Yes and no. As a headline "I reduced $7t of foreign debt" is pretty good. The plan appears to be to invite people to Mar a Lago and offer to trade the existing debt for new instruments out in the never-never.

Domestic debt might not be such a big deal? Who is coming to collect?

So the argument is that we crashed the economy but at least we screwed foreigners over and not just social security?

Wasn't that the plan all along, people always said "Ballooning Government debt is fine since unlike normal debt Governments can just print money and never really pay back the real value".

Someone has to get screwed over when you do that, who do you suggest get screwed over?

That was a rainy day argument for not caring too much about debt. But what's happening now is we're raiding our savings account to pay for bath salts. No, it was not "the plan all along".

> But what's happening now is we're raiding our savings account

What savings, USA just takes on more debt it hasn't saved anything.

Other countries got screwed when doing that because the US used to have the world currency and could print money essentially without repercussions.

Note the past tense as this advantage is now gone with Trump.

I heard the term "bail-ins" used in this context. i.e. the elites will have to suffer the devaluation.

YES. About ~30% of people appear willing to experience a loss as long as they believe they're inflicting a greater loss upon other people, and this personality type is baked in young. In my vier it's not a coincidence that polled support for Trump consistently hovers around 30%.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

Not all policy is rational. Oftentimes it's atavistic. Surely you have noticed by now that Trump deals in emotional arguments, not reasoned ones.

> Domestic debt might not be such a big deal? Who is coming to collect?

Old people with retirement needs. A lot of that debt is borrowed from SS surpluses in the past, and now the system is actually in deficit (so needs what it lent out back and then some). I’m all for screwing over boomers, psychologically I’ve convinced myself they are responsible for Trump and this mess (not entirely true, but the boomers as a generation messed things up for us before Trump was president, anyways).

> As a headline "I reduced $7t of foreign debt" is pretty good.

Nobody cares about the big numbers when the wallets are empty.

So the full faith and credit of the US Treasury is thrown away just like that?

No one collects the debt. It’s just redeeming treasury bonds. If they are no longer good then the sub prime crisis is going to look like a minor economic wrinkle.

Still fits within a populist agenda. Not a lot of sympathy for mutual funds and the wealthy holding treasury notes that get inflated away.

I'm not excited that 20% of federal revenue goes pay debt interest to some investors and stockholders. Especially when much of the original debt spending also went into the pockets of stockholders, sometimes the same ones.

Of course, the actual problem is lack of control and debt spending, not the fact that investors exist.

People say that public debt doesn't matter because it domestic, but the recipients and payers are different. It doesn't cancel out when I'm responsible for paying taxes and Vanguard or JPMorgan get the debt interest.

> Still fits within a populist agenda. Not a lot of sympathy for mutual funds and the wealthy holding treasury notes that get inflated away.

Wouldn’t this include average people’s pensions, IRAs, etc, too?

Yeah, national debt is splattered all around the US economy, but that doesn't mean it is uniform, or the payers and recipients are the same in terms of participation, returns, or even time.

Foundationally, national debt is about passing costs into the future, which also creates another huge dichotomy in payers and beneficiaries. Minimal federal spending is on growth, so isn't really about investment as how much value can be extracted from one group to another, largely, but not entirely overlapping group.

> but that doesn't mean it is uniform, or the payers and recipients are the same in terms of participation, returns, or even time.

I’m not sure if I’m following, but a (let’s say) 20% cut to the value of an average retiree’s pension account will hurt much _more_ than the same cut to a diversified wealthy person. This is simply because poorer people are affected more by fixed costs. I don’t see where the populist angle comes in. Shouldn’t the populist angle be about targeting the “elite” specifically?