It’s not mutually exclusive. By definition, government expenditures are from tax collections. Whether it becomes debt, is a function of collection vs expenditure.
You have come full circle. As I said, whether the debt is paid off or not, it is still costing the people.
Correct.
Not really.
Taxes are at pretty much an all time low.
Party on.
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I have to go to bed right now.
I will respond to you in the morning
The level of taxes has absolutely nothing to do with it. The fact remains that the “government’s money,” one way or another, comes from the people.
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ok…
No… the Government’s money comes from the government.
They are the ones who print it and everything.
I was a fully investigated Hillary Clinton supporter in 2016.
I have always disliked Bernie, who is not a Democrat.
Allan
Okay… this is going to be a little long winded, which is why I couldn’t do it last night.
The parameters I am using is focused on sovereign debt, not State or Local.
When one looks at what the US debt actually composes of, one can see that there is a large swath of it that will never be paid off, nor should it be paid off, because it exists only as markers on a balance sheet.
Fully 27% of the debt is intragovernmental debt. That is debt that the United States Government owes to itself. That is debt that is simply a balance sheet problem… because how can a government owe money to itself? Especially when it prints the money.
Let us look at the rest of the 73% of the debt. Because that is the part of the debt that we actually need to worry about servicing. We can not worry about 16% of that debt… that is the part held by the Federal Reserve.
What we do need to worry about servicing is that the privately held debt and the debt held by other sovereigns. Or foreign held debt is around $6.5 Trillion. The break down of who owns it is here. https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt
Banks, State and local governments, pensions, Insurance funds, etc etc own the rest… in the form of treasuries… usually as a hedge against downward market forces.
So… what does this all mean and what is my point?
Well… the original claim is that government expenditures are from tax collection. But that is not how our sovereign debt operates. Our sovereign debt operates as a funding mechanism for keeping money moving through the economy. We don’t create money. We are users of money, but we don’t create it. We create wealth and money is a representation of that wealth. Taxation is a way to redistribute that wealth to the common good… or bad depending on your opinion about things.
This is the fight over the last round of tax cuts. Tax cuts to people with a bunch of wealth does not really help the economy because there is little reason for them to spend that money into the economy. Direct payments to the lower rungs of the economic spectrum means that that money will get spent almost immediately.
But if the debt doesn’t really mean anything, then why not just print a bunch of money? Well… inflation.
So we know as a whole that the economy works better when money is cycling through it… from the bottom to the top and back again.
So this comes back to what the debt means and how it is used.
Debt is fine when it is used for things like spurring the economy in a recession. Debt for building out infrastructure is good because at the end of the day there are real and tangible assets. Debt for schools, debt for health care, debt for scientific advancement, debt that is in the public good. All of those thing are good uses of sovereign debt as long as what it takes to service that debt does not outstrip the ability of the long term economy to absorb the costs of servicing that debt.
Bad forms of debt. Giving people with a lot of wealth more of it. That is selling off the commons.
So to come back to the main point. Government Expenditures are from debt. Tax collections function as a way to redistribute the wealth created by that debt, to keep money flowing through the economy and to hedge against inflation.
So after that long and rambling post… I hope that it made a little bit of sense.
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It does make sense. But it ignores several things.
Or democrats doing in Alabama.
So in other words we don’t need a private sector or an economy, we can all just sit home and collect whatever money we need from the government. If it were that ■■■■■■■ easy countries like Greece and Venezuela could just print whatever money they need and be doing just fine.
Keep reading the thread and you will see what I mean.
They are just projecting again.
The media is hedging their bets with Biden…that much is clear.
I think the media is in love with Buttigieg…but he’s unelectable.
Why is Buttigieg unelectable?
Now you are just being silly.
I really don’t know what this has to do with what I posted.
