Noam Chomsky is a great resource if you want to go deeper on this topic.

> Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition.

If you want confirmation bias or arguments to feed your matching viewpoint, sure, but neutral, reasoned analysis? Not so much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Political_views

If you want to read a serious progressive economist, go for Dani Rodrik. Or hell, read Marx. Marx was a real social scientist. Chomsky, no.

Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the USA https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-Nation... (11 pages, easy read)

First page: "Failure to meet our defense objectives will result in decreasing U.S. global influence, eroding cohesion among allies and partners, and reduced access to markets that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living"

I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this supports the above argument, it's just USA propaganda but I found it certainly interesting to read with a cynical eye.

The US will use all its might if someone threatens the stability and dominance of the dollar.

The real counter to the US military is China, both in a direct military sense, as well as economically/softpower-y.

I like the finance wonks word for debt- leverage. Taking on debt is like going out further on a lever- the debter is more exposed to swings in the overall economy. While it's worked out fine so far, a high debt to gdp ratio exposes the US to higher risk on the downside.

But you never really have to do that. You can just keep rolling them. If we could keep the debt at the same absolute level inflation and productivity increases would drive it into insignificance.

Of course the idea of keeping it at the same level is a fantasy.

In the last 40 years, the 30 year treasury bond has gone for rates of less than 2% and more than 14%. The interest as a percent of tax revenue metric would have predicted the death of America in the 1980s, while oppositely making it look like things will be forever rosy today. Neither of those perspectives accurately characterizes the debt burden.

If the USA falls into a debt crisis the result will be global economic disruption.

If the world falls into runaway climate change the result will be the extinction of the human race and possibly all life on earth.

Personally I'm more comfortable with the possibility of the first than of the second.

If we could have runaway climate change somehow not disrupt global economy, we could eventually tech our way out of it. But the game over point is when the economy stops, and humanity no longer has capability to slow down and mitigate the effects of warming. At that point there isn't much left of humanity anyway.

E.g. how easy would it be for us to bootstrap back to space capabilities after a catastrophic war wiped out a large portion of world economic capability?

If something pulled the plug on our economy, all the technology we have today would disappear in few years to decades. Devices wearing out with no way of repairing them or producing new ones. We'd regress to medieval times, because that would be the most advanced things available energy sources would support.

The industrial revolution happened because we had easy access to high-density energy source in the form of coal. Maybe, given enough time, some survivors would figure out how to do a new industrial revolution without it, though I'm not having high hopes. So whatever is left of humanity would have to wait until the Earth recycles enough living matter to create new deposits of high-energy something.

Only if you can find people or institutions willing to buy the new bonds.

_if_ those cannot be found, the ‘easy’ (easy because all it’s debts are in US dollars) way out for the USA is to print money, but a country that has to print money because nobody wants to lend it money will find it hard to buy stuff from other countries.

Ultimately, what is and isn't possible for a state to do stems from the vagaries of what all other states are currently doing.

It's somewhat rooted in economic output, but there are a lot of other independent variables in the pot.

Current interest rates can give a somewhat distorted picture for the US. Banks buy US debt because they have to due to regulation, other countries buy US debt as part of their economic policy, the net effect is that the US government is able to borrow money more cheaply that it should based purely on credit risk. Even so, the US is able to borrow money at historically cheap rates.

My understanding is that if current trends is health care costs and economic growth continue then in the long run the US will be unable to service its debt and maintain its current spending programs without raising taxes. Most spending is on the military, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, so there will be some difficult political decisions. However, that doesn't mean the US is close to a debt crisis today.

I don’t think anybody is making that claim. Problem is: if you can only rank values that have a total order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order), so if you want to rank countries, you have to simplify.

For the judgment of “how deep is a country in debt” it also seems desirable to have the property that splitting a country into equal parts yields smaller countries that are equally deep in debt.

If you want that, “debt” on its own doesn’t cut it. Debt/population and debt/GDP are two metrics that have that property. They also are simple, so do not seem doctored, which correcting for modeled/guessed at/hoped for future growth or correcting for the age distribution of the population, average fertility, etc. easily could.

”GDP today is not a perfect proxy for GDP in 10 years”

Again: I don’t think anybody is claiming ‘perfect’.

We see this currently in Germany, the German government is proud of their budget but at the same time the infrastructure is crumbling, trains are delayed, bridges are in need for repair or even replacement, broadband doesn't reach all places and I don't want to talk about climate change and the structural issue to which it will lead.

There is also one more thing about state debt, many people invest in state debt because it is a secure investment for the retirement and when a country no longer takes debt, this possibility is gone.

The ideology to have little or no state debt is hurting the economy and will do so in the future. And I'm not even talking about a recession or a depression which will come sooner or later.

EDIT

Please don't turn this into a flame war. I am slightly worried about the effects of mainstream media, as I've seen these kind of posts on Reddit also.

People keep hearing about the low/inexistent economic growth of countries like Germany or Japan and start thinking that these countries are a deep mess. The reality is quite far from it.

Here are some more information in German though: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/autobahnbruecken-in-deutschla... https://www.dw.com/de/bahnfahren-auf-verschleiß/a-46623921

Assuming linear failure to fault (e.g. rust or structural weakening), an overbuilt bridge makes a big difference if one is skimping on maintenance costs.

Ideology can be pretty dangerous. This seems like your main point. Back up, though:

> [...] state debt is not like personal or corparate debt. If you cut your spending to pay of a loan, it is usually not a problem.

How is it less of a problem for a person, or for a corporation, than for a government, to have to reduce spending?

The difference is actually very simple. Persons and corporations are not closed systems. If you safe money, the impact is very small. Even when a big corporation safes money it doesn't really matter. But the state is huge and spends a lot of money. And many companies depend on state contracts.

I give you a simple example. The German state is subsidising public transport, if the state cuts theses costs, the company providing this service has only a few choices, such as cutting service or increasing prices. These will leads the consumer to have higher costs. If the company cuts lay off people to compensate, those will lose their income and the state must even pay them unemployment benefits.

So the state budget is not really a question if something is be paid but rather by whom and at what point. It is essentially a closed system.

P.S. Very export depended countries can essentially export this partially to other countries. There is this argument that Germany did that with Greece. While Germany consolidated its budget, the debt of Greece increased.

Either the state taxes and provides public services, or the state taxes less and private services are provided.

I think the bigger point is about the state's role as a consumer- and lender- of last resort.

Through its ability to deficit spend (enabled by its supposed future ability to tax) or its ability to print currency (through its central bank), there are functions the only states have access to. Which become incredibly valuable when everyone else is economically terrified.

You could divide by other numbers - an example the author gives is hard assets- and come up with a different percentage.

That's not accurate though. We can pay off the debt tomorrow and skip the years of productivity. It really is an apples to oranges comparison. The debt isn't denominated in productivity. It's denominated in dollars that the government can create for "free". Of course there are knock on effects of creating enough dollars to zero out the debt, but it's not equivalent to the entire country working for years.

The government cannot create wealth "for free". It can print more dollars, but in doing so it makes each dollar worth less. No wealth is actually gained.

> there are knock on effects of creating enough dollars to zero out the debt

Doing that is impossible, though. Reducing the value of a dollar means that you'll need even more dollars to repay that debt than you would have needed otherwise. There is no net gain here.

That's the point. The government isn't on the hook for wealth. They are on the hook for dollars. And dollars, to the US government, are "free".

>Doing that is impossible, though. Reducing the value of a dollar means that you'll need even more dollars to repay that debt than you would have needed otherwise. There is no net gain here.

The amount of debt doesn't go up if the value of the dollar goes down.

The interest rate goes up almost instantly when the government prints money. That's not exactly equivalent to increasing the debt value, but it's more than enough to make the "just inflate it away" strategy fail 100% of the times some country tries it.

Same with US dollars. Half of them might be held by non-US persons. Another quarter by US population. Printing dollars is a wealth redistribution excersice and a very effective one.

One of the very smart things the U.S. has done is take a good portion of those printed dollars and invest in weapons which allow us to force the world to accept the same printed dollars. That's what really allows our government to be in that globally unique position. Resistance to this by other nations has various consequences. If you're a country that doesn't have a certain level of military deterrent you become victim of "regime change". If you are a country that meets that deterrent threshold you become victim of the foreign boogeyman FUD.

I'm not against debt[0] so much as I like interesting units and metrics. If you want to compare debt levels of different countries across history getting the local currency to cancel out means no converting 1870 dollars to 2019 dollars, no converting 1920 Yen to 1995 Azerbaijani Manats, etc.

The fact that Debt-to-GDP reduces to years, even if it's unclear what that means, lets us make years-to-years comparisons and makes charts like this possible[1].

[0] - Though I think what it's being spent on really matters cough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Gdp_to_debt_...

The government could choose to reduce the productivity value of the debt by reducing the value of the dollar (quantitative easing), or numerous other monetary policy levers it can pull. How many years of "productivity we owe" isn't a sensible metric when it's not to be paid now, and we can manipulate the number between now and maturity.

> years of productivity

You got the units wrong: the GDP isn't productivity, it's production (it's even consumption actually,but this is another subject).

However, I will concede that GDP as a measure of productivity is hard to measure, easy to manipulate, and less effective than other measures of productivity.