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by panick21_ 874 days ago
Nobody that is serious about the topic believed in some kind of doom scenarios. Indeed people who are actually in this topic pretty much agree on the general numbers on the topic. The 'doom' talk is from people who don't know shit. However that doesn't mean there is no problem.

There are plenty of people who know whats going on, its not even very complex. What people disagree about is the long term implications.

The reality is this, the US getting to the point where the debt servicing costs as much as the military. And future spending is known to be high simply by the already promised social benefits.

And the debt servicing could go much bigger if interest on debt goes up even slightly. Ever 1% of increase debt might result in a whole US military worth of extra debt serving per year.

So, eventually the US will either have to raise taxes broadly on the whole population, or cut social spending by a large amount. Both are politically untenable and thus have a high potential of not happening or resulting in a serious political crisis.

As long as neither of them happens, the situation is getting worse, and critically getting worse with ever increasing speed. And that simply isn't possible to go on forever.

So its easy to go into an exponential curve of things getting worse and worse. All the other countries that ran into problems also had people say 'wouldn't happen here'.

So this isn't a doom for the next couple years, even decades but even until then, spending large parts of your GDP with debt servicing isn't really great way to spend money either.