Saturday, October 5, 2013

The Debt Issue IS Phony! Really??

Well shoot! I got up this morning early, intending to dive into a new book, when I made the fatal error of looking at my emails and clicking a link to an article titled Is The Debt Issue Phony?

I thought I'd share with you the knee-jerk, hopefully coherent (I really want to get to that book), reaction I couldn't help but type into the article's comment section

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Wow! Where to begin...

Coke, really? Coke posted $10 billion in net income last year. How did Uncle Sam do? Oh, that's right, we're not supposed to make those kinds of comparisons. Not, that is, unless---in some dimension---it supports our story.

And you somehow know that we're poised for years of economic growth, and then you get real and say we have no clue how the future will unfold.

And, I didn't know this, but we can grow assets at will. Wow!! We develop a "real debt crisis", and, as you say, the answer is simple, "grow assets". Sure, just like all those other countries throughout history have done. You know---the ones who have borrowed themselves into real crises---how they've just turned the switch, and voilĂ !, grown assets. As opposed to inflating their currency, decimating their economies and outright defaulting on their debt. Never mind the fact that growing government debt is synonymous with growing government, and growing government is synonymous with a slowing private sector, and how history utterly demolishes your theory.

And I'll stop here (I could go on all day) with saying thank you for putting us all at ease with your assets to government debt analysis. We can sleep easy knowing that when we get into a real debt crisis, all we have to do is nationalize 20% (at this point) of net household assets and we're in good shape.

Dang it! One more: You're kidding us on your interest on the debt analysis, right? I mean, you make the statement that we'll never pay off the debt, which means we'll be refinancing it into eternity. Now, if we're, at this juncture, so utterly sanguine about Uncle Sam's ability to borrow harmlessly into the future, do you think just maybe we could (just maybe) one day find ourselves in a "real debt crisis"? I mean, what happens if the rest of the world, our creditors, don't agree that a country can simply operate on a credit line for eternity. And, you know, some of them don't. And if they, therefore--somewhere along the way--decide to do more transacting in other currencies, and less lending to Uncle Sam, you think maybe we run into a bit of trouble, maybe interest rates rise, maybe a lot? And if interest rates rise, maybe alot, well, I guess rising interest rates on God knows how many trillions in debt---rolling over in perpetuity---is what you might call a debt crisis.

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