So in the UK the tories and media keep saying the national debt is the highest its been since the ww2 (which is true of pretty much any year since the 80s). And that we need to raise taxes, tighten our belts etc to pay back what we borrowed to get us thru the pandemic.
Now I know this kind of treating a countries finances like household finances and talking about national debt like its credit card debt is disingenuous and just used as a way to justify squeezing people more than they are already.
But what I don't know with enough authority to be able to talk to people about it is why this is the case? How is national debt different and wtf is it? Who do we owe it to and do we even need to pay it back etc?
Ofc I know the whole thing is bullshit anyway any only exists to preserve the current power structure but let's leave that for now.
Be good to hear thoughts from someone who knows things.
Oh my god your link literally proves my point, it is literally the subtitle to your article.
you claimed corporations are owed the debt. in reality it's the citizens and foreign governments.
I said private actors, not corporations. Citizens are private actors. Foreign governments only own a small part of the debt.
a third is the largest part of the debt.
Fractions: How do they work?
they work like this
Jfc I have no clue what you are trying to prove here, if you cut a slice from a bread and then cut the rest of the bread up into much thinner slices, then the original slice isn't most of the bread. It's really simple.
No one has ever proposed your theory because it is extremely silly and obviously false. By far the largest part of US debt is owed either to other branches of government, or to private actors. Then a comparatively small part of debt is owed to foreign governments. IT DOES NOT MATTER at all if all foreign governments combined own more than other actors do separately, they still own a minority of US debt, and of that minority most of it is owed to close allies of the US, and most of it is also paid up (including debt to enemies of the US) constantly, while more is being accumulated, because foreign governments generally own US BONDS just like every private actor who owns a US bond and the US pays all of them, or else they will default. Your idea of national debt is completely false. It is not at all the reason the US buys so many bombs, that happens so that the US maintains the role as a global hegemon, exapand its sphere of influence so that corporations have more and more available space to expand into, and maintain the petrodollar. It has nothing to do with preventing other places from collecting their debt, it's simply not how national debt works.
if you cut up a slice of bread into three chunks and then two thirds of the chunks go to hundreds of different causes the one third of the chunk is still the largest chunk.
the largest part of the debt is owed to foreign governments, and there's a reason that the US doesn't actually give a fuck about the national debt and that the defense budget is the largest of the next like 7 countries combined.
edit: the US isn't the only fucking country that's bowing down to corporations. corporations have become basically an entire entity of their own that have influence on lots of different governments.
It is the largest COMPARED TO THE REST OF THE CHUNKS SEPARATELY which doesn't matter at all because it's simply a result of how you decide to categorize the rest which has no consequence. You might as well name the rest of the debt "not foreign government debt" and then suddenly it is by far the largest chunk. Or you might split it up to all the different private actors and branches of government who own it separately in which case you have hundreds of millions of different slices and they're tiny. Except it doesn't change the situation one bit. The only thing that is relevant is that debt to foreign governments is less than 30% of debt.
How about Japan? Is that also why their debt is fucking massive, much larger compared to their GDP but don't care? BTW Japan is iirc the largest holder of US debt. How about Singapore? Is Singapore also expecting to strongarm creditors? Furthermore, are you implying that the US ISN'T paying back debt? Your entire argument seems to be that the US has actually already defaulted but other coutnries pretend nothing has happened because they are afraid. Sorry, but that is simply not the case. Yes, the US can say "fuck you we're not paying" but that's pretty much what defaulting is, almost any country can do it but none want to because then no one will buy their bonds any more.
What does this have to do with anything?