7 ms·

U.S. National Debt Tops $33T for First Time

37 points by vinni2 3y ago

s09dfhks 3y ago
its probably fine
MrLeap 3y ago
I thought we agreed, as a society, that arbitrary numeric thresholds are only interesting if they're in the integer series of K*10^N, where K is 1 to 9 and N is 0 to infinity. Occasional allowances for multiples of 5 -- normally only if the second digit is 5.
- bgirard 3y ago
  Yea, I don't get the significance of $33T. It's a monotonically increasing number these days.
  - samspenc 3y ago
    +1, I find the "for first time" part a bit of an oxymoron as we know this number is going to keep increasing. In a few months, it will top $34T for the first time, and a few months after that, $35T for the first time, and so on.
    - a-user-you-like 3y ago
      +1. It will soon be 500T, then quickly followed by 1QN. Agreed, a bit of an oxymoron.
    - Incipient 3y ago
      By definition it's not an oxymoron? It may be "obvious" but nothing is contradictory.
  - slantedview 3y ago
    The reason debt matters is because if it gets high enough, it may cost us more to borrow money and could eventually trigger a debt spiral where we're unable to service our existing debt. Currently, our debt to GDP ratio is among the highest in the world [1][2]. At the moment, we're still able to borrow cheaply mainly to the dollar being the reserve currency of the world, and due to the petro dollar program (where oil producing companies sell their oil in dollars), but these things may not last (which is part of the reason why the US is pushing for war with China). The takeaway from all of this isn't necessarily that we need to cut spending on social programs while maintaining a larger military than the next several nations combined, which is what the deficit hawks referenced in this article want, it's that we should rollback the tax cuts that led the deficits in the first place. We should also be increasing domestic investments that would make us more attractive to outside investors rather than becoming an over-militarized hollowed out shell of a former super-power. If you treat your domestic economy and workforce like a leveraged buyout target, siphoning every ounce of profit out of it while saddling it with debt, the end result is likely the same as with many leveraged buyouts: collapse. 1: https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-debt.htm https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-debt.htm 2: https://data.oecd.org/chart/7bDT https://data.oecd.org/chart/7bDT
    - oneTbrain23 3y ago
      You do know that Fed will give the interest collected to Uncle Sam directly. The main downside is debt is a built-in timebomb to destroy economy when condition is "ripe". Now seems to be so for USA, weak military (defeated by Talebans, Russian shovels destroyed EVERY single American high-tech including rumored downing 2 F35s in Syria), dedollarisation due speed-up by alternatives Brics and cryptos, high-unemployment and recession, lack innovations and unable to manufacture goods (China at least able to build 7nm,nowhere in USA land able to build such), superb incompetent leaderships in centuries for USA. I am netflix and chill on this Dalio-predicted world event.
    - afpx 3y ago
      If I’m calculating correctly, debt is like 100,000 per person, roughly. Does someone have a plan for how to pay it? To this layperson, it seems like an inevitable default. The rich may be able to, but tax the rich, and they’ll just move it.
  - yetanotherloss 3y ago
    No one knows at which point that number goes from being a hypothetical problem into a very realized one. Everyone knows the US needs to roll back the batshit tax advantages it keeps handing out to certain groups that largely already have all the money, although few seems willing to say that in a way that may impact them getting paid.
    - soupfordummies 3y ago
      There's a very large portion of folks in the US that think the deficit is coming from tax advantages to folks who DON'T have all the money though.
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S 120% debt to GDP ratio is "the problem"
- Canada 3y ago
  Yeah, agreed. Let me know when it's 50... in a year or so at this rate
- toast0 3y ago
  I dunno, 3.3 is in E6 and E12 which are commonly used to decide which values to care about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_series_of_preferred_numbers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_series_of_preferred_number...
npalli 3y ago
In other news, in 2023 U.S GDP tops $26T for the first time.
- iwonthecase 3y ago
  Number of years since birth of Christ tops 2023 for the first time.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  This is the important number that gives meaning to the national debt number. It's similar to income versus debt for an individual, the more income you have the more debt you can service. At about a third over GDP it's a bit high, but not disastrous. And no this 33 trillion will never be 'paid back', instead GDP will grow and make the number insignificant (also inflation), a few decades down the road.
ortusdux 3y ago
Note that debt to GDP has decreased slightly in the last 2 years, but inflation has offset this when it comes to total $ of debt.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  Also note that year-over-year numbers are still skewed by comparing to the pandemic years. Debt-to-GDP compared to two years ago is less not because the debt situation got better, but because GDP two years ago was artificially depressed by the pandemic restrictions.
ldoughty 3y ago
"for the first time" Hasn't it topped 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23...32... etc.. for the first time too? What makes 33 special? I certainly don't like the amount of debt in the U.S.... but this is a low quality headline except for the fact you don't need anything more to the story --- or if you do, they are burying the lead behind the paywall.
- klyrs 3y ago
  > What makes 33 special? It's the first composite number ending in 3? And, yes, that only makes sense in decimal, but finance wonks aren't to be bothered with such esoterica.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  > What makes 33 special? Election season is starting, and someone wants to use this as a talking point.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
A trillion bucks ain't what it used to be
mindvirus 3y ago
I've talked about this before, but the US debt feels to me mostly like an accounting mechanism. What I mean is that the US government is mostly in debt to itself, in money it can print. For example, the Social Security Trust Fund buys US bonds to secure its cashflows. Anyway, I really don't understand if and why the US National Debt matters that much (I'm not saying it doesn't, I just don't get it)
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  Yes and no. The U.S. can and does make new money to pay debts...basically out of thin air. As a self imposed limit, they agree to pay interest on that debt. Again, yes they can create money to pay that interest, which because of the mechanism they set up, would cost further interest payments. So what's the real limit? Inflation. If you have too many dollars in circulation chasing too few goods, you get inflation. Therefore, the limit is the the extent to which interest payments on the national debt are sufficient to induce inflation beyong productivity growth. At least, this is my understanding.
- adventured 3y ago
  Because as it expands it becomes a heat sink that consumes an ever greater share of the US economy and will gradually drive economic dynamism rapidly toward zero. It's the Japan scenario. Take a look at their budget and or spending, and the share going to interest (debt maintenance broadly), over the past 20 years. The result? US GDP per capita: $80,000. Japan's GDP per capita: $35,000. In the year 2000 Japan's figure was higher than the US figure. Now, the US will be able to kick the can for quite a while yet, especially if it retains the global reserve currency and can distribute economic damage (debasement) more globally. The tape to watch is the average rate of interest on the debt and the share of spending going to maintain the debt. Imploding demographics and entitlement growth are gasoline on the fire. For a while you can just keep trying to push the average interest rate lower, so the interest costs don't get out of control as the total sum soars by the decade; that eventually begins to fail, as it did in Japan. You can only drive the interest rate on the debt pile so low and then your last game is to begin aggressively debasing the standard of living of the people, through currency debasement, to reduce the debt problem. And it's thus Japan's standard of living has been hammered over the past two decades. South Korea will shortly (within a few years) surpass Japan in GDP per capita. Tens of trillions of dollars locked up yielding 0.5% or 1% or 2% per year (now or in the future), is the heat sink. That capital should otherwise be acting to spur economic growth, innovation, invention, economic well-being, social welfare, infrastructure, and so on. Instead it's being locked away yielding zip, in ever greater sums, at ever lower average interest rates. It's an economic heat death process and it will tend to keep going until it eats everything it can (because no political entities dare step in front of it on their watch).
slantedview 3y ago
[flagged]
- Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
  Bush and Trump tax cuts aren't a substantial cause of the rising debt. Over the last few years revenues are UP in spite of the tax cuts, but so are deficits. Why? Because spending rose even faster. Over the next 30 years we are going to add 116 trillion to our current debt, and it will all be because of Social Security, Medicare, and their associated interest costs. Really! The rest of the budget is balanced: https://manhattan.institute/article/behind-cbos-100-trillion-in-projected-deficits-over-30-years https://manhattan.institute/article/behind-cbos-100-trillion.... Neither political party wants to acknowledge this because these programs are popular, and Democrats (despite the rhetoric) aren't interested in repealing ~95% of the Trump tax cuts. Neither party is fiscally responsible.
  - mempko 3y ago
    You have it backwards. A balanced budget would not be fiscally responsible because money IS debt. If you like economic growth, then a balanced budget will cripple it, which is not fiscally responsible from that perspective. On the other hand economic growth is causing our climate an ecological crisis. So a deflationary event, done responsibly, should be considered.
    - Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
      A balanced budget at this point is impossible. We are heading toward 3 trillion dollar deficits by the end of the decade. At most, we can hope to rein in the growth of the debt, but the US will never run a balanced budget in your lifetime so this point is moot. >On the other hand economic growth is causing our climate an ecological crisis. So a deflationary event, done responsibly, should be considered. Legitimately evil thinking. Yeah, let's destroy the economy because of climate. Do you think poor countries can afford to care about the climate?
akamaka 3y ago
On the Federal Reserve Economic Data website, you can put together your own charts to put the debt data into context. Here’s one that I just created, which compares the ratio of debt payments to tax collected over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18ZzX https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18ZzX
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  do they go back through WW2? Interesting times then in twrms of debt.
tiffanyh 3y ago
Debt to GDP is the more interesting number. In the last 5-years, the US has more debt than GDP. The last time we experienced this was during WW2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_Held_By_Public_as_of_Feb._2023.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_Held_By... https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to-gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to...
fuoqi 3y ago
For all those who think that a high debt-to-GDP ratio is fine (put the meme picture here) and that the US will simply follow the Japan scenario for several decades at least (nothing great, but nothing catastrophic), I highly recommend to read this Lyn Alden's article: https://www.lynalden.com/economic-japanification/ https://www.lynalden.com/economic-japanification/ To summarize it: Japan and US are in two very different situations, the former is one of the largest world's creditor nations, while the latter is THE largest world debitor nation. The reserve currency status, while quite useful for kicking the can down the road, makes situation exponentially more dangerous when the can will hit a wall.
- mortureb 3y ago
  That’s what you get for putting someone like trump in office. He increased the debt in one term as much the last decade and a half combined. The American people are silly.
  - fuoqi 3y ago
    Both parties love to spend public money. Remember that the COVID-related spending had a very high level of support from both sides. Same goes for the current administration with its "Inflation Reduction Act" (lol, talk about misnomers). Also, not all of the borrowed money were spent by the Trump administration. When he left the office, TGA had 1.6T dollars.
    - mortureb 3y ago
      No the deficit was massive under bush, fixed by Obama, ridiculously massive under trump and significantly improved by Biden. This isn’t bOtH sIDeS
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I don't think Trump is to blame for situation where both parties agreed to spend their way out of...
    - 3y ago
mempko 3y ago
Another way of saying this is "US National Savings tops $33T for First Time". Debt of the public sector is an asset to the private sector. This debt shows up as deposits in our accounts.
trts 3y ago
https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/ Federal debt more than $250K per taxpayer. Doesn't include state-level debt and unfunded liabilities such as public employee pensions. Interest payments on the debt alone now exceed spending on defense https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX In order to pay these bills, they will have to print more money. Those seeking to protect the value of their wealth will pour it into real estate, equities, and other assets. This is what the hollowing out of the middle class looks like. The asset holding class will absorb the wealth effect of higher valuations, and wage & salary workers will see their discretionary income diminished as inflation puts healthcare, housing, and education further out of reach.
archo 3y ago
https://archive.is/TZL2V https://archive.is/TZL2V - https://archive.ph/TZL2V https://archive.ph/TZL2V - https://archive.vn/TZL2V https://archive.vn/TZL2V - https://archive.md/TZL2V https://archive.md/TZL2V
- dang 3y ago
  Your account has been posting dozens of comments just like this, and we're getting complaints that you're using a bot to do it. Autogenerated comments are not allowed on HN, so can you please not? Of course it's ok to occasionally post archive links to articles, as long as you don't overdo it relative to other sorts of comments. And there should not be such a mechanical pattern to the posts—one link is fine; you don't need 4!
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    In the case of archive.today, linking all variants (ph is li vn of md & today) of the domain can be useful given the already legion DNS issues the site faces. I'll punch through all of those hoping that I get lucky with one. (Increasingly that's not the case.) I've written my own local shell scripts/functions to generate the lists for my own use. I've found the service all but unusable for well over a month now, which means that paywalled HN posts are not accessible: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681> Numerous other HN members are noting issues with (Re)CAPTCHA loops: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37445503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37445503> 38 results over the past month on "captcha loop": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1695104420&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1692482400&page=0&prefix=false&query=captcha%20loop&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1695104420&dateRange=custom&...> One workaround for WSJ content, at least, is to look for syndicated publication after a day or so. MSN seems to carry at least some stories as I've noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543995> I've already noted that when the NY Times bolstered its paywall in 2019, HN front-page stories fell to 25% of their prior average, apparently due to the paywall and reader response to it (presumably fewer upvotes and more flags) rather than any change in HN's own code, ranking, or practices (admins as opposed to readers). Paywalls, like generic topics (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37565975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37565975>), make for very poor discussion. Not only does the paywall itself become a (really, legitimate) topic, but the already low evidence of having R'd T.F.A. drops to nanoscopic values. Expecting HN readers to subscribe to even a small fraction of the tens of thousands of sites which appear on the front page (let alone all submissions), or even the ~150 sites I've identified associated with news organisations (even "public" sources such as the BBC and US NPR affiliates are now "requesting" registration and logging in) really isn't viable. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354> Whether that means HN ban strict paywalls (I'm strongly leaning that way), come up with its own arrangement for major news sites (top 20: nytimes.com, bbc.com, bbc.co.uk, theguardian.com, washingtonpost.com, reuters.com, npr.org, cnn.com, slate.com, vice.com, latimes.com, cnet.com, yahoo.com, sfgate.com, cbc.ca, cnbc.com, guardian.co.uk, bits.blogs.nytimes.com, vox.com, salon.com). The full listing of 149 sites accounts for over 8% of HN front-page topics from 2007 through June of this year. I also know that HN doesn't like single-theme / topic accounts. But unless HN is willing to run this as a service itself (see the "Who's Hiring / Who Wants to be Hired" threads), this is net-net useful. There's an additional issue that archive sites might not want to be too strongly associated with a principle role of piercing paywalls. But that just gets us back to the issue of paywalled content on HN and the fact that HN is now leaning on two parties (paywall-exploiting publishers, and paywall-piercing archivists) and potentially causing pain to both rather than grabbing the bull by the horns.
freediverx 3y ago
[dead]

37 points by vinni2 3y ago

its probably fine

I thought we agreed, as a society, that arbitrary numeric thresholds are only interesting if they're in the integer series of K*10^N, where K is 1 to 9 and N is 0 to infinity. Occasional allowances for multiples of 5 -- normally only if the second digit is 5.

bgirard 3y ago
Yea, I don't get the significance of $33T. It's a monotonically increasing number these days.
- samspenc 3y ago
  +1, I find the "for first time" part a bit of an oxymoron as we know this number is going to keep increasing. In a few months, it will top $34T for the first time, and a few months after that, $35T for the first time, and so on.
  - a-user-you-like 3y ago
    +1. It will soon be 500T, then quickly followed by 1QN. Agreed, a bit of an oxymoron.
  - Incipient 3y ago
    By definition it's not an oxymoron? It may be "obvious" but nothing is contradictory.
- slantedview 3y ago
  The reason debt matters is because if it gets high enough, it may cost us more to borrow money and could eventually trigger a debt spiral where we're unable to service our existing debt. Currently, our debt to GDP ratio is among the highest in the world [1][2]. At the moment, we're still able to borrow cheaply mainly to the dollar being the reserve currency of the world, and due to the petro dollar program (where oil producing companies sell their oil in dollars), but these things may not last (which is part of the reason why the US is pushing for war with China). The takeaway from all of this isn't necessarily that we need to cut spending on social programs while maintaining a larger military than the next several nations combined, which is what the deficit hawks referenced in this article want, it's that we should rollback the tax cuts that led the deficits in the first place. We should also be increasing domestic investments that would make us more attractive to outside investors rather than becoming an over-militarized hollowed out shell of a former super-power. If you treat your domestic economy and workforce like a leveraged buyout target, siphoning every ounce of profit out of it while saddling it with debt, the end result is likely the same as with many leveraged buyouts: collapse. 1: https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-debt.htm https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-debt.htm 2: https://data.oecd.org/chart/7bDT https://data.oecd.org/chart/7bDT
  - oneTbrain23 3y ago
    You do know that Fed will give the interest collected to Uncle Sam directly. The main downside is debt is a built-in timebomb to destroy economy when condition is "ripe". Now seems to be so for USA, weak military (defeated by Talebans, Russian shovels destroyed EVERY single American high-tech including rumored downing 2 F35s in Syria), dedollarisation due speed-up by alternatives Brics and cryptos, high-unemployment and recession, lack innovations and unable to manufacture goods (China at least able to build 7nm,nowhere in USA land able to build such), superb incompetent leaderships in centuries for USA. I am netflix and chill on this Dalio-predicted world event.
  - afpx 3y ago
    If I’m calculating correctly, debt is like 100,000 per person, roughly. Does someone have a plan for how to pay it? To this layperson, it seems like an inevitable default. The rich may be able to, but tax the rich, and they’ll just move it.
- yetanotherloss 3y ago
  No one knows at which point that number goes from being a hypothetical problem into a very realized one. Everyone knows the US needs to roll back the batshit tax advantages it keeps handing out to certain groups that largely already have all the money, although few seems willing to say that in a way that may impact them getting paid.
  - soupfordummies 3y ago
    There's a very large portion of folks in the US that think the deficit is coming from tax advantages to folks who DON'T have all the money though.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S 120% debt to GDP ratio is "the problem"
Canada 3y ago
Yeah, agreed. Let me know when it's 50... in a year or so at this rate
toast0 3y ago
I dunno, 3.3 is in E6 and E12 which are commonly used to decide which values to care about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_series_of_preferred_numbers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_series_of_preferred_number...

npalli 3y ago

In other news, in 2023 U.S GDP tops $26T for the first time.

iwonthecase 3y ago
Number of years since birth of Christ tops 2023 for the first time.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
This is the important number that gives meaning to the national debt number. It's similar to income versus debt for an individual, the more income you have the more debt you can service. At about a third over GDP it's a bit high, but not disastrous. And no this 33 trillion will never be 'paid back', instead GDP will grow and make the number insignificant (also inflation), a few decades down the road.

ortusdux 3y ago

Note that debt to GDP has decreased slightly in the last 2 years, but inflation has offset this when it comes to total $ of debt.

vikingerik 3y ago
Also note that year-over-year numbers are still skewed by comparing to the pandemic years. Debt-to-GDP compared to two years ago is less not because the debt situation got better, but because GDP two years ago was artificially depressed by the pandemic restrictions.

ldoughty 3y ago

"for the first time" Hasn't it topped 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23...32... etc.. for the first time too? What makes 33 special? I certainly don't like the amount of debt in the U.S.... but this is a low quality headline except for the fact you don't need anything more to the story --- or if you do, they are burying the lead behind the paywall.

klyrs 3y ago
> What makes 33 special? It's the first composite number ending in 3? And, yes, that only makes sense in decimal, but finance wonks aren't to be bothered with such esoterica.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
> What makes 33 special? Election season is starting, and someone wants to use this as a talking point.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

A trillion bucks ain't what it used to be

mindvirus 3y ago

I've talked about this before, but the US debt feels to me mostly like an accounting mechanism. What I mean is that the US government is mostly in debt to itself, in money it can print. For example, the Social Security Trust Fund buys US bonds to secure its cashflows. Anyway, I really don't understand if and why the US National Debt matters that much (I'm not saying it doesn't, I just don't get it)

SubiculumCode 3y ago
Yes and no. The U.S. can and does make new money to pay debts...basically out of thin air. As a self imposed limit, they agree to pay interest on that debt. Again, yes they can create money to pay that interest, which because of the mechanism they set up, would cost further interest payments. So what's the real limit? Inflation. If you have too many dollars in circulation chasing too few goods, you get inflation. Therefore, the limit is the the extent to which interest payments on the national debt are sufficient to induce inflation beyong productivity growth. At least, this is my understanding.
adventured 3y ago
Because as it expands it becomes a heat sink that consumes an ever greater share of the US economy and will gradually drive economic dynamism rapidly toward zero. It's the Japan scenario. Take a look at their budget and or spending, and the share going to interest (debt maintenance broadly), over the past 20 years. The result? US GDP per capita: $80,000. Japan's GDP per capita: $35,000. In the year 2000 Japan's figure was higher than the US figure. Now, the US will be able to kick the can for quite a while yet, especially if it retains the global reserve currency and can distribute economic damage (debasement) more globally. The tape to watch is the average rate of interest on the debt and the share of spending going to maintain the debt. Imploding demographics and entitlement growth are gasoline on the fire. For a while you can just keep trying to push the average interest rate lower, so the interest costs don't get out of control as the total sum soars by the decade; that eventually begins to fail, as it did in Japan. You can only drive the interest rate on the debt pile so low and then your last game is to begin aggressively debasing the standard of living of the people, through currency debasement, to reduce the debt problem. And it's thus Japan's standard of living has been hammered over the past two decades. South Korea will shortly (within a few years) surpass Japan in GDP per capita. Tens of trillions of dollars locked up yielding 0.5% or 1% or 2% per year (now or in the future), is the heat sink. That capital should otherwise be acting to spur economic growth, innovation, invention, economic well-being, social welfare, infrastructure, and so on. Instead it's being locked away yielding zip, in ever greater sums, at ever lower average interest rates. It's an economic heat death process and it will tend to keep going until it eats everything it can (because no political entities dare step in front of it on their watch).

slantedview 3y ago

[flagged]

Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
Bush and Trump tax cuts aren't a substantial cause of the rising debt. Over the last few years revenues are UP in spite of the tax cuts, but so are deficits. Why? Because spending rose even faster. Over the next 30 years we are going to add 116 trillion to our current debt, and it will all be because of Social Security, Medicare, and their associated interest costs. Really! The rest of the budget is balanced: https://manhattan.institute/article/behind-cbos-100-trillion-in-projected-deficits-over-30-years https://manhattan.institute/article/behind-cbos-100-trillion.... Neither political party wants to acknowledge this because these programs are popular, and Democrats (despite the rhetoric) aren't interested in repealing ~95% of the Trump tax cuts. Neither party is fiscally responsible.
- mempko 3y ago
  You have it backwards. A balanced budget would not be fiscally responsible because money IS debt. If you like economic growth, then a balanced budget will cripple it, which is not fiscally responsible from that perspective. On the other hand economic growth is causing our climate an ecological crisis. So a deflationary event, done responsibly, should be considered.
  - Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
    A balanced budget at this point is impossible. We are heading toward 3 trillion dollar deficits by the end of the decade. At most, we can hope to rein in the growth of the debt, but the US will never run a balanced budget in your lifetime so this point is moot. >On the other hand economic growth is causing our climate an ecological crisis. So a deflationary event, done responsibly, should be considered. Legitimately evil thinking. Yeah, let's destroy the economy because of climate. Do you think poor countries can afford to care about the climate?

akamaka 3y ago

On the Federal Reserve Economic Data website, you can put together your own charts to put the debt data into context. Here’s one that I just created, which compares the ratio of debt payments to tax collected over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18ZzX https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18ZzX

SubiculumCode 3y ago
do they go back through WW2? Interesting times then in twrms of debt.

tiffanyh 3y ago

Debt to GDP is the more interesting number. In the last 5-years, the US has more debt than GDP. The last time we experienced this was during WW2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_Held_By_Public_as_of_Feb._2023.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_Held_By... https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to-gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to...

fuoqi 3y ago

For all those who think that a high debt-to-GDP ratio is fine (put the meme picture here) and that the US will simply follow the Japan scenario for several decades at least (nothing great, but nothing catastrophic), I highly recommend to read this Lyn Alden's article: https://www.lynalden.com/economic-japanification/ https://www.lynalden.com/economic-japanification/ To summarize it: Japan and US are in two very different situations, the former is one of the largest world's creditor nations, while the latter is THE largest world debitor nation. The reserve currency status, while quite useful for kicking the can down the road, makes situation exponentially more dangerous when the can will hit a wall.

mortureb 3y ago
That’s what you get for putting someone like trump in office. He increased the debt in one term as much the last decade and a half combined. The American people are silly.
- fuoqi 3y ago
  Both parties love to spend public money. Remember that the COVID-related spending had a very high level of support from both sides. Same goes for the current administration with its "Inflation Reduction Act" (lol, talk about misnomers). Also, not all of the borrowed money were spent by the Trump administration. When he left the office, TGA had 1.6T dollars.
  - mortureb 3y ago
    No the deficit was massive under bush, fixed by Obama, ridiculously massive under trump and significantly improved by Biden. This isn’t bOtH sIDeS
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I don't think Trump is to blame for situation where both parties agreed to spend their way out of...
  - 3y ago

mempko 3y ago

Another way of saying this is "US National Savings tops $33T for First Time". Debt of the public sector is an asset to the private sector. This debt shows up as deposits in our accounts.

trts 3y ago

https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/ Federal debt more than $250K per taxpayer. Doesn't include state-level debt and unfunded liabilities such as public employee pensions. Interest payments on the debt alone now exceed spending on defense https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX In order to pay these bills, they will have to print more money. Those seeking to protect the value of their wealth will pour it into real estate, equities, and other assets. This is what the hollowing out of the middle class looks like. The asset holding class will absorb the wealth effect of higher valuations, and wage & salary workers will see their discretionary income diminished as inflation puts healthcare, housing, and education further out of reach.

archo 3y ago

https://archive.is/TZL2V https://archive.is/TZL2V - https://archive.ph/TZL2V https://archive.ph/TZL2V - https://archive.vn/TZL2V https://archive.vn/TZL2V - https://archive.md/TZL2V https://archive.md/TZL2V

dang 3y ago
Your account has been posting dozens of comments just like this, and we're getting complaints that you're using a bot to do it. Autogenerated comments are not allowed on HN, so can you please not? Of course it's ok to occasionally post archive links to articles, as long as you don't overdo it relative to other sorts of comments. And there should not be such a mechanical pattern to the posts—one link is fine; you don't need 4!
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  In the case of archive.today, linking all variants (ph is li vn of md & today) of the domain can be useful given the already legion DNS issues the site faces. I'll punch through all of those hoping that I get lucky with one. (Increasingly that's not the case.) I've written my own local shell scripts/functions to generate the lists for my own use. I've found the service all but unusable for well over a month now, which means that paywalled HN posts are not accessible: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681> Numerous other HN members are noting issues with (Re)CAPTCHA loops: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37445503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37445503> 38 results over the past month on "captcha loop": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1695104420&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1692482400&page=0&prefix=false&query=captcha%20loop&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1695104420&dateRange=custom&...> One workaround for WSJ content, at least, is to look for syndicated publication after a day or so. MSN seems to carry at least some stories as I've noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543995> I've already noted that when the NY Times bolstered its paywall in 2019, HN front-page stories fell to 25% of their prior average, apparently due to the paywall and reader response to it (presumably fewer upvotes and more flags) rather than any change in HN's own code, ranking, or practices (admins as opposed to readers). Paywalls, like generic topics (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37565975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37565975>), make for very poor discussion. Not only does the paywall itself become a (really, legitimate) topic, but the already low evidence of having R'd T.F.A. drops to nanoscopic values. Expecting HN readers to subscribe to even a small fraction of the tens of thousands of sites which appear on the front page (let alone all submissions), or even the ~150 sites I've identified associated with news organisations (even "public" sources such as the BBC and US NPR affiliates are now "requesting" registration and logging in) really isn't viable. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354> Whether that means HN ban strict paywalls (I'm strongly leaning that way), come up with its own arrangement for major news sites (top 20: nytimes.com, bbc.com, bbc.co.uk, theguardian.com, washingtonpost.com, reuters.com, npr.org, cnn.com, slate.com, vice.com, latimes.com, cnet.com, yahoo.com, sfgate.com, cbc.ca, cnbc.com, guardian.co.uk, bits.blogs.nytimes.com, vox.com, salon.com). The full listing of 149 sites accounts for over 8% of HN front-page topics from 2007 through June of this year. I also know that HN doesn't like single-theme / topic accounts. But unless HN is willing to run this as a service itself (see the "Who's Hiring / Who Wants to be Hired" threads), this is net-net useful. There's an additional issue that archive sites might not want to be too strongly associated with a principle role of piercing paywalls. But that just gets us back to the issue of paywalled content on HN and the fact that HN is now leaning on two parties (paywall-exploiting publishers, and paywall-piercing archivists) and potentially causing pain to both rather than grabbing the bull by the horns.

freediverx 3y ago

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