How about having homes and cars and education without debt?
It's not like you need to be in debt to another and to steal from your feature to have nice things...
The only way a young person could be given a house without owing any debt would be if someone else bought it for them or if the government paid workers to build houses for everyone. However, if the government paid people to build houses without any payments in return the government would be collected the debt which it would then hold. This doesnt reduce any debt globally it just transfers it.
Maybe you could argue it is better for the debt to be on government than individuals but that doesnt address how no debt is good. No debt would just mean zero houses.
Our generation gets 25-year mortgages, and very little help from inflation.
As someone born in the 1980s in the USA, I don't think this is true. I believe that the 30 year mortgage has been the standard here since sometime in the mid 20th century.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there far fewer homes and people made a lot less money.
You don't need a new house for every young person.
You can reuse houses across generations. 100, 200 and even 500 year old houses are not uncommon in Europe for example, if you build them properly (and not the el-cheapo wood US construction). They're not any kind of ruin either, but highly coveted city and rural real estate.
Plus, there's an existing pool of a hundred million houses or close, so you wouldn't have to worry about getting them a house either.
Lastly, debt means money owed. A government can also money it actually has (e.g. form taxation, dropping military expenses and so on). Presumably there's still that.
Not to mention that the government could still ask for payments for the houses, but for a much smaller interest, and without expecting a profit, allowing people to repay them much earlier.
This is not some communism plot, places from England to Singapore, most of EU and beyond have done public housing in different degrees. England's public housing plan, for example, implemented for the most part of the 20th century, turned it from a country of extreme poverty slums (think L.A.'s seedier districts but in Dicken's London and Manchester and elsewhere) into an acceptable middle class (they'd call it "working class") existence.
If you only see these things as "nice", your should reevaluate what you value.
Housing and cars - I’d agree. But for me the problem with debt is it seems like a ploy to squeeze more and more out of people who don’t realize the deal, or who because of encroaching levels of debt don’t have a choice in society.
If debt were purely opt in and people could simply not get into it while still having a first world life then I wouldn’t disagree with you at all. But as it stands debt is a requirement that permanently endentures far too many of our citizens.
All of the above things have stopped worked for the majority of middle class and most working class people for the past 30+ years in the US (and lots of EU).
"a better education now" doesn't "means you can probably make more money over time", but leaves you straddled with a large debt, as just another person with a degree in a huge pool of people who might not even make as much as their parents did.
And the huge debt crisis shows that people and countries alike increasingly can't "out grow the costs of that borrowing".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickwwatson/2018/03/08/the-m...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/06...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...
So, sure, if a few people don't want to have any debt, that's great. But if everyone stopped borrowing we'd be in a lot of trouble.
There are other ideas about how we could grow the money supply of course. Perhaps the Federal Reserve could mail everyone some cash every month.
Why would we be in trouble. Explain it to me like I know nothing about economics?
There's a place for credit, but right now I think it does more harm than good.
Some people have to live with family for a while or build in stages. It’s a challenge, but it’s doable.
Yeah, sorry, the life you want might not be sustainable and could be detrimental to society.
At the same time I have the impression., independent what the environment-protection-movements want to achieve or actually did, the state of the planet did not improve.
However education for which you need to get into debt is something that I really don't think is a progress. It is still better than no education or education for which you have to join a political party or a religion, but it is actually a step back from free education.
If I do work for you, and you can't pay, and you give me an "IOU", that is debt, and if I agree to make that IOU transferable that that is money.
The Federal Reserve system is simply one specific kind of money that is only special because the US government accepts it for tax payments and certain other kinds of money at illegal.
For a lot of America's history we used horses and sailing ships to get around. Are you suggesting we should return to that too? Otherwise this argument is empty.
I don't see debt as all that much different than insurance. Sure, society can get by without it, and you may never need it, but society in general benefits. If I run a business any large expenses would be amortized over the lifetime of that thing. I could pay for it upfront, but that might never happen and if I could it wouldn't be the best use of my resources. Ideally, I'd "pay rent" in order to borrow money upfront, now that I have that machine it's easier to pay back since that fixed cost will benefit me for the next 20 years. That's the scenario where all debt is never paid back.
Financial tools, like anything else can be good or bad depending on the circumstances and motivations at play. Payday loans (generally seen as bad) aren't all that different from micro-loans lauded in third-world countries. Let's say there's an older woman who walks out of town to buy goods and carries them back to town every day to sell (arbitrage). If she gets a small loan to buy more goods up front, invest in a wheelbarrow, or a booth at the market she can do more business and more easily pay off that loan benefiting; her, the person offering the loan, the sellers and the buyers--society in general. If she cannot pay back the loan she can get into a debit spiral. There are situations where that is beneficial to the person giving her the loan at the expense of her and the rest of society.
I don't understand why you would ask this question. On the individual level its obvious that some debts won't be. It happens all the time for a lot of reasons. So I assume you aren't talking about the individual level.
But on the macro level zero debt is a very bad idea and unless civilization collapses there will always be debt. Debt itself is a very good thing. Too much, and too little, of a good thing is bad.
So in either case all debts being paid off will almost certainly never happen.
> Does anyone even believe that the amount of debt will go down
In absolute terms due to inflation it always goes up.
> (that allows people to have negative amounts of currency)
You say this like its a bad thing. Debt isn't a bad thing. Debt allows people to own homes and cars and pay for education and invest in business. Debt means you are optimistic about the future.