, and write their code. That is exploitation by definition: those employees are not paid what their labor has generated in terms of wealth. Every employee is paid less than they are worth, because otherwise profits would not exist.

> Amazon had created value across the economy, far beyond Bezos’ net worth.

Amazon has also decimated numerous other businesses, and used the resulting holes in the market to grow.

> Likewise, arbitrarily destroying Amazon or Bezos would likewise destroy value across the economy, as well as destroy the institutional trust that enables the economy in the first place.

I don't want to destroy Amazon, necessarily. I want them to pay their workers enough to live. The problem is every time people suggest that, people like you come in and say "well if we paid them a living wage the business would die, do you want that?" To which I say, yes. If your business must pay poverty wages and force people onto Government welfare, that is literally the Government subsidizing your workforce and why the hell should we do that? If we're going to pay, by proxy, for people to work at Amazon, then let's just fucking own Amazon as a public utility and cut out fucking Bezos. We don't need Bezos. He is doing nothing essential at Amazon, he just had the capital to start it, and he certainly doesn't do fucking anything worthy of earning what he does. No human being can EARN 4.5 million dollars an hour.

We saw in the pandemic what happens when the workers can't go to work, but the finance guys, and the CEOs and everyone else can. The economy ground to a fucking halt. Bezos was able to do everything he does at Amazon just fine, just like every other CEO, because what they do is functionally nothing. Their workers, on the other hand, were essential! They were heroes! So they had to go to work, and get sick, and die to avoid this entire ponzi scheme coming crashing down. And still huge sectors of it are on the verge of collapse precisely because the people actually generating wealth are having a hell of a time doing it.

[PragmaticPulp]

> I don't care about business or business owners.

That much is clear. You also said:

> Fuck no, I want no one to use money.

I’m afraid your ideology is preventing any actual discussion of economics.

[jpxw]

Lol, if you got your way you would immediately crash the economy.

See for example any country that has ever tried anything close to this - Zimbabwe, Venezuela or post-war Hungary, to name just a few examples.

When that happens, perhaps you’d understand why a stable money supply is important.

[tboyd47]

The debt and the money is not "made up," but the "we" is made up. The owed amount will be paid by our children and grandchildren through their taxes. The money will go to foreign countries, federal agencies, central banks, hedge funds, and pension payouts.

[eloff]

> let the unwieldy and inefficient private sector die, we're propping them all up with tax money already anyway and they still barely tread

The whole private sector? You mean the economy?

It's hard to tell if this is sarcasm, but I'll go and name this the unicorns and rainbows theory of economics.

[whitepaint]

> inefficient private sector die

This is factually wrong. We've been miraculously efficient since 18th century.

[FlownScepter]

> This is factually wrong. We've been miraculously efficient since 18th century.

Being more efficient than the 1700's is an astonishingly low bar.

[ChrisLomont]

Yet that efficiency has only increased as the money system we have now stabilized, and was adopted by every single country in the world, because it did provide empirical benefits to the populations in those countries.

So the point is correct - stable currencies have allowed vast increases in economic growth and vastly better standards of living than were possible the millennia before it.

Being locked to other forms of money, such as the rate a country can amass gold, slowed growth to that rate. The current system is vastly better.

[FlownScepter]

Your point presumes that the spread of the globalized market is a boon to the countries it touches. Like, fair dues, now people in remote island nations can buy televisions and smart phones, but now they also have Facebook which is being used by their leaders to foster genocides.

"Standard of living" is more complicated than good and bad.

[splaytreemap]

"Money is made up therefore it serves no purpose" is just a bafflingly implication. Care to provide any detail at all about how your moneyless society is going to work?

[FlownScepter]

Oh it absolutely serves a purpose, it's a shared value that speeds the exchange of goods and services. However as the monetary system exists now, is mainly as a tool of oppression to keep people locked in a cycle of working themselves to death. It doesn't work for anyone save a tiny minority of people, who have more of it than they could ever use.

I suppose instead of "moneyless" society, I'm saying we need a money reboot.

[tastyfreeze]

We need money that has actual value that can't be manipulated. That is why the gold standard worked. At the same time that is why those in power ended the gold standard.

Without the anchor to gold our money can freely be manipulated for personal or political gain at the expense of the public.

[FlownScepter]

> We need money that has actual value that can't be manipulated. That is why the gold standard worked. At the same time that is why those in power ended the gold standard.

No, the gold standard worked because at that time, manipulating the value of money to tweak the economy was not a practice. And besides-which, gold is a terrible standard anyway. We use tons of the stuff in basic, cheap electronics all the time. We use it on boutique audio connectors. It's not uncommon or rare at all. It's like diamonds, the only reason they're worth a goddamn thing is that everybody just agrees they should be, even though the same substance that sits on the end of a $10,000 ring is ground up and coats the outer surface of saw blades.

> Without the anchor to gold our money can freely be manipulated for personal or political gain at the expense of the public.

As we've seen though, this can be done with virtually any asset now, which is why land remains basically the only thing that holds value, because increasing or decreasing the supply of it is really ridiculously hard.

[tastyfreeze]

Manipulating the value of money wasnt done because it wasnt possible. Not because nobody thought of it.

The gold standard is a protection against exactly the problem you are complaining about.

[rthomas6]

We owe each other. A owes B, who owes C, who owes A. Sometimes paying off one debt causes a cascade of several debts being paid off in turn, all with the same money.

[tastyfreeze]

Please see the history of communist countries for how that works out. Central allocation of resources is incredibly inefficient and highly susceptible to corruption.

[seibelj]

Private sector had multiple pharma firms ready to go to create vaccines to cure us from terrible virus. If we had one “efficient” government firm we wouldn’t have anything.

[FlownScepter]

And public sector money props them up each year when they pay little if any taxes, and we also fund their research endeavors because corporations are notoriously shitty at that sort of thing.

99% of private sector "innovation" is repackaging the stuff created under DoD/DARPA research projects. Then once that's done, they corner cut.

[JumpCrisscross]

> when they pay little if any taxes

Who’s paying the taxes then?

[xtian]

Who's left if you remove corporations? It's individuals, and more and more over time it's the middle strata of earners.

[FlownScepter]

I dunno man, you tell me. We're perpetually running out of money every time we're talking about doing things like helping people not die or freeze to death, yet miraculously we always have trillions around to funnel into more tanks that will rust away in a field in Kentucky, but we can't help people survive the deadly plague circling the globe by just paying them to stay home, yet also have the money to just GIVE Wall Street 3.5 TRILLION DOLLARS, like just here, not a loan whatever, it's all good bro. Just 3.5T for 30 minutes-ish of market stability.

You explain how this shit is working for anyone not in the C-level or political classes.

The only time I hear about Supply and Demand is when poor people get fucked. Nobody is worried about the money supply when we're pissing streams of BILLIONS into the military industrial complex, when we already have a military multiple factors larger than anyone else on the fucking planet. Yet in the midst of shitloads of people not being able to afford rent, we can't like, defer mortgages or just give the people money, noooo, that'll hurt the moooneeeey.

[stackedinserter]

Where did you get this number?

Which DoD/DARPA stuff do FAANG repackage?

[FlownScepter]

They often repackage a shit ton of open source software developed by volunteers, all of which is running on Internet standards originally developed by the Department of Defense for military use. Most of the tech in the servers was developed by various DARPA initiatives surrounding transistors and solid-state memory.

Mind you these things were invented at companies, yes, but almost every time if you dig deep enough you'll start finding the lists of the various grants given to said companies to fund this research, because otherwise they just tend to not do that. This is not controversial stuff, it's very normal.

[burnthrow]

You're so right. First give me all of your money, it's an illusion anyway.