The country doesn't have a debt problem - it has a revenue problem.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a8aee1d4-991c-11e5-95c7-d47aa298f7...
EDIT:
Anyways, back on topic:
* Shifting demographics
* Oil/energy glut
* Slowing China economy
There's too much supply and not enough demand in the world (speaking macro economically). You can't "push the string" and force demand, even with zero interest rate policies (you'll just get an asset bubble; witness housing and equity prices). The developed world's future is Japan, and frankly, that's not such a bad thing.
This doesn't mean those giant pools of money aren't hungry for returns though. Notice how quickly those funds in developing countries floods back to the US at the slightest hint interest rates are headed back up.
If you haven't read up on the high yield/junk bond slow motion train wreck occurring, you should.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-14/investors-...
> Debt of struggling companies has slumped, with one market gauge falling to a six-year low, as declining energy and commodity prices hit producers just as the Federal Reserve prepares to raise borrowing costs for the first time in almost a decade. Scott Minerd, global chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners, predicts 10 percent to 15 percent of junk bond funds may face high withdrawals as more investors worry about getting their money back. He joins money managers Jeffrey Gundlach, Carl Icahn, Bill Gross and Wilbur Ross in warning of more high-yield trouble ahead.
TL;DR Janet Yellen either a) waited too long to raise short term interest rates or b) raising them at anytime was going to break the bank.
The revenue should be coupled with the value, not volume of the asset.
Never been to the States, but wouldn't that be a regressive tax? And regressive taxes are morally bad, as in they hurt the poor more than they hurt the rich. I'm saying this because if you work a McDonald's job in Europe (from where I'm from) you don't probably have a car, you live in the city, and have the benefit of having access to relatively cheaper public transport, but if you have a McDonald's job in the States chances are big that you're going to work by car.
The US should do the same thing with gasoline. Let the rich people with premium-gas-guzzling V8s pay through the nose for the luxury of polluting and use the money to wean the country off of oil.
Try a land value tax (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...) for an asset that can't be hidden or removed from the country.
Adding a carbon tax might also be a good idea.
But their wealth is not. If it moves through a financial network, it can be found and taxed. Unless you're going to carry it around in cash. Which then causes you to run afoul of civil forfeiture laws.
I agree that a land tax would be helpful; it would allow for property currently being used unproductively to launder developing country wealth (Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, London, and now parts of Texas) to be used by actual residents.
Yes, and no. The foreigners can still buy up land (and why not?), but with the land value tax they'd be actively losing money, if they don't rent it out or otherwise use it productively.
Thailand gets this right:
"Under Thai laws, foreign nationals are not allowed to own residential land. They can, however, buy apartments so long as no more than 49 per cent of a development is owned by foreigners. They can also purchase detached villas, but while they can own the house, they cannot own the land the house is on and are only able to lease it for 30 years at a time."
In Toronto property taxes pay for a lot of services. Let the rich Chinese foreigners subsidize those services; I'll continue to rent from them at monthly rates I know they're losing money on (after taxes, maintenance, and opportunity cost).
Owning a home is a poor investment, there's a good reason companies lease office space and don't waste their time and capital owning and maintaining it themselves.
Depends on the tax treatment. Lots of places have tax breaks for owner occupied property; and some places like Australia go really crazy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_gearing)
You know, like people giving their inheritance first and foremost to the children that "happen" to be theirs instead of random people.
People living in a country are its collective owners. If they want to have those laws or these customs, that's their choice.
And the situation in places like Thailand, where citizens share a common history and civilization that goes thousands of years in the past, is difficult to be understood by people from a "melting pot" place, which was established a mere 3-4 centuries ago, and which consists of all kinds of immigrants coming over and helping create a country.
And even there, the fate of the original inhabitants (native americans) is maybe telling of why the Thais might not want foreigners coming in and buying the land. Thais would be the "native americans" in that scenario.
The people living in a country might be the collective sovereigns, and the laws they decide upon apply.
> And the situation in places like Thailand, where citizens share a common history and civilization that goes thousands of years in the past, is difficult to be understood by people from a "melting pot" place, which was established a mere 3-4 centuries ago, and which consists of all kinds of immigrants coming over and helping create a country.
You mean like Germany where I am from? Depending how you count, it's been around for longer or shorter. But the borders were never very stable, and neither were the different states. So nationality is a weird and muddled there.
Oh, just found this on Wikipedia:
> Thai people, who originally lived in southwestern China, migrated into mainland Southeast Asia over a period of many centuries. The oldest known mention of their existence in the region by the exonym Siamese is in a 12th-century inscription at the Khmer temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, [...]
There's your melting pot.
"According to Mexican law, foreigners are prohibited from owning land within 31 miles of the coastline or 62 miles from an international border."
Don't we have property taxes already?
> A land value tax (LVT), also called a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or site-value rating, is a levy on the unimproved value of land. It is an ad valorem that, unlike property taxes, disregards the value of buildings, personal property and other improvements.
The idea is that we can tax land values like crazy without distorting investment decisions, if we are very careful not to tax improvements to the land like buildings. That's because the supply of land is in some sense the most inelastic economic commodity there is: they stopped making it, and you can't hide it. But, you have to be very careful not to tax the buildings---otherwise you end up with less buildings than is optimal for society.
See the Economist or Wikipedia or Google for more explanation. It's one of the few taxes that don't distort the economy.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val... explicitly talks about the distinction between property taxes and land value taxes.
Perhaps we need more regular, able to work in an industry other than lobbying after holding office folks run for office and not worry if they don't get re-elected.
You will not make a dent in the debt by taxing HFT. If you introduce a tax, people will stop doing it. (Maybe that's what you're after, but that's an entirely different problem than repaying the national debt).
Your ignorance on this topic which you confidently expound on is deplorable.