Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

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A better measure of debt is to compare it with GDP (intuitively makes sense given GDP normalizes for size of economy). By that measure, Japan is in way worse shape at 294%: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to...

Someone like Peterson, as quoted in the article, has been saying the same thing since the 80’s, warning people of impending doom. In 2004: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/running-on-empty-how-the-democ...

And before that in 1993: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/facing-up_peter-g-peterson/126...

From the article: “As we have seen with recent growth in inflation and interest rates, the cost of debt can mount suddenly and rapidly,” Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, said in a statement.

“With more than $10 trillion of interest costs over the next decade, this compounding fiscal cycle will only continue to do damage to our kids and grandkids.”

While now might be different, the economy has been in good shape in aggregate over the last 30 years, with debt scolds sounding the alarm all throughout.

Some historical context as well (#5, towards bottom):

> Debt service as a share of federal outlays peaked at more than 15% in the mid-1990s, but generally falling interest rates have helped hold down payments even as the dollar amount continues to grow.

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/14/facts-abo...

Also, out of the ~$6T of spending in 2022, about $4T was mandatory (Social Security, Medicare, etc):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

With $1.7T being discretionary, and $0.5T being interest.

GDP is such a juiced up a number I would not want to base any metric on it especially how much more debt we could conceivably take on. As an example: Americans are getting healthcare dicked at 18.3% of GDP, erm I mean they are contributing that much to the "economy" in a good way.

Japan's debt is mostly domestic isn't it? It's foreign debt a country needs to be more wary of.

Absolutely f**ing rubbish. No. This is dead wrong. You are speaking authoratively but you don't know what you are talking about.

There is nothing inherently superior about debt/gdp. It is one good metric for tracking debt but is in no way the one true metric or intrinsically superior to other debt metrics and importantly it cannot give you a reasonably complete picture of the fiscal situation of a country because it is lacking the key component of incorporating rates and flows.

Japan has more than double our debt to GDP but this is able to not catastrophically blow up in the short term because their interest rates and therefore interest expense is low.

Again, really sad , but not rrally surprising to see low quality drivel stated authoratively as the top answer

Can you please make your substantive points without calling names or posting in the flamewar style? Besides not breaking the site guidelines, it will make your arguments more persuasive.

When someone else is wrong and/or you know more than they do, or feel this is the case, it's enough to post correct information and explain it to readers. Then we all can learn something. Putdowns, on the other hand, get in the way, poison conversation, and evoke worse from others.

Your comment would have been just fine without the first and final paragraphs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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