Like how does it affect the average citizen on a day-to-day basis?
Why do we have a national debt in the first place (as presumably the richest country in the world)? Who lends us the money, and do we have to pay them back?
Also, as I understand it, we can’t really get rid of the national debt, but we can slow down the amount of spending. Why does the rate of our debt accumulation matter?
If we’re already trillions in debt, what difference would it make at this point to spend indefinitely to improve our country?
In: Economics
Some debt is fine, as long as you have enough potential investors.
Problem is most of our investors are people’s retirement plans. Which given our aging population is shrinking. And of course we have to pay interest on that debt, and our interest payments are a growing percentage of our expenses. Which means we need to borrow more money.
At some point we can’t borrow enough to pay our expenses and either the government dramatically cuts spending or we get inflation.
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