Is "public debt" just a meme or does it hold some actual value for countries like the US, Japan or Germany?
Everytime I hear conservatives going on about "muh national debt" and "muh responsibility for the next generation" it feels they just want a reason to enforce austerity and reduce government spending. I know that the credit ranking of a country relates to its GDP but even when a county gets ranked down: Who is actually going to come knocking anyway? Do they seriously believe that once China stops buying American public bons the US won't just find another buyer? Seems like this is only relevant if you are a country like Greece.
Low debt is better than high debt, but when you have high debt investing with low interest rates is much better than austerity. The Greek debt crisis was a relatively unique situation in that it was not caused by the debt itself but by a crisis in confidence that led to people actively working towards provoking a financial crisis in order to profit off of it – bankers literally gambled on whether Greece would collapse, then brought about said collapse in order to win their gamble. If the public was aware what happened in Greek we would actually see all bankers hanged by tomorrow.
Leo Watson
Didn't that also have something to do with the fact that Greece had a high credit ranking as a EU member? This is why the EU is shit, it encourages such behavior by upgrading the credit ranking of shitholes that can never keep up with their debt bubble
James Hughes
Yes absolutely, the EU was involved in this process at every step of the moment. Some of the biggest gamblers were from Germany/Deutsche Bank.
Jace Cooper
you know, I could unironically appreciate a right-wing government if they would actually ever do a goddamn thing about debt
the problem is that they never reduce spending more than they reduce taxes, in fact, they often increase spending by squandering it on military and business deals, so it's the worst possible outcome
they cut taxes for the rich, cut spending on things that matter like healthcare and industry, increase spending on military and big business subsidies, end up with more debt, or maybe just a little less
Dominic Butler
industry was supposed to be education, but I guess industry works aswell cause it's typical of them to move industry to third world countries
Luke Adams
What I fucking hate is this analogy that right-wingers do when they try to express their hate boner for Greece: "They have to pay their debts just like all you guys in your daily struggles." Yeah fucking right, because public debt is the exact same thing like the private debt I have to finance my new car with or something.
Camden Lewis
It's real for the bondholders and for everyone who has to pay taxes. It's pretty hypocritical that rich conservatives go on about 'muh public denbts' when they insist the monetary system should be in private hands and buy up public debt in order to profit off it.
Gabriel Perry
Every dollar in circulation is public debt. Conservatives, who adhere to a subsect of liberalism, see themselves as the great superego appointed to discipline the lumpen id. Of course they don't want people to have fuck-you money, the ultimate goal of neoliberalism.
Angel Collins
The important difference is whether the nation has its own currency (USA, Japan) or not (Greece). Greece is constrained in the way a state within the United States is.
Christopher Ramirez
As a practical matter debt that's going up slower than GDP is effectively going down because it's getting easier to pay off, not harder
Alexander Bennett
Things like pension funds have investments in government bonds. If the state defaults on the debt then the pensions are gone.
Jayden Martin
Everyone who was against greece was either ignorant or straight up sociopathic. By the way third world countries have been getting the greece treatmen for at least 30 years.
Landon Morales
so what happened in Greece?
my dad is convinced they've been living above their standard for too long but he's wrong about 90% of politics
Jeremiah Sanchez
tl;dr: they should've defaulted long time ago istead they got baited into an eu backed refinancing scheme so original creditors cashed out. Btw their economy lost 1/3 of the output since then.
Joshua Cox
US public debt is a meme. Public debt of countries that have their own currency (that isn't pegged to the USD or whatever), but aren't the US, are less of a meme. Public debt of countries that lack their own currency is absolutely not a meme.
John Richardson
i guess you can make it 100% now that's just the eu lie to make you hate greeks fuck that shit.
Joshua Ward
Greeks are brown.
Brandon Perez
Violets are blue I'm not from Holla Forums, how about you?
Hunter Brooks
Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government cook the books to get admission to the EU
Tyler Williams
gonna need more info than that
Isaiah Morgan
The problem with EU is the Euro currency, which Greece has no control over. The Euro is maintained by ECB, and mainly from the industrial countries France and Germany. The low Euro value because the peripheral countries are so fucked up gives industrial exporters like FRA and GER an advantage. So, basically France and Germany reaps all the benefits while Greece is cucked by the currency.
If you have your own sovereign currency, public debt is entirely a meme. You can print all the money you want to pay back your debt (within the constraints of inflation, of course).
The Euro should be abolished, and each individual country should have their own currency.
Liam Rodriguez
Read this book.
Sebastian Jenkins
They had a bunch of debt and government was corrupt. Countries that use euro can't control their currency, so EU decided they had to repay the debt ASAP and their usual recipe to do that is just destroy any kind of welfare a country has. Now people in greece are literally dying in the streets because they can't afford medical care.
Cooper Morales
Watch this explained by Steve Keen about 2 years ago
