Spoiled Americans’, who have been living far beyond their means for the last 50 years, do not understand that a Trillion dollars is a colossal sum of money. As of this writing the global combined debt is $397 Trillion!!! Think about all of that future consumption pulled forward in time. $100 Trillion was added in just the last handful of years. The U.S. Federal Government is over $33 Trillion in debt and is now running $2+ Trillion annual deficits. This doesn’t include crisis spending, which we find ourselves in constantly. However, sometimes during unremarkable times for no perceptible reason the National debt skyrockets, from September 15th to October 5th of this year (2023) the federal government recorded a half of Trillion dollars in new debt ($500 Billion) in just 20 days! Holy Shit! Much of this government debt is short term and rolls over often and refinanced at what ever the current prevailing interests rate. With 40 years of declining interest rates, and more than a decade of artificially suppressed interests rates by the Federal Reserve Bank, debt that used to be cheap to hold is becoming very expensive to hold. This year taxpayers’ on the hook for nearly $1 Trillion in just interest payments on existing debt. This equals the size of the current, historically high, defense budget! The amount owed to pay off interest on existing debt will continue to increase as more debt rolls over at the new much higher rates. Technically, there is no way to afford this in a medium or long term so, something will have to give. Something potentially catastrophic.
It is important to note that for all this debt aka liquidity that we, the people, do not have anything to show for it except wars, a bunch billionaires (hyper-wealth inequality), a decadent federal bureaucracy, and an entitled elderly population who benefits from the system at the expense of posterity.
We live in a debt-based monetary system, everyone would do well to understand what that means, for it controls your life far more than you imagine.
This is still one of the better primers to how the monetary system works. They don’t teach this in school, but it is more important than just about anything else that they do…