Sorry, I guess this is a tangent, but wouldn't that depend on how you define debt?

IIRC the US government failed to pay pensions for Civil War or WW1 soldiers, and the British government did something similar regarding bonds or pensions for WW1 or WW2 soldiers.

I should have been more specific, this is about paying the capital and interest on national bonds.

Never said I don't think we'll pay our debt.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

How will that not limit us going forward / is the current rate of "just add it to debt/never pay it back" sustainable?

Not sure how far we can go but Japan's debt is currently 266% of GDP, so the USA debt of 120% is less than half of the Japanese debt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_Japan

If people are willing to lend to the gov't (by purchasing bonds), then why is it not sustainable? Those who are doing the lending is effectively proclaiming that they don't foresee a stoppage of future lending.

just because we can doesn't mean we should?

Type "At what level does debt-to-GDP ratio hinder a nation?" into ChatGPT

I'm not talking about collapse, I'm talking about hinderance going forward

Raising debt, gotta service it, gotta raise taxes to pay for it or cut costs, no?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/24/facts-about...

The level at which GDP growth is higher than interest payments.

The more important aspect is not that there's debt, but how it is spent and what is being spent on. If the spending is poor (aka, the spending is malinvestment), it doesn't matter that the current or projected future servicing is OK.

Using a metric like debt to GDP does not tell the whole story.

> Type "At what level does debt-to-GDP ratio hinder a nation?" into ChatGPT

Wow, is this what we’ve come to? This is a valid thought process now?

I have no strong views on your point. But I really don’t think it’s safe to trust the very-convincing and very-possibly-incorrect responses generated by ChatGPT to inform your views (on anything).

ChatGPT would only have a cogent answer to that if there were a well-accepted cogent answer in the extant literature.

To the best of my understanding, any answers to that question in extant literature are either going to be highly theoretical, or about situations that are not sufficiently similar to that of the modern US to be helpful.

Please stop using ChatGPT to write your comments. Nobody here is here to have a conversation with ChatGPT, and anyone who wants to talk with ChatGPT instead of actual human beings can do that privately without polluting the conversations of real human beings.

I know they're probably not what you were thinking of when you wrote "English speaking nation", but Belize defaulted on their debt twice in 2021:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/belize-de...

Right, I don't think there is a good phrase for it, but I believe when economists make this statement they mean Britain, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. I could say "Anglosphere" but some people think that phrase is racist.