memes

And you really like downplaying how shit things are.

Let me ask you this: if the US is so bad at managing the debt it owes to its people, how come we have functioned as an economy under that debt for the last several decades?

Let me ask you this: if smoking or being overweight is so bad for your health how come people can do it/be for several decades?

Got it? No? Alright let me break it down. Most of the debt we have was built up starting from 2001. A combination of two wars, tax cuts, defunding the IRS, and bailouts. So it isn't several decades it's 2.5. Now in that time period there have been 3 government shutdowns or 1 per 7 years. The current debt to collections ratio is second highest of a nation in the world and every other (ok not Japan) government hovering around that ratio owes money to the IMF which is another way of saying it is easy to erase.

The types of debt the US carries is far from simple with 10s of millions of individual creditors. And unlike Japan the high debts were accumulated in infrastructure, it was not for war or to give the wealthy a tax break. If the Japanese default they will still have their highways, if we default we still can take comfort in turning Iraq into a smouldering pile of rubble.

Our debt is huge, new, complex, and we have nothing to show for it. As long as it remains it grows faster than tax revenues grow to service it. Which means our government runs less efficiently. This is real dollars and cents. Projects don't happen, food stamps don't go out, roads don't get repaired and all the while more and more money is transferred via income taxes to people who are already wealthy enough to buy our debt. Meanwhile the typical ways of getting out of debt remain out of reach. We can't print money without inflation, we can't get it forgiven because we don't have one single major creditor, we can't raise taxes because that would be unpopular, and we can't cut anything without sending chaos out there.

But I forgot, since we aren't immediately in risk of dying we have no risk of it. Have you considered a career in insurance?