1- It is mathematically impossible to clear the debt without reneging on most of it.
2- The majority of people in the US are so ignorant that they couldn’t tell you the difference between the debt and the deficit.
3- If you take cash advances on your MasterCard to make the minimum payments on your Visa card, most people would say you are in deep guano. When the government borrows money to pay the interest on existing debt, we are told it’s good for the economy, nothing to worry about.
Nope. It is absolutely possible to clear the debt without reneging. Just inflate the currency by a factor of 19 times current value and print our way out of it. We’re kind of doing that already in slow motion.
“The majority of people in the US are so ignorant that they couldn’t tell you the difference between the debt and the deficit.”
I actually heard one Obama supporter claim that, under Obama, BOTH the deficit and the national debt were decreasing! He’s a computer science graduate too! Apparently he didn’t pass simple business math though.
How is it mathematically impossible? Start spending less than you have coming in, and start lowering the debt. It might take a thousand years, but impossible? That’s impossible.
That last eight years had Fed and Treasury guys that embraced the Keynesian dogma, that government borrowing/spending drives the economy. They keep digging, in fact they say that much more should have been spent from 2007 onward.
The Austrian encampment sees government activity as a parasite sucking the life-force out of the economic engine. The adherents to Von Mises have been out in the cold looking on in horror.
The wave theory guys believe it’s economic fate for the world economy as it currently exists. The next wave should launch in the near future and restore growth, perhaps as early as 2017 per the optimist contingent.