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Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

If your assets, lets say your house of value grew by 5% , you would say yay me.

However, to make things simpler assume you don't have cash, for example, because you are unemployed.

So, if you are making the mortgage payments using the credit card and the total CC payments this year alone are 8% of the value of the house, you can see problem.

Eventually, the debt becomes due, and no amount of house will repay the incurred debt.

So the relationship is, you may buy any house (assets) that grows in any amount, but if your CC hole is growing faster, you are actually worse than you started out.

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Analogies comparing household finances to government finances are pretty apples to oranges. A household can’t easily get unsecured loans below prime, print money to cover debts, or do many other things that governments can.

Government is just a large group of people

Financing and even currency issuance depends on trust.

I can get a 0% from family and friends if i needed for far more my net worth. With connections I could also get counterfeit and pass it around.

It comes down to the fraud triangle: opportunity, incentive, rationalization.

The government may have more leeway to commit fraud than an individual. But the comparison is still apt, the fraud is the same, whether its a house being paid with CC or GPD with govt bonds. Ignore that at your own peril

The dynamics are similar in many ways, but not the same. Scale and occupying a significant part of a market create their own qualities. Government bonds are closer to shares in a company than personal debt, or even corporate debt for that matter. Many people want to own government debt as a stable store of value. Even moreso as the global military hegemon, where other countries want to own the government's debt as a stable store of value.

Conversely, the US government has also spent the last 40+ years abusing the fallacy that loaning money is completely different than spending, which has grotesquely distorted the financial industry and the housing market. So the sooner we shove off these misguided notions, like that the government's balance sheet is anything like a private balance sheet (and even worse, that the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is somehow distinct from the government's!), the better. Modern Monetary Theory is more in line with the actually-conservative Austrian School than the hybrid catastrophe of the past four decades.

Still, there's no free lunch. You can see this clearly with smaller nations that try those strategies. If the US government has to do those things then there are negative repercussions in the form of distorted interest rates, inflation, capital misallocation, etc. All else equal it's obviously beneficial to have a balanced budget, low debt, and organic economic growth from dynamic markets. The federal government still has the exorbitant privilege of the USD as the global reserve currency, so can export much of its inflation across the world. Though at the end of the day these trends matter, and the long term debt cycle, coupled with worsening domestic issues, does not bode well with increasingly powerful strategic rivals and proxy wars.

But what if you can set the CC rates as you please (let's say to 0% because why not and we've been doing that for the better part of last 12 years). And if push comes to shove you can just get infinite "loan" from a biggy bank that you happens to have.

Technically you are correct that the govt can set the rates.

But that's just like you demanding to have a 0% CC from a financial institution. If you are Bezos, you may be able to swing that.

But that demand only follows your credit rating. You can demand 0%, but that doesnt mean you will get it. If Bezos is suddenly bankrupt, bet he's not getting the same CC, or even any CC.

Making the bet that the USG can set rates as they please forever just because they have for 12 years is just saying "I'm a turkey and life is good, this nice farmer feeds me every day!"

Thanksgiving always comes.

I don't think this captures the point I was trying to make, the US government have ultimate control over Federal Reserve and its policies.

Thanksgiving will always arrive but the government is not going to be the turkey with its debts, in this case, it could be a global stagflation. The US government can always make good on however many debt it has as long as it is denoted in US dollars.

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