4 ms·

Thanks. I do understand the value in holding debt, to my engineering brain it's analogous to a heat sink - without it, energy (money) has impetus to flow. I gue

by mojomark 11mo ago

Thanks. I do understand the value in holding debt, to my engineering brain it's analogous to a heat sink - without it, energy (money) has impetus to flow. I guess I don't have a good sense for what "the right" amount of debt is for a country, so to your point, I don't really have solid reason to assume we should even care about buying down our debt. I think the root of my confusion was clarified by the other reply above - it's not that the US just has a stash of excess capital coming in and UBI is a way to spend it, but rather UBI is a way for a government to step in, and force it's ultra-rich citizens to put their money back into the economic engine at the base level... like an artificial mechanism to account for some percieved flaw in the natural capitalistic process.

ai_critic 11mo ago
No problem! The big thing--usually missed by most folks, especially engineers whose intuitions and experience are correct but in the wrong domain--is that you don't balance a country's budget like you do a household's. The scale is different, the incentives are different, the problems and tools are different. Of course, to confound things, it's entirely possible that we should treat a country's balancebook like a household's, and it's just the dumb luck of near 3/4 of a century that we've gotten away with assumptions like mine. :)