So what should bondholders do? Dump US treasury notes?
If you want to continue to pay lower interest rates on things like cars, housing, and get all the benefits that the US consumer gets for being the global reserve currency - you should be spreading lies about the US' fiscal horizon.
Most federal debt is owed to domestic holders, but foreign ownership is much higher now than it was about 50 years ago.
www.pgpf.org
Again. The vast majority of the debt is in US hands.
They want us to think that it is ordinary citizens that took the money out and is not finna pay it back to Uncle Sam.
It's an accounting charade. US big banks and big businesses and the fed govt itself hold most of that debt...and it's those same people creating the money in the first place. These people already own the vast majority of the assets and make the vast majority of the income already.
They promote this stuff, so it's easy for them to cut back on Social Security, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid.
It's a psy-op, plain and simple.
They always find money
To fight a "war" on Venezuela
To fund tax cuts
To pay American defense companies to send bombs to Israel
To pad the bottom line of the American health industry
It’s a confidence game. Not some auto loan. As long as people had confidence America was dependable to mostly keep peace in the world we were good. Europe was under constant wars until America became a superpower and finally brought the Soviet Union down.
Also, there probably won’t be another dot com boom that positively affects so many in the world again. That’s the only way we could grow ourselves into a slower debt. AI ain’t going to d anything but consolidate personal assets information into even fewer tech bros hands once all the hype dies down
my understanding is that it doesn't matter...until it does
as we saw with all that money printing after covid, it can definitely produce noticeable short term effects that we can ride out. but eventually the big collapse will happen, to some generation of grandkids
personally i just need a good 40 or so years outta this fukkin country after that, not my problem
The national debt will only go down and be erased if the US decides to go back to Manufacturing and Agriculture as its main source of industry. Most likely that will never happen
The debt keeps rising because the US is now overwhelmingly an importer than they are an exporter. US leaning too much into the Service sector is the cause of this
The issue is we're not competitive in either of those things. The video actually covered this in the first 10 minutes.
For example if we were to bring back Pittsburgh and Detroit to their 1960s peaks ,
nobody on Earth would buy our industrial equipment or farm produce because we have to pay our farmers and factory worker a living wage of 60k. The reason China can make so much money is because they do everything more efficiently and at a lower cost. (And use slavery).
But even countries without slavery like Vietnam or Brazil or japan are much more efficient and lower cost at producing these things than we are.
And it's not just an issue of cost. American quality is garbage if we are being honest. This is a problem both an industry and in agriculture/husbandry. An example of this is that we pump our plants and cattle so with the GMOs, chemicals, and hormones that are out right in band and most of the world.
On the industrial side, just look at our recent Boeing debacles. We have a giant industrial entity making garbage planes that fall out of the sky. Or look at our semiconductors were Intel and IBM are inept and incapable of manufacturing the 2nanometer and 3nanometer chips that sansung and TSMC produce. Or even look at the failure of our Auto industry that can compete in reliability or performance with japnese cars.
The only reason that strategy worked in the past to build America was because
there was no global competition. Europe was reeling from both world wars, and the Soviets had a close economy that wasn't directly competing with America. There was no Japan or Korea or China or Vietnam or India or Brazil to compete with. We are not the only game in town and we are not the most affordable one. As we speak the only reason US soybeans or cattle are purchased abroad is because the US government subsidizes them, otherwise there's no agricultural or animal husbandry that is unique to America or can be done cheaper in America.
Would you believe me if I told you there was an era when general electric, us steel, standard oil, boeing, johnson and johnson, intel, and ibm had dominant stakes in 80% of their industry is globally. But this was before TSMC, Samsung, Saudi Aramco, nippon steel, tata pharmaceutical, and Embraer existed.
Personally I think the US government should double down on high-tech ventures and reclaim Federal stakes in these technologies. For example the methods that South Korea and Taiwan are using to make advanced chips is from US government funded research on ultra violet lithography machines with dutch asml. So if we could reassert our claim, we would have a lot more federal revenue.
Personally I think we should take more stakes in the ventures our govt funded instead of being laissez-faire. Even the modern day existence of Saudi aramco is due to American investments in their Wells decades ago. Percentage stakes in these ventures should have been held by the federal government. And because of our huge scientific base, there are lots of global companies like this which only exist because of federal government investment. Even fireign pharma like azrtazenica are selling vaccines and drugs funded by nih grants. This is lost revenue for the treasury department.
I honestly think The US government should automatically gain a 10 to 20% permanent , undiluted stake in all research it funds from nsf, darpa, and nih.
It's doable. that's exactly how France got rid of its Napoleonic debt by giving us the west. It worked well for them since they hadn't settled very much of it and it wasn't bringing them much economic value due to its distance.
Personally I don't think I would notice if Alaska , montana, or North Dakota disappeared.
I also don't see why we're still holding on to the Virgin Islands because it's extremely lucrative land for Nations that don't have tropical regions. Similarly I don't see the value of holding Puerto Rico, since I'm sure spain or a Latin American country would love to have it back at a good cost. Even Guantanamo is a waste of money.
So I do think it's viable to start selling assets that bring no value to the majority of US citizens. It doesn't even need to be whole states. For example we have sea beds at the edge of our exclusive economic zone which aren't being used despite having minerals at the bottom of them. We have Antarctic research bases that are no value to us whatsoever.
So I could see a sizable chunk of the debt being taken care of by sales of unused assets. My only concern is how would you value them? For example the entire GDP of Alaska is only $77 billion. What valuation multiple would you use ? 5x or 10x or 20x ?
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