For first time since World War II, US national debt now larger than its economy

sharemywin

good thing the current administration was basically elected to fix it. how's that going?

rayiner

America can’t solve this problem democratically. Trump has taught the GOP you can win elections through targeted bribery (e.g. No Taxes on Tips), avoiding hard decisions (e.g. no cuts to entitlements), and distracting people with expensive spectacle. Meanwhile, Democrats are a collection of interest groups held together by patronage. In the recent election, Democrats were knee-capped because inflation made it impossible to promise expensive new programs. With expanding benefits off the table as a carrot, Trump was able to make big gains among Democrat groups (e.g. Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens, Muslim immigrants in Michigan) that lean more conservative on issues other than government welfare. That leaves everyone dealing in fictions: the fiction that you can reduce debt by cutting taxes, the fiction you can reduce debt by increasing spending, and fictions about how much you really balance the books by targeting only “billionaires” instead of taxing the middle class.

fallingfrog

The debt can be inflated away (which is the only plausible way this is going to go) but it might cause the dollar to be dropped as the world reserve currency. I don't know for sure what happens in that case.. I suspect that imports would become enormously more expensive, which would reveal the catastrophic erosion in worker rights and pay due to neoliberalism. People would be suddenly aware of how much less they are making and how much more the wealthy are taking than was the case 40 years ago. This in turn might result in political instability. But who knows.

bcjdjsndon

America teeters on the edge like Britain prior to ww2...one more military overstep and it's over for you

oa335

History doesn't repeat but it rhymes. Roman emperors starting with Marcus Aurelius began devaluing their currency to pay for endless war, and to a lesser extent, free bread; i believe that is the principle cause of the decline of Roman empire.

jjk166

There's nothing particularly special about the debt being larger than GDP. GDP is not income and debt is paid over time. For context, China has a Government Debt to GDP ratio of 96%, the UK is at 94%, France at 116%, Japan is at 263%.