|
Because as it expands it becomes a heat sink that consumes an ever greater share of the US economy and will gradually drive economic dynamism rapidly toward zero. It's the Japan scenario. Take a look at their budget and or spending, and the share going to interest (debt maintenance broadly), over the past 20 years. The result? US GDP per capita: $80,000. Japan's GDP per capita: $35,000. In the year 2000 Japan's figure was higher than the US figure. Now, the US will be able to kick the can for quite a while yet, especially if it retains the global reserve currency and can distribute economic damage (debasement) more globally. The tape to watch is the average rate of interest on the debt and the share of spending going to maintain the debt. Imploding demographics and entitlement growth are gasoline on the fire. For a while you can just keep trying to push the average interest rate lower, so the interest costs don't get out of control as the total sum soars by the decade; that eventually begins to fail, as it did in Japan. You can only drive the interest rate on the debt pile so low and then your last game is to begin aggressively debasing the standard of living of the people, through currency debasement, to reduce the debt problem. And it's thus Japan's standard of living has been hammered over the past two decades. South Korea will shortly (within a few years) surpass Japan in GDP per capita. Tens of trillions of dollars locked up yielding 0.5% or 1% or 2% per year (now or in the future), is the heat sink. That capital should otherwise be acting to spur economic growth, innovation, invention, economic well-being, social welfare, infrastructure, and so on. Instead it's being locked away yielding zip, in ever greater sums, at ever lower average interest rates. It's an economic heat death process and it will tend to keep going until it eats everything it can (because no political entities dare step in front of it on their watch). |
Japan's problem was that it's spending did very little to encourage consumption [1]. It was mostly dedicated to high-cost infrastructure projects and other boondoggles that simply did not lead to more economic activity. [2]
That intrinsic lack of demand led to insanely low inflation for a long time, so that Yen-denominated debt consistently grows as a share of their Yen-denominated GDP. [2][3]
In the US, we've grown debt a considerable amount, but the only time we really increase it as a % of GDP is during recession responses (since our 'normal time' debt usually goes to things like private contractors who grow like stock-market businesses and create durable GDP). [4]
Anyway, long story short, the US debt is it's own thing and it's very hard to compare to Japan, since Japan went about it in such a different way.
[1] hhttps://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.PRVT.PP.CD?locat... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/world/asia/06japan.html [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGJPN [4]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18ZDt