However, to get that debt we needed to borrowing money from someone and agree to pay them interest. We could have also browned the same money and lowered taxes, or borrowed the same money and had free universal healthcare or whatever other government spending we wanted.
That’s what opportunity cost means.
1) The Fed can loan money by simply creating new dollars and purchasing treasury bills. This has been happening for a long time, T-Bills do first get offered to private institutions but the Fed backstops all auctions.
2) There is literally no way for the US Gov to go involuntarily bankcrupt because of 1). It is the sole manufacturer of US dollars and can always create more.
100 quintillion (10^20) pengő, the largest denomination bill ever issued, Hungary, 1946.
Hyperinflation largely happens in countries where the money wasn't really worth much to begin with because it's value was pegged to the price of gold or other currencies. Or because most of the economy functioned on foreign currency and the government borrowed in foreign currency. In this case printing more money to service foreign debt or imports can quickly spiral out of control because as soon as the trust in the local currency erodes it essentially doesn't matter anymore if you have 100 or 100T of it. It's worthless paper.
There is a little wiggle room. Governments do get to create a little money as their economies grow or if it’s used in foreign economies without causing significant inflation, but it’s dangerous to just spend it directly. The issue of course excessive printing or any economic contraction.
PS: Foreign debt is of course a closely related issue, but countries don’t create foreign debt unless they are forced to. You can’t get hyper inflation with a currency actually pegged to another currency or gold, those ties break long before hyper inflation happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg
It seems like you are conflating the role of private and public debt, which is a very common mistake. Private debt does cause economic crises, public debt is a misnomer - it's generally speaking not even correctly referred to as debt. It's referred to as a debt for historical reasons, its not owed to anyone, for example.
A paper by the CATO institute showed that world hyperinflations have not historically arisen from monetary policy changes. They have more to do with... eh, its complicated. Collapses of industry in wartime, famines, militarily-imposed foreign debts and single-resource economies living beyond their means. The understanding you are demonstrating is called the Quantity Theory of Money and its being more and more called into question. The Theory of Ricardian Equivalence is toast. Not sure if you know that those are the high-falutin names of the theories you are describing as being patent fact.
No, it can be quite beneficial. However, it’s more dangerous to borrow in foreign currency because exchange rates are outside of complete government control.
> You think government spending necessarily precipitates a currency crisis
No, the inability to borrow in their own currency is one possibility. Bad monetary policy is another, losing a war for existence is another.
And think in terms of people. People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. We threw an insane amount of people-time, and a tragically insane amount of people.
There is an opportunity cost in terms of both stuff and people. We can print money, but we can't print stuff or people.
Much of that stuff has actually found itself in the hands of those it was made to fight against. This is significantly worse than throwing it away in my opinion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_toil,_tears_and_sweat
The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience. I’m not saying it justifies the cost. Far from it. But it’s not a complete wash from a mid term strategic analysis.
From my experience and social contacts, I don't think "incompetence" at doing anything is accurate or would I describe it as affecting morale. There are inefficiencies and incompetency with leadership or supply chains, some of this waste is part of running such a large organization like the military. One that sticks in my mind is having 60 people assigned to shake debris out of parachutes when there are only 25 hooks to hang the parachutes on, requiring US mail to be transported by US citizens, and I'm nit picking here: US Air Force intra-Base Security Police enforcing a 15 MPH speed limit...
There have been many lessons that have been learned, from these conflicts and I think a large contributing factor to the cost is rapid procurement of enhanced equipment such as individual and vehicular armor improvements; equipment that had been identified in review's as being a deficiency.
I think a positive attribute around the military is what is being viewed and cited, is lessons and critique. The Army does have strong systems in place for reviewing actions. I think it's something that I try to take a utilize in the civilian sector. I think there is waste, and certainly there could be modifications to improve efficiency, but I also think for a very large organization it does fairly well, and modernized fairly well to the challenges that were presented. However if I were joking around with some friends, I would totally would be tossing around incompetence left and right (haha)!
The average term of enlistment in the USA military is 15 years, 11 years for officers. So that experience gets lost quickly unless we keep getting embroiled in new wars.
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2015...
The average length of enlistment for U.S. military personnel is just under 15 years for all branches. The average service time for officers is a bit less, averaging about 11 years. The U.S. Air Force has an average enlistment time of 14.7 years. Oct 4, 2017
The referenced URL is:
https://classroom.synonym.com/beyonce-curls-8729.html
(yes, that "beyonce-curls" URL is the right one)
Surprisingly, it does include references, but only one of them still exists, which backs up the 11 year number for officers, but not for general enlisted:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/10/05/chapter...
The average officer in 2009 had been in the military nearly 11 years, slightly more than a year longer than the average in 1973.
The pattern among enlisted personnel is more complicated. The average length of service for enlisted personnel rose from 5.8 years in 1973 to a peak of 7.5 in 1994 and 1996, but then began drifting downward and now stands at 6.7 years.
Some military pilots talking about Afghanistan
- drove people out
- airframe lifetimes consumed
- people not wanting to sign up
I'm not finding much of what you claim the poster is "saying", in their post.
As for people, spending a couple of years in the military is much better personal development for many young people than going to college at an age when most people can't appreciate it.
These things aside, of course the loss of life is horrific and a terrible waste.
https://facethefactsusa.org/facts/the-true-price-of-war-in-h...
Metal is a non-renewable resource. Cost of extraction does not match market price, more so when unnecessary demand is created for wars. What kind of spin is this?
But in general metals can be recycled quite well and often are recycled due to their price. Also even if you finely shredded it and mixed it with other stuff the resulting mix would still most likely have higher grade than regular ore & mining it would thus be economicaly viable.
There could be asteroids of pure palladium, platinum, gold, and silver, and it wouldn't matter a fig until it was cost competitive with digging rocks out of the ground, sticking them on a slow barge to a massive refinery and processing them with cheap, probably exploitative, labor.
"We can't have a metal shortage because there's lots of metal in space" is not the most coherent argument I've heard today...
Yeah, and see what mess that sort of thinking has got us into. Economic growth is worthless if it’s not sustainable.
Stop using what you learned in your Econ 1XX level courses to try and reason about government spending and money operations, especially, US government spending and money operations. What you learned is not applicable.
Otherwise, does it matter? What's the impact on ordinary people if bitcoin is worth 100 or 1 mio dollars? Notwithstanding the fact that the number of people actively buying financial assets has gone up a lot in recent years, which is bound to increase prices.
I keep hearing that it's supply shortages due to covid and wage increases due to unemployment aid.
Who knows if that is true, either.
“Reality is unchangeable, so we can’t know the unknown”
So what? It definitely could’ve been spent better than decade’s killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.