Global debt levels rose to more than 325 percent of the world's gross domestic product last year as government debt rose sharply, a report from the Institute for International Finance showed on Wednesday.
The IIF's report found that global debt had risen more than $11 trillion in the first nine months of 2016 to more than $217 trillion. The report also found that general government debt accounted for nearly half of the total increase.
Emerging market debt rose substantially, as government bond and syndicated loan issuance in 2016 grew to almost three times its 2015 level.
Source: Reuters
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday January 06 2017, @03:48PM
Except when it doesn't. Every one of those "sensible things" has notorious examples where there is at best a paltry return on investment, and sometimes a negative return on investment.
Well sure, there are positives and negatives on every balance book. You try to make things as efficient as possible and make the best judgements you can, at the end of the day you just have to accept that despite your best effort nothing's perfect, but as long as the average trend is positive then it's worthwhile.
I would argue that money spent on things like infrastructure, universal healthcare and education can very easily achieve a positive return, as long as the money isn't spent in blatantly foolish ways (ie bridges to uninhabited islands, education money spent on creationism or whatever). Now doubtless there is a point of diminishing returns, whereby (using healthcare as an example) you've spent $X of your tax budget to control the nastiest major infectious diseases, and in so doing have saved the national economy 1 billion man-hours of lost productivity, but spending another $X to control a mild outbreak of some obscure sniffling ailment will only save you an additional 0.1 billion hours... but I don't think there are many western nations currently near such a point, or even heading in the right direction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @08:14PM
...but government spending triggers rightards and damages their safe space!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 07 2017, @12:55AM
You try to make things as efficient as possible and make the best judgements you can
The problem is that conflicts of interest by themselves make the idea laughable. And even when collectively people sincerely try, their trying tends to be pretty bad. Any sort of market approach has the advantages that you don't have to care whether the trying is sincere or effective. You can choose to go with whatever is working at the time. You don't have to care why the more effective providers of the infrastructure or service do that (FOPN [soylentnews.org]).
Sure, the creation and maintenance of public services tends to be a weak part. But we don't usually need those public services and it is far too common for public goods and services to exist despite being terrible ideas, either because someone believes in a public good no matter the cost, or because they can exploit the public good for gain.