TLDR: the last time someone that didn’t understand economics paid off the national debt, it didn’t end well.
If there is a finite amount of money you can print before suffering the effects of inflation, deficit spending allows you to increase the amount of money in circulation without just printing more. If I owe you 100 trillion dollars, you owe Japan 100 trillion dollars, and Japan owes me 100 trillion dollars, this is good for the economy. Yes, it probably sounds like voodoo magic. No, I’m not qualified to help with that.
Now, there is still an upper limit on how much debt is okay, generally tied to interest rates. We’re beginning to scratch that upper limit thanks to deficit spending during covid, but it’s by no means problematic and things would overall probably have been worse without the extra spending.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/andrew-jackson-national-debt-reaches-zero-dollars
TLDR: the last time someone that didn’t understand economics paid off the national debt, it didn’t end well.
If there is a finite amount of money you can print before suffering the effects of inflation, deficit spending allows you to increase the amount of money in circulation without just printing more. If I owe you 100 trillion dollars, you owe Japan 100 trillion dollars, and Japan owes me 100 trillion dollars, this is good for the economy. Yes, it probably sounds like voodoo magic. No, I’m not qualified to help with that.
Now, there is still an upper limit on how much debt is okay, generally tied to interest rates. We’re beginning to scratch that upper limit thanks to deficit spending during covid, but it’s by no means problematic and things would overall probably have been worse without the extra spending.
At the same time, the way it was done might have been the issue, right?