US News

I would be very cautious when it comes to the US dollar, debt, debt ceilings, etc. I mean there's a ton of videos on modern monetary theory that can explain it better than I ever can. I'll just say theory is misleading because it's not a theory as in "I have a theory that George HW Bush shot JFK..." more in the scientific theory way and just a description of policy the US government already follows and has followed for a long time. The important part, I suppose, is capitalists (yahoo finance) will sell it like US debt and budgets must be or should be treated like household budgets, but that's not how this works. China certainly doesn't operate on that principle and we can all see their economy is blowing the back out of the US currently- and it has nothing to do with debt. It's more important to analyze where the money printed is going (infrastructure spending vs defense contractors which is essentially just waste and only enriching Boeing, Raytheon, etc. stockholders not increasing economic production and such).

So, tldr, countries that print and use their own currency, US, Japan, China, etc., should not consider national debts for... basically anything under the current economic structures in the world.

And of course this is inherently a capitalist, bourgeois outlook on the world. The world is currently dominated by capitalist, bourgeois governments. My point is yahoo, et al. are not offering legitimate criticism, but just arguing for austerity while simultaneously also arguing for an ever-ballooning budget which pumps cash into the MIC and all its various subsidiaries. They know how MMT works, they know how the federal reserve works and will continue to work (until it doesn't) and they want to hoard as much of that cash for themselves instead of "the poors" getting any, so they pretend there's an arbitrary limit on it or that it will result in a large future bill for American children when that just isn't the case.

Anyway, MMT has been implemented by the US for a long-ass time, and it's just funny how if you google it you get a bunch of critiques as if it just popped into existence in 2020. A lot of this is overly complicated (on purpose, it should be stated) but a lot of the analysis comes down to "gold bugs" being butthurt over the gold standard not being adhered to by literally any modern nation for, again, a long-ass time. Officially the US ended it completely in the 1970s, most people know this I think, and FDR started the process way back in the 1930s.

None of this should be taken as a defense of current financial systems. Obviously there are many criticisms of them, but one thing I can say with absolute confidence is that anyone proposing the gold standard or lamenting moving from it is... not a serious person. These aren't the only people criticizing MMT (again, the US, China, etc. already operate under the conditions that MMT describes), but, they are the loudest and dumbest for sure. Aka most right wingers in the US. They think the US dollar (or Euro or Yuan or Yen, etc.) are backed by assets such as gold when, again, this is objectively not true and hasn't been for a long time. Cryptobros are just more "modern" and "sophisticated" "gold bugs" btw. For whatever that matters. They're also obsessed with currency being backed by more than just some abstract idea of stability, whatever that entails.

Anyway, yahoo is full of shit, the US debt basically doesn't matter, there's a ton of other shit that does matter that they ignore (like how the US gov chooses to print money to pay Lockheed Martin contracts instead of to build high speed rail... hmm...).