[roenxi]

Are you potentially not a creditor? I think the term here is 'distinction without a difference'. If you lend the US enough money for a sandwich, you should expect not to get a sandwichworth of money back. What you call that legally is not that interesting, I suspect, to the people were lending the money.

[ceejayoz]

The creditors all get paid. The US has always made its debt payments.

New loans get taken out while that happens.

Non-$0 debt load, but no defaults. The only time the US ever paid off “all its debt” was during 1835-1836. One year out of more than 200.

[roenxi]

It doesn't matter what happened to creditors centuries ago. As it stands right now it is inconceivable that the US could or will pay off all its present and future creditors in real terms. Someone has lost a lot of money (presumably China and Japan). How could the US pay them back without resorting to fantasy? The debts are too high and the US economy is not big enough for any strategy to be politically feasible. Even coming up with a serious scenario where the US tries to pay down its debts is hard. It is likely that they are going to keep running up debts until they can't pay the interest any more, then default.

The best outcome the US can achieve is semantic games where they pretend that giving people back less than was borrowed is somehow reasonable.

[ceejayoz]

The debt-to-GDP ratio the US currently carries has been seen before. The raw number is high, but so is the GDP.

$1M in credit card debt would sink me. For Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t even rise to his personal attention.

> Someone has lost a lot of money (presumably China and Japan). How could the US pay them back without resorting to fantasy?

I can’t pay my mortgage in full right now. That doesn’t mean my bank loses money on the loan.

China and Japan are getting paid on their loans, at the agreed upon amounts. They will continue to be paid.

[roenxi]

> The debt-to-GDP ratio the US currently carries has been seen before.

In the middle of a world war, facing a level of emergency that left civilisations of more than one continent shattered and reordered the world as it was known. As an emergency spike that lasted for around 5 years before they started paying people back. And although the debt was staggering and the US economy was in its prime as a global manufacturing superpower.

This is obviously different, the US government has just been spending because they can. If they even try to pay this debt off it'd be stupid. From the US perspective, why even bother? They're basically already committed.

> I can’t pay my mortgage in full right now. That doesn’t mean my bank loses money on the loan.

In that case you've defaulted on your mortgage. You may get on well with the US government.

And the bank may or may not be losing money for all I care, but on net the creditors to the US are clearly losing money. The numbers are too big for any other outcome.

[ceejayoz]

> In the middle of a world war

We're just getting out of a world pandemic.

> In that case you've defaulted on your mortgage.

No, I'm making the agreed-upon payments, just like the US is on their debt. I can't pay off the whole loan today, there's twenty years left on it. Similarly, the US can't pay off 108% of GDP today, but they can over the decades-long timespan of those debts.

[roenxi]

> We're just getting out of a world pandemic.

The US couldn't pay its debts before COVID either. The pandemic hasn't changed the US's long term prospects for servicing its debt even slightly. The future was default in 2019 and it remains default now in 2022. The only interesting questions are when and what form the default will take.

I mean, are you trying to be serious here? How do you think those debts will be payed down? Who do you think will be involved? What timeline?

What evidence?

> No, I'm making the agreed-upon payments

Oh ok, I thought you meant you weren't making them. Well, assuming you intend to keep that approach up there is no place for you in the halls of government. You are heading for a future where you might pay your debts in full!