I’m a middle aged dude with a family, own a house, have four kids, investments, all the adulting things.
However, I’m still not sure how a multi-trillion dollar national defecit seeps down to affect my day-to-day life
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It’s like a bomb under your house with a timer you don’t know. This bomb doesn’t explode as long as the US can get loans cheap enough to cover the payments for the previous debts. But if the cost of US loans goes up too quickly, the bomb explodes on us all. It might not blow up your house until your grandkids have kids in the house or it might go off during your lifetime, but if we don’t disarm it by keeping the debt to a more manageable level or heaven forbid eliminate it, the bomb will eventually blow up on us.
The US debt makes us much more vulnerable to OPEC as currently they only accept payments in dollars. That makes the dollar the primary reserve currency in the world. It massively increases the demand for USDs. If they switched to say the Euro, global demand for dollars would take a significant hit. This triggers higher interest rates for US loans which makes the cost of the debt multiply. There are other factors that could drive down demand for USDs as well, OPEC is just the one I expect to happen.
Any such factor would, at best, result in austerity measures for decades. Right now we’re playing chicken that the cost of loans will stay low forever because our politicians are all short sighted morons because our voting population doesn’t care. Until it blows up in our faces, there is unlikely to be change.
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