And who is going to lend you the next billion dollars without some assurances?
I agree. But you have to see that the debt issue, although important, is not the world breaker that some claim. The howlers act as though the lender nations will suddenly remove the money from the table and we will thrash about with no funding sources. This is just stupid.
I am a libertarian and as anti-govt spending as you can get. I have a daughter who qualifies for all kinds of disabilty "supplements" and don't use them b/c I am ideologically opposed to them (they are IMMORAL, not just bad fiscal policies).
However, it is really silly to fear that other nations will jerk their funding. Most of the "debt" is in bonds, which are investments in OUR economy, rather than theirs. Their purchasing of our debt instruments are votes of confidence at this point in time. Further, it is extremely silly to point to debt levels only. Another illustration may help: I once owed about 60,000 dollars. That was a crushing debt load, as my income was only about 52 thousand a year. Now I owe about 140,000 dollars (not counting my mortgage..., in fact, my debt is more than my mortgage). I am not nearly as worried about that as I was when I owed 60K, because my income is almost 5 times what it was then, and I am paying off the debt more rapidly. Debt is all a matter of percentages. We actually owed more money as a country right after the Revolutionary War than we do now. We also owed more money during the Reagan years.
Do I wish we owed NO money? Yeah. I do. But it is not the "we are on the brink of the precipice" kind of nonsense you hear bandied about.
Thanks for taking the time to expand the knowledge of folks interested in debt and its effects in relationship to an entire economy. I have long believed that when we buy goods from all over the world, trading them for dollars, those dollars enable people in countries all over the world to improve their standard of living. They then can produce even more goods and can consume some of them, not exporting everything to American consumers.
In the meantime, the best place to use the dollars we traded to them, is to buy goods from us, Boeing planes for example, or to invest in our economy. Both situations strengthen our country.