yes, and Japan's GDP growth has been pretty weak. I guess I need to write more so yea excess debt is thought to hamper GDP growth which has been going on Japan. Makes it even harder to 'grow your way out' which is pretty much our only option at this point
Or, you know, we could raise taxes on the rich and corporations, AND cut spending, which would drive down the deficit. Its crazy how the conversation only includes "cut spending" without addressing the insane tax cuts for the top 1% that were passed in 2017 with Trump's Tax Cuts Act
The rich pay virtually all taxes and corporations pass down costs to consumers. Add onto that the government will just spend more when it takes in more revenue
We've pretty much reached a point of physical saturation so growth is now far harder to achieve than it was 20-30 years ago. The only way out is abstract justifications for endless inflation. At some point this century, this is going to stop making sense. Once it stops making sense, politics will break down, and some kind of global conflict will emerge.
I mean, we're looking at allocating pretty much all the capital, water, and energy we have into AI centers which are somehow going to make all of this alright. This is exactly what the 1972 report predicted. The morbid part is the report said we need to force the allocation of capital away from services, and abstraction into food generation, and medicine regardless of profit.
The report said the world ends before 2100, and our only bet is to establish equilibrium in how we manage resources. Instead we're just tripling down on financial abstraction. I personally don't think it is a crazy thought, or even conspiratorial to say that at this point, all of this, the modern world, ends this century. We're at the tail end of the modern human experience. We arrived too late to enjoy the peaks, but too late to escape the system once it ends. For those of us struggling to get by just know that it wasn't your fault.
Committing to AI as we are is a collective death pact. We will allocate everything into AI, and then Jevons Paradox will kill us. I personally feel conversations around GDP growth, and ROR on capital are all economic fictions which allows us to pretend like there isn't a physical limit to the world.
I get the overall vibe of The Limits of Growth, but that paper is also so far off the mark in many areas it's hard to take it seriously in 2026.
It predicted gold production running out around 1981, silver and mercury around 1985, oil peaking around 1992, and natural gas around 1994. It argues oil would be completely gone by 2022. None of that has come to pass. Like not even close. Known reserves of most of these commodities are actually larger today than they were in 1972 when this paper was written.
The paper was also heavily criticized when it came out because it doesn't incorporate price constraints into any of its models. This means scarcity doesn't effect price, and resources just slowly run out. In reality, when supplies decline consumption typically falls along with it, and people seek substitutes.
The focus on technology is wildly flawed as well. They discuss technology as a fixed multiplier while problems continue to scale. So technology pretty much becomes baked in as always guaranteed to lose. In the real world since 1972 technology has compounded significantly. Orders of magnitude beyond what they predicted with crop yields, energy intensity of GDP, and material use per dollar of output all improving dramatically, and continuing to do so at accelerating rates to this day.
> We have felt it necessary to dwell so long on an analysis
of technology here because we have found that technological
optimism is the most common and the most dangerous reaction
to our findings from the world model
That framing just lets them brush off the objection without modeling it seriously, and as a result, the reality of the past 40+ years of technological progress does not align with that model at all.
I am not dismissing the nature of this paper entirely, merely stating I find the research to be immensely flawed and would dispute your point that it "appears to becoming more, and more true as we get closer to the 2025-2030's" as the predictions from their paper deviated from reality more than 30 years ago.
These are fair criticisms, and they have been common for decades. I'm not saying it is gospel, or empirically amazing but that the paper was pointing in the right direction.
I think you're right, but I wonder if it is a question of time, and perspective? Neoclassical offers of price signaling, and alternatives are really just a form of short-termism. It is managerialism rather than a solution.
I also wonder if we're not thinking about the issue properly. The physical limit is one side, and Neoclassical economics is another, but the issue itself is one of political preferences and decisions. Politically, what is the most likely outcome? In theory, there is no reason why Neoclassical economics cannot fix this. All we have to do is reallocate capital, and make adjustments but this is a political decision, not an economic one.
I think we're not too far off from one another's perspective. I think Neoclassical economics will continue to be the dominant language we use to describe the modern financialized world we live in but it is all just going to delay the underlying biological problem. This doesn't end because of a hard physical drop in resources, but because the energy cost of sustaining hyper-abstract financialization will surpass the the return on energy for capital invested in acquiring it. Energy will get too expensive, and capital will get too intensive.
I still maintain that the 21st century is the end of the modernity, and hyper-realism is what is next. A world where physically contained value means more than capital. Coincidently, whoever has capital now will physically own the value in the future. There will be an increase in regional conflicts in areas where there are supply chain bottlenecks, or critical resources, and digital warfare will take over as the dominant form of warfare. Breaking infrastructure and forcing a rival to spend energy on fixing it is how you win.
I will caveat to say everything I just wrote is probably some veiled attempt at my own version of "everything's fine!" when I agree we're probably not far off from one another's perspective. Everything is not fine. That much is true.
I'm in the same boat. I was also someone who was in the mainstream economics camp who hated the critical side of things but over the last couple of years, I read enough that I realized I was just coping. It was a transition into the academic side of things and seeing my coworkers that made me realize we're cooked. Almost no one sincerely disagrees with the critical outcomes, and most have already given up waiting for retirement.
It really does feel like we're at the end of something when you're smartest people are retiring, and there isn't really anyone to replace them because of how funding has collapsed in universities. We have poor doctoral programs, and no funding to do research while at the same time research is being cut and universities are being pushed into repetitive teaching institutions where they sell degrees and that's it. It sort of drives home how we've probably been in a bit of a crisis for decades and the allocation of capital to manage the problem has bled society so dry we're all starting to see it.
There is just a general sense of decline which is hard ignore. Over the last 10-15 years, it is hard to argue to the average person that things have improved when in truth, it is has been one slow, long decline. Now I'm more interested in how we use economics to describe society, and to justify policies, and decisions.
It is priced in but the question is what is the length of time people are looking at? Are we priced in for inflation in a year? A decade? 25 years? So all information does get priced in the time horizon is far less clear
"The Limits to Growth" absolutely did not stand the test of time lol.
It's actually been almost entirely wrong.
The entire premise was that economic growth can't continue forever because resources are finite. Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the vast majority of growth moved away from hard resources to services and improvements in labor efficiency.
They also predicted pollution would continue to get worse. In reality, air and water quality is significantly improved.
They also predicted we wouldn't be able to feed the world population and we would have mas starvation. The green revolution prevented that.
The entire book is a bunch of supposedly smart people thinking that trend lines are predictors of the future and always keep moving in the same direction at the same rate.
Odd, most agree that it was more right than wrong. It had a flawed methodology, and the predictions predictions/interpretations of the authors were also wrong like China only having $100 GNP per capita by 2000 when in reality it was 10x that.
Why the paper still gets some degree of reference and respect is because the model was correct, and the overall timeline wasn't far off at all. This is what people focus on when they refer to the paper. It isn't the specific claims, but the broader model which has proven more right than it was wrong.
What exactly do you think has been proven right in their model?
Their predictions were nearly entirely wrong. Growth has continued at a blistering pace over the last 50 years. And economic growth is becoming increasingly less tied to finite resources. Something they ignored the possibility of.
>Their predictions were nearly entirely wrong. Growth has continued at a blistering pace over the last 50 years
But this is what the report predicted? Did you read it?
This is a core claim they make.
> And economic growth is becoming increasingly less tied to finite resources. Something they ignored the possibility of.
Objectively false and just silly. Economic growth is tied to the physical world, and the laws of physics. It is an absurd claim to say it isn't. Every single act, physical or digital, requires energy and energy is derived from the physical world.
It is even more absurd to say "increasingly less" when the direct opposite is true. We are moving towards even more energy intensive forms of digitally driven growth. AI is not predicted to scale down in energy costs. All predictions, as a universally accepted part of AI, is that the energy costs of tokens will scale up until they become unsustainable. This is common knowledge.
>Something they ignored the possibility of.
Yes, because it isn't possible. There is no escape from the laws of physics and the requirements for energy. This isn't economics. It's hard, empirical science.
>Economic growth is tied to the physical world, and the laws of physics
The universe is not finite. And the sun gives us enough energy in a single day to power total energy consumption by humans for 10,000 days. Energy is not a meaningful restriction.
The book used known reserves of commodities like oil and cobalt as an example of things we would run out of soon. Neither became an issue in the last 50 years. For oil, technological advancements helped us find new massive reserves. For cobalt, new technological advancements made cobalt much less important.
>is even more absurd to say "increasingly less" when the direct opposite is true.
Nope. Industry uses far more resources than computer or data centers. Like its not even close. As we have been over, energy is not limited in any meaningful way. The sun gives us near limitless amounts. Costs will of course rise as demand increases, but supply will also increase in response.
It's a bad book. And they were proven wrong. They are incapable of understanding that humans can adapt and innovate. They predicted doom and gloom and were wrong then, and they will continue to be wrong into the future. There will be no massive collapse. The world will not become over populated.
>It's hard, empirical science.
Nothing in that book even approached hard empirical science lol.
This is pretty much a summary of the book. https://xkcd.com/605/
Or this https://xkcd.com/1007/.
Just people saying, "wow if population growth keeps growing at the current rate and food production doesn't increase at all, we are gonna be fucked!!!!". And then what actually happened was the population growth began slowing down and technological improvements vastly increased food production.
Thank God we have actual scientists who make the world better instead of the guys who wrote that book. We'd be really screwed if everyone had as little imagination regarding the future as they do.
anyone saying grow your way out needs to turn off fox news. Its time to raise the corporate tax rate back to the pre JFK level. And stop the wealth transfer of public funds to the corporate sector.
Wages have been stagnant for over 40 years with conservative supply-side /voodoo economics. The old excuse of saying that a cheeseburger is going to cost $15 if we raise wages is kinda moot when they are already costing $15.
No you get a market where substitutes take market share. You’re already going to see it, we are not going back to ZIRP anytime soon. These rates are the new normal. Customers will continue to be compressed by inflation and flock to value.
Substitutes are goods other than a primary good that consumers can switch to when the prices go up. If you're using it in some other way, can you say more clearly what you mean?
My health insurance and medical costs are already way too high. Does anyone think a doctor or dentist is no going to pass along his loss of earnings (because of increased taxes), to the consumer? This example applies to …. everything. Bad idea.
When Japan sells bonds, they are in quantities the world can absorb (including Japan).
When the US is selling bonds, they are in quantities which are becoming too big for the world to digest. Also, the world is turning its back on everything US, including bonds.
Exactly. There was a premium for transparency and sustainability and having allies and a military. Trump destroyed all that. The only thing sustaining it is it takes a long time for huge fund to start doing something different.
With drones, most militaries are having a giant rethink of almost every major hardware system.
This is both damaging everything that makes the US military mighty, and everything it has to offer to others.
If, for some dumb reason, the entire US army tried to do a boots on the ground invasion of Ukraine, they would be wiped out. Yes, they would do lots of damage, but the tanks, vehicles, and men would be wiped out.
I remember when the news had these slowly scrolling lists of the lost in Iraq. This time, the list would be a live feed of continuous losses.
I doubt Cuba is amassing a drone fleet, but, if they are, uh oh.
Although the debt/GDP ratio of the United States (around 126%) is lower than that of Japan (204%) or Singapore (172%), the article maintains that the US situation remains more worrying due to the huge absolute volume of debt, which exceeds 39 trillion dollars, and the speed with which it continues to grow. Economists warn that this debt reduces the country’s room for manoeuvre to respond to future recessions through fiscal or monetary stimulus, while Japan has managed to sustain a higher debt thanks to a different financing structure.
The conclusion is that the debt/GDP ratio alone does not reflect true risk, since factors such as the rate of debt accumulation, its cost and who finances it are equally or more important.
The headline sounds like sensational breaking news, but the fact is the U.S. has been the world's largest debtor country since 1985, roughly 40 years now.
Highly misleading to compare Japan and US's debt to GDP ratio in a vacuum without accounting for the fact that Japan also has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world while the US has none. Japan's debt is also almost all internally owned, while their sovereign wealth is largely externally invested. They are bringing in interest from outside the country to pay off the interest on the debt they owe to their own people internally. For a country that was always going to enter a period of economic and productivity stagnation due to demographic decline, this is as good a strategy as any and in any case extremely disanalogous with the US debt situation, which owes and pays money all over the world and has no sovereign wealth assets to defray those costs.
The majority of our debt is domestically owed and we control the world's reserve currency.
Japan is also very dependent on the US for defense and they are situated in a dangerous part of the world. Most of their neighbors hate them because they refuses to apologize for and/or even admit to the atrocities that they committed during WW2
You are correct that the cases have big differences but I'd rather be the US over Japan
Japan's geopolitical and demographic positions are obviously much weaker than the US's, but this post is about evaluating their fiscal policy not their overall situations. Japan's fiscal policy is a decent attempt to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. There is no similar excuse for the US's fiscal position.
How about this? If you are a billionaire or corporation and you paid net zero in Federal taxes last year, you must sell off all of your bonds and can't buy more.
I'm sick of going into debt only to have these people make it up by loaning us money to cover the deficit spending due to their tax breaks.
Reasonable-Fee1945 | 2 hours ago
yes, and Japan's GDP growth has been pretty weak. I guess I need to write more so yea excess debt is thought to hamper GDP growth which has been going on Japan. Makes it even harder to 'grow your way out' which is pretty much our only option at this point
Gandalftron | an hour ago
Or, you know, we could raise taxes on the rich and corporations, AND cut spending, which would drive down the deficit. Its crazy how the conversation only includes "cut spending" without addressing the insane tax cuts for the top 1% that were passed in 2017 with Trump's Tax Cuts Act
Reasonable-Fee1945 | an hour ago
The rich pay virtually all taxes and corporations pass down costs to consumers. Add onto that the government will just spend more when it takes in more revenue
morbie5 | 39 minutes ago
> The rich pay virtually all taxes
No they don't, the rest of us pay a lot of payroll taxes at the federal level.
And at the state and local level taxes are pretty regressive
Reasonable-Fee1945 | 35 minutes ago
Can you point me to one state with a regressive income tax? BTW federal income tax is by far the largest revenue source for the federal gov
Thom0 | 2 hours ago
Grow your way out = inflation.
We've pretty much reached a point of physical saturation so growth is now far harder to achieve than it was 20-30 years ago. The only way out is abstract justifications for endless inflation. At some point this century, this is going to stop making sense. Once it stops making sense, politics will break down, and some kind of global conflict will emerge.
Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth (1972: https://collections.dartmouth.edu/xcdas-derivative/meadows/pdf/meadows_ltg-001.pdf?disposition=inline ) appears to becoming more, and more true as we get closer to the 2025-2030's. This thing really did stand the test of time. It has flaws, but it just keeps on swinging and hitting as the decades pass.
I mean, we're looking at allocating pretty much all the capital, water, and energy we have into AI centers which are somehow going to make all of this alright. This is exactly what the 1972 report predicted. The morbid part is the report said we need to force the allocation of capital away from services, and abstraction into food generation, and medicine regardless of profit.
The report said the world ends before 2100, and our only bet is to establish equilibrium in how we manage resources. Instead we're just tripling down on financial abstraction. I personally don't think it is a crazy thought, or even conspiratorial to say that at this point, all of this, the modern world, ends this century. We're at the tail end of the modern human experience. We arrived too late to enjoy the peaks, but too late to escape the system once it ends. For those of us struggling to get by just know that it wasn't your fault.
Committing to AI as we are is a collective death pact. We will allocate everything into AI, and then Jevons Paradox will kill us. I personally feel conversations around GDP growth, and ROR on capital are all economic fictions which allows us to pretend like there isn't a physical limit to the world.
End3rWi99in | an hour ago
I get the overall vibe of The Limits of Growth, but that paper is also so far off the mark in many areas it's hard to take it seriously in 2026.
It predicted gold production running out around 1981, silver and mercury around 1985, oil peaking around 1992, and natural gas around 1994. It argues oil would be completely gone by 2022. None of that has come to pass. Like not even close. Known reserves of most of these commodities are actually larger today than they were in 1972 when this paper was written.
The paper was also heavily criticized when it came out because it doesn't incorporate price constraints into any of its models. This means scarcity doesn't effect price, and resources just slowly run out. In reality, when supplies decline consumption typically falls along with it, and people seek substitutes.
The focus on technology is wildly flawed as well. They discuss technology as a fixed multiplier while problems continue to scale. So technology pretty much becomes baked in as always guaranteed to lose. In the real world since 1972 technology has compounded significantly. Orders of magnitude beyond what they predicted with crop yields, energy intensity of GDP, and material use per dollar of output all improving dramatically, and continuing to do so at accelerating rates to this day.
> We have felt it necessary to dwell so long on an analysis of technology here because we have found that technological optimism is the most common and the most dangerous reaction to our findings from the world model
That framing just lets them brush off the objection without modeling it seriously, and as a result, the reality of the past 40+ years of technological progress does not align with that model at all.
I am not dismissing the nature of this paper entirely, merely stating I find the research to be immensely flawed and would dispute your point that it "appears to becoming more, and more true as we get closer to the 2025-2030's" as the predictions from their paper deviated from reality more than 30 years ago.
Thom0 | an hour ago
These are fair criticisms, and they have been common for decades. I'm not saying it is gospel, or empirically amazing but that the paper was pointing in the right direction.
I think you're right, but I wonder if it is a question of time, and perspective? Neoclassical offers of price signaling, and alternatives are really just a form of short-termism. It is managerialism rather than a solution.
I also wonder if we're not thinking about the issue properly. The physical limit is one side, and Neoclassical economics is another, but the issue itself is one of political preferences and decisions. Politically, what is the most likely outcome? In theory, there is no reason why Neoclassical economics cannot fix this. All we have to do is reallocate capital, and make adjustments but this is a political decision, not an economic one.
I think we're not too far off from one another's perspective. I think Neoclassical economics will continue to be the dominant language we use to describe the modern financialized world we live in but it is all just going to delay the underlying biological problem. This doesn't end because of a hard physical drop in resources, but because the energy cost of sustaining hyper-abstract financialization will surpass the the return on energy for capital invested in acquiring it. Energy will get too expensive, and capital will get too intensive.
I still maintain that the 21st century is the end of the modernity, and hyper-realism is what is next. A world where physically contained value means more than capital. Coincidently, whoever has capital now will physically own the value in the future. There will be an increase in regional conflicts in areas where there are supply chain bottlenecks, or critical resources, and digital warfare will take over as the dominant form of warfare. Breaking infrastructure and forcing a rival to spend energy on fixing it is how you win.
End3rWi99in | an hour ago
I will caveat to say everything I just wrote is probably some veiled attempt at my own version of "everything's fine!" when I agree we're probably not far off from one another's perspective. Everything is not fine. That much is true.
Thom0 | an hour ago
I'm in the same boat. I was also someone who was in the mainstream economics camp who hated the critical side of things but over the last couple of years, I read enough that I realized I was just coping. It was a transition into the academic side of things and seeing my coworkers that made me realize we're cooked. Almost no one sincerely disagrees with the critical outcomes, and most have already given up waiting for retirement.
It really does feel like we're at the end of something when you're smartest people are retiring, and there isn't really anyone to replace them because of how funding has collapsed in universities. We have poor doctoral programs, and no funding to do research while at the same time research is being cut and universities are being pushed into repetitive teaching institutions where they sell degrees and that's it. It sort of drives home how we've probably been in a bit of a crisis for decades and the allocation of capital to manage the problem has bled society so dry we're all starting to see it.
There is just a general sense of decline which is hard ignore. Over the last 10-15 years, it is hard to argue to the average person that things have improved when in truth, it is has been one slow, long decline. Now I'm more interested in how we use economics to describe society, and to justify policies, and decisions.
Iron-Fist | 2 hours ago
>endless inflation
Priced in
Reasonable-Fee1945 | 2 hours ago
It is priced in but the question is what is the length of time people are looking at? Are we priced in for inflation in a year? A decade? 25 years? So all information does get priced in the time horizon is far less clear
PartialDischage | 49 minutes ago
"The Limits to Growth" absolutely did not stand the test of time lol.
It's actually been almost entirely wrong.
The entire premise was that economic growth can't continue forever because resources are finite. Meanwhile, in the last 50 years, the vast majority of growth moved away from hard resources to services and improvements in labor efficiency.
They also predicted pollution would continue to get worse. In reality, air and water quality is significantly improved.
They also predicted we wouldn't be able to feed the world population and we would have mas starvation. The green revolution prevented that.
The entire book is a bunch of supposedly smart people thinking that trend lines are predictors of the future and always keep moving in the same direction at the same rate.
Thom0 | 45 minutes ago
Odd, most agree that it was more right than wrong. It had a flawed methodology, and the predictions predictions/interpretations of the authors were also wrong like China only having $100 GNP per capita by 2000 when in reality it was 10x that.
Why the paper still gets some degree of reference and respect is because the model was correct, and the overall timeline wasn't far off at all. This is what people focus on when they refer to the paper. It isn't the specific claims, but the broader model which has proven more right than it was wrong.
PartialDischage | 43 minutes ago
What exactly do you think has been proven right in their model?
Their predictions were nearly entirely wrong. Growth has continued at a blistering pace over the last 50 years. And economic growth is becoming increasingly less tied to finite resources. Something they ignored the possibility of.
Thom0 | 33 minutes ago
>Their predictions were nearly entirely wrong. Growth has continued at a blistering pace over the last 50 years
But this is what the report predicted? Did you read it?
This is a core claim they make.
> And economic growth is becoming increasingly less tied to finite resources. Something they ignored the possibility of.
Objectively false and just silly. Economic growth is tied to the physical world, and the laws of physics. It is an absurd claim to say it isn't. Every single act, physical or digital, requires energy and energy is derived from the physical world.
It is even more absurd to say "increasingly less" when the direct opposite is true. We are moving towards even more energy intensive forms of digitally driven growth. AI is not predicted to scale down in energy costs. All predictions, as a universally accepted part of AI, is that the energy costs of tokens will scale up until they become unsustainable. This is common knowledge.
>Something they ignored the possibility of.
Yes, because it isn't possible. There is no escape from the laws of physics and the requirements for energy. This isn't economics. It's hard, empirical science.
PartialDischage | 18 minutes ago
> Did you read it?
Yes. And it was quite hilarious how wrong it was.
>Economic growth is tied to the physical world, and the laws of physics
The universe is not finite. And the sun gives us enough energy in a single day to power total energy consumption by humans for 10,000 days. Energy is not a meaningful restriction.
The book used known reserves of commodities like oil and cobalt as an example of things we would run out of soon. Neither became an issue in the last 50 years. For oil, technological advancements helped us find new massive reserves. For cobalt, new technological advancements made cobalt much less important.
>is even more absurd to say "increasingly less" when the direct opposite is true.
Nope. Industry uses far more resources than computer or data centers. Like its not even close. As we have been over, energy is not limited in any meaningful way. The sun gives us near limitless amounts. Costs will of course rise as demand increases, but supply will also increase in response.
It's a bad book. And they were proven wrong. They are incapable of understanding that humans can adapt and innovate. They predicted doom and gloom and were wrong then, and they will continue to be wrong into the future. There will be no massive collapse. The world will not become over populated.
>It's hard, empirical science.
Nothing in that book even approached hard empirical science lol.
This is pretty much a summary of the book. https://xkcd.com/605/
Or this https://xkcd.com/1007/.
Just people saying, "wow if population growth keeps growing at the current rate and food production doesn't increase at all, we are gonna be fucked!!!!". And then what actually happened was the population growth began slowing down and technological improvements vastly increased food production.
Thank God we have actual scientists who make the world better instead of the guys who wrote that book. We'd be really screwed if everyone had as little imagination regarding the future as they do.
TheWhiteManticore | 2 hours ago
Its honestly crazy like how? Japan pretty much excels in almost every industry
dually | 2 hours ago
without growth, debt is the least of our problems; earth's economy is still only about a trillionth of k2 civilization
Reasonable-Fee1945 | an hour ago
What is k2 civ?
CivQhore | 2 hours ago
anyone saying grow your way out needs to turn off fox news. Its time to raise the corporate tax rate back to the pre JFK level. And stop the wealth transfer of public funds to the corporate sector.
ModernLarvals | an hour ago
Pay down the debt instead of paying up to the MIC.
Own_Boysenberry_0 | an hour ago
We also need to match the top personal rate with the top corporate rate to properly tax pass through.
Reasonable-Fee1945 | an hour ago
Do you like higher price? Bc this is how you get higher prices
No_Application_5179 | an hour ago
There's already higher prices on everything, and a weaking dollar. It ok to expect corporations to pay for something, then the nothing they do now.
Reasonable-Fee1945 | 39 minutes ago
That's the thing about prices. They can always go higher
No_Application_5179 | 6 minutes ago
Wages have been stagnant for over 40 years with conservative supply-side /voodoo economics. The old excuse of saying that a cheeseburger is going to cost $15 if we raise wages is kinda moot when they are already costing $15.
ap1618 | 14 minutes ago
No you get a market where substitutes take market share. You’re already going to see it, we are not going back to ZIRP anytime soon. These rates are the new normal. Customers will continue to be compressed by inflation and flock to value.
Reasonable-Fee1945 | 14 minutes ago
Do the corporations that make the substitutes not have to pay the tax or something?
ap1618 | 10 minutes ago
Not sure what you mean
Reasonable-Fee1945 | 8 minutes ago
Substitutes are goods other than a primary good that consumers can switch to when the prices go up. If you're using it in some other way, can you say more clearly what you mean?
Arlo1878 | 39 minutes ago
My health insurance and medical costs are already way too high. Does anyone think a doctor or dentist is no going to pass along his loss of earnings (because of increased taxes), to the consumer? This example applies to …. everything. Bad idea.
EmperorOfCanada | an hour ago
When Japan sells bonds, they are in quantities the world can absorb (including Japan).
When the US is selling bonds, they are in quantities which are becoming too big for the world to digest. Also, the world is turning its back on everything US, including bonds.
HumorAccomplished611 | 18 minutes ago
Exactly. There was a premium for transparency and sustainability and having allies and a military. Trump destroyed all that. The only thing sustaining it is it takes a long time for huge fund to start doing something different.
EmperorOfCanada | 10 minutes ago
> long time
With drones, most militaries are having a giant rethink of almost every major hardware system.
This is both damaging everything that makes the US military mighty, and everything it has to offer to others.
If, for some dumb reason, the entire US army tried to do a boots on the ground invasion of Ukraine, they would be wiped out. Yes, they would do lots of damage, but the tanks, vehicles, and men would be wiped out.
I remember when the news had these slowly scrolling lists of the lost in Iraq. This time, the list would be a live feed of continuous losses.
I doubt Cuba is amassing a drone fleet, but, if they are, uh oh.
[OP] Sufficient_Fuel5269 | 2 hours ago
Although the debt/GDP ratio of the United States (around 126%) is lower than that of Japan (204%) or Singapore (172%), the article maintains that the US situation remains more worrying due to the huge absolute volume of debt, which exceeds 39 trillion dollars, and the speed with which it continues to grow. Economists warn that this debt reduces the country’s room for manoeuvre to respond to future recessions through fiscal or monetary stimulus, while Japan has managed to sustain a higher debt thanks to a different financing structure.
The conclusion is that the debt/GDP ratio alone does not reflect true risk, since factors such as the rate of debt accumulation, its cost and who finances it are equally or more important.
Ask_Individual | 2 hours ago
The headline sounds like sensational breaking news, but the fact is the U.S. has been the world's largest debtor country since 1985, roughly 40 years now.
deelowe | 18 minutes ago
Its correlated to the size of the economy.
Hautamaki | an hour ago
Highly misleading to compare Japan and US's debt to GDP ratio in a vacuum without accounting for the fact that Japan also has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world while the US has none. Japan's debt is also almost all internally owned, while their sovereign wealth is largely externally invested. They are bringing in interest from outside the country to pay off the interest on the debt they owe to their own people internally. For a country that was always going to enter a period of economic and productivity stagnation due to demographic decline, this is as good a strategy as any and in any case extremely disanalogous with the US debt situation, which owes and pays money all over the world and has no sovereign wealth assets to defray those costs.
morbie5 | 32 minutes ago
> which owes and pays money all over the world
The majority of our debt is domestically owed and we control the world's reserve currency.
Japan is also very dependent on the US for defense and they are situated in a dangerous part of the world. Most of their neighbors hate them because they refuses to apologize for and/or even admit to the atrocities that they committed during WW2
You are correct that the cases have big differences but I'd rather be the US over Japan
Hautamaki | 14 minutes ago
Japan's geopolitical and demographic positions are obviously much weaker than the US's, but this post is about evaluating their fiscal policy not their overall situations. Japan's fiscal policy is a decent attempt to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. There is no similar excuse for the US's fiscal position.
Arlo1878 | 42 minutes ago
Excellent points you make. Thanks for sharing .
OffalSmorgasbord | an hour ago
How about this? If you are a billionaire or corporation and you paid net zero in Federal taxes last year, you must sell off all of your bonds and can't buy more.
I'm sick of going into debt only to have these people make it up by loaning us money to cover the deficit spending due to their tax breaks.
HumorAccomplished611 | 17 minutes ago
That would cause interest rates to rise which would be worse for the government.