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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Because the debt is now due?

"U.S. Debt: Visualizing the $31.4 Trillion Owed in 2023" - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-debt-31-4-trillion-ow...

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A few years ago we had an opportunity to borrow at a negative interest rate. Should have leaned into that opportunity.

Also we’re under-taxing bajillionaires and politically-active but tax-exempt megachurches.

It was a choice not an opportunity. They decided to do that to boost asset values.

If the government sent out a hit team to forcefully rob every single last penny of net worth every US billionaire has, what impact would that income have on the national debt? I'm pretty sure it'd be extremely negligible.

'Tax the billionaires' is a red herring. Nobody should use that or engage with it. The issue is that they exist in the first place.

nah, bro. like pigs, you fatten them up and then eat them. do it in 3 or 4 cycles and then there will be no more billionaires.

> Because the debt is now due?

The so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) credibly posits that because the U.S. borrows in its own currency (dollars), it can simply "print money" as needed — as long as the U.S. economy has sufficient unused productive capacity to absorb the resulting increase in demand. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/business/economy/modern-m...

MMT is basically modern day heliocentrism - objectively correct, but threatening to established wealth and power structures and therefore Wrong.

? American debt is only due, if they abandon the world, which pays for this debt by valuing american security and insurances of free trade high, by using the dollar to trade and as reserve currency.

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