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Comment by makeworld | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't sound like number to me.

You might as well say there's no "magic number" of bricks we can stack on top of you before you are squished because we don't know precisely what that number is (yet.) But clearly there is a limit, even though we might have some difficulty saying exactly what it is.

The number is, whatever number it is when USD stops being the world’s reserve currency, for reasons unrelated to national debt.

Would a national debt of $0 be a point where the debt is a full-on crisis? Would a national debt of $999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 be a point where the debt is a full-on crisis? If only there were some kind of conclusion we could draw from this, even if we don't have an exact number. Oh well, back to eating paste.

Disagree. If we had the ability to borrow $999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 and spend it on useful projects, we’d be mining helium on the moon, colonizing Mars, terraforming Venus, building a Dyson sphere around the sun, and warping to Alpha Centuri. Our gross planetary product would probably be able to pay off the debt in a week or two.

That doesn't work, particularly the Venus and Dyson sphere ideas, because being able to borrow that much money doesn't actually give you access to the requisite resources and labor. Resources and labor isn't something you can just conjure out of the void as easily as adding zeros to an entry in a bank's database. If you brought such a ludicrous amount of money into existence, the amount of steel or man-hours a dollar could buy would be greatly diminished.

Furthermore, you presume the money would be spent on successful and profitable projects, rather than being squandered away. If only it were so easy.

Yes, but it’s an absurd number to begin with, so I think some poetic liberty is justified.

To make it slightly more realistic, let’s say the Galactic Development Bank of Betelgeuse offered us that amount as a loan, along with access to their expertise and trading partners, with 1000 years to pay it off.

My actual point is that in the ratio of debt to GDP, perhaps we should use projected future GDP in the denominator, rather than current GDP. This is why a hard upper limit on debt (or even debt-to-GDP ratio) is a dubious idea. It’s all about what the government does with the money.

Indeed, it's not a number. The loss of AAA status would mean the loss of the US's economic, technological, and military superiority first. After that, the specific number would matter as little as it does now.

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