All I'm mad about is I don't have access to the same sorts of instruments. I pay an _excessive_ amount of taxes that return at like a 0.0001% for society. I could make 12% on them and give 5% directly at a much better rate.
I'm of the opinion that we should have a constitutional amendment which limits debt to gdp to 80%. If the CBO indicates we will breach that, congress has 8 years to get it back under control before the CBO has the authority to ban officials from public office if it's determined they voted in favor of the legislation responsible for the breach. No doubt there are problems around that. Someone smarter than me can fill in the holes.
The correct approach is to require all those people worried about the “Debt” to hand over any liquid savings they have in bank accounts or retirement funds. Since that is what is causing it by accounting identity.
After all if they consider it to be such a problem they should put their money where their mouth is.
Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton to understand how the system actually works.
Amusingly a larger deficit means government has more space to spend, not less. People saving means they are not spending which means resources are left underemployed.
Debt to GDP is not a relevant concern in a free floating currency has Japan has demonstrated for decades.
You could. Would you, though?
History (milennia of it) says the average answer is "no".
I don’t see maintaining a church and staff as the same as maintaining a charitable clinic and its staff. As such, I don’t count a tithed dollar as necessarily equivalent as a dollar given to a high quality secular charity.
If you're giving 11% to genuinely charitable causes, good for you! But you're very, very much an outlier.
Fixed that for ya!
The government used to sell two bond types - dollar bonds that paid off in dollars, and gold bonds that paid off in gold. The gold bonds were safer and hence paid a lower interest rate.
Enter FDR. FDR decided to pay off the gold bond holders in dollars, not gold, and since the value of gold vs dollars had diverged substantially, FDR confiscated the difference.
That was the end of the phrase "sound as a dollar". Gee, I wonder why nobody says that anymore!
The largest risk of TBills is that inflation will shrink their value, and with catastrophic deficits that is a very, very real risk. That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
Most investments seem to eventually (?) denominate into USD equivalents, especially if you live in the US. Do you mean hard(er) assets like real estate or commodities (which also leaves me puzzled because they’re still typically denoted in an underlying fiat currency and especially USD if they’re domestic assets).
It’s easy to imagine a well performing stock that neverless loses due to a currency shock. Indeed this is why one would typically hedge currency risk if trading a name outside of accounting currency
Money isn't real: it's an abstraction. What it's an abstraction for, on the other hand, is very real. Don't confuse the map and the territory.
Musk, for example, invested hundreds of millions into Tesla, his entire fortune. Soon afterwards, he was within hours of personal and business bankruptcy.
SpaceX also was one explosion away from total bankruptcy.
Say what you will about Musk, the man has a lot of guts. Without those guts, there'd be no Tesla and no SpaceX and no Starlink.
Scams, cons, grifts, and destructive exploitation of common resources, on the other hand? Those can get massive numbers of monies out for every single number of money in. So that's where my mind goes, when someone talks about "make 12% on [a pile of cash]".