US debt repayments (notes, bonds, etc.) are already a significant portion of our budget ($522B in 2020)... do we really want to increase that even more?
That's what inflation is for. Increase money in circulation by 10x such that price levels rise by 10x, and you increase both tax receipts and government spending by 10x. (Well, technically tax rates go up more than that because of bracket creep, and government spending goes up less than that because the government is a monopoly and can bargain effectively for specialized services.) The absolute value of the debt and the money needed to service it remains constant, though. Instead of public debt being 127% of nominal GDP, it becomes 12.7% of nominal GDP.
Just get ready for big-denomination bills, and, well, starvation and social unrest if you're in one of the social classes unable to raise your wages to capture some of that money floating around.
Please don't try to shoehorn items like this into HN's (generous) scope of "Anything[...]"; it's still not intended to function as an aggregator for displacing traditional news sources. By all means, if you're interested in these types of news items, there's no dearth of outlets that carry them.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports[...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
The best way to make this better is flagging if you must and not commenting like this on articles you think are off topic. The second best is not doing what I just did reminding people to just move along.
We should simply eliminate the debt ceiling, it is utterly pointless and has been raised whenever expedient.
Following that, we should issue an official statement re-framing the concept of US public debt so all parties understand that repayment is only a conceptual model, not a factual outcome.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 30.5 ms ] threadYou can just STOP SPENDING FUCKING MONEY.
Most of the people in DC should hang.
Just get ready for big-denomination bills, and, well, starvation and social unrest if you're in one of the social classes unable to raise your wages to capture some of that money floating around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports[...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Additionally, political topics especially are not something that comments here excel at handling particularly well, anyway.
Following that, we should issue an official statement re-framing the concept of US public debt so all parties understand that repayment is only a conceptual model, not a factual outcome.