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The U.S. national debt reached $20 trillion for the first time ever last Friday after President Trump signed a bipartisan bill temporarily raising the nation's debt limit for three months.
While at Camp David, Mr. Trump, with the stroke of his presidential pen, increased the statutory debt last Friday by approximately $318 billion, according to the Treasury Department. Before the bill's completion, the U.S. debt was sitting around $19.84 trillion.
The legislation allowed the Treasury Department to start borrowing again immediately after several months of using "extraordinary measures" to avoid a financial default. The bill passed last Thursday 80-17 in the Senate and in the House 316-90 on Friday. Around $15 billion in emergency funding for Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts was attached to the borrowing measure.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-debt-hits-historic-20-trillion-mark/
[That works out to just shy of $62,000 per American. --Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @06:14PM (1 child)
Different AC here. Seems to me it's a game of moving the decimal point in the figure of how many dollars buys me hamburger for lunch.
If the total currency (gold, T-bills, Bitcoins, etc) available is fixed, then technology improves, moving the decimal point to the left. Let's say I make $5k per year flipping burgers, and I used to buy a hamburger for $5.00. Then the burger-bot took over, and I can now buy a hamburger for $0.50. Then beef was grown in vertical farms, and I can now buy the exact same hamburger for $0.05. I'm still making $5k per year even though my job is now to design and maintain bots that build vertical farms and burger-flipper-maintenance bots, but now I can buy many more hamburgers.
However, we can construct the exact same situation and have the decimal point move rightwards. If the total currency (gold [dredge up shipwrecks? asteroid mining?], T-bill [print more], Bitcoins [???], etc) available is variable, then as technology improves, we can control how much and in which direction the decimal point moves. I used to buy a hamburger for $5.00. Then the burger-bot took over my job, and I got a job maintaining burger-bots for $50k/yr. Burgers still cost $5. Then beef was grown in vertical farms, and I moved career to designing vertical farm and burger-flipper-maintenance bots for $500k/yr. Burgers still cost $5, but now I can buy many more hamburgers.
Yeah I'm glossing over tons of shit.
However, there is a specific place I'm going with this. As a person, my ability to afford a burger is the only thing I care about. If my ability to afford a burger has not changed in 40 years, then were does all the extra wealth we create in this non-fixed-sized-pie go to, anyway???
I think we all know where it goes.
Maybe fixing the size of the currency and changing to a deflationary model would help the average person understand how badly the Owners are fucking them so that they can do something about it before there are riots in every major city.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Saturday September 16 2017, @02:09AM
What on earth makes you think the burgers get cheaper, and that you get a new job?
Have you ever looked at history?
Have you wondered why the market for ultracars is exploding?
It is not because your burgers are about to get a lot cheaper.