It used to be "tax and spend" or "spend and tax" liberals, vs. "small government" conservatives. The thinking is not that way anymore. The thinking is now:
debt is only a problem if it becomes too big for your balance sheet. America has not yet reached that point, with the huge trillion dollar economy. So we easily service the debt burden.
now sports teams get money for stadiums by having the local governments tax the people that come in from out of town....thereby having no tax burden added to the local people....in effect, for free......except the local government must pay if not enough revenue comes in from the out of towners
People like free stuff. And governments have figured out a way to do it.
Originally Posted by VitaMan
There are probably only two people on this board, LustyLad and CaptainMidnight, who actually understand this. And I believe their points of view are closer to yours than mine.
How can government debt as a % of GDP exceed 200% in Japan, yet it still coasts along? Meanwhile all hell breaks lose in some developing countries at much lower levels. I've read that the Japanese government debt is mostly owned by Japanese, and it's the external debt (debt owed to foreigners, including corporate and individual debt) that gets places like Venezuela into trouble. It would seem to me that we're more like Venezuela than Japan in that respect. Our continual current account or trade deficits, that result from us buying a lot more from the rest of the world than what we sell to it, means foreigners own a good bit of our debt.
Anyway, it's beyond my pay grade. All I know is with huge expenditures we're incurring in 2020 and 2021, our net national government debt (net of the federal debt owned by the Fed) would have to go over 100% of GDP by the end of this year, if it hasn't already. And while that's not unprecedented -- there are some sickly countries in Europe like Greece, Italy and Portugal that have already reached that point -- it's scary. We don't have Japanese savers happy with 0% interest rates or hard working Germans to bail us out.