by 827a | 2025-12-27 19:09:52+00:00
Lot of emotion in this comment; not a lot of substance. I think you're misunderstanding how some of these systems work.

> This change will also force the US to finally get fiscally responsible and get the bloody USD printing machine under control, something they never had to do because of the USD reserve currency status.

It is not the case that the US didn't "need" to get the USD printing machine under control because of the reserve status; it is the case that the US
"could not" get the USD printing machine under control, because of the reserve status. When there is demand for US dollars, domestic or foreign, US dollars sometimes needed to be printed to satisfy that demand. If the US decides to not print those dollars; this is literally "defaulting on the debt", and would be bad-bad.

This gets at where you're misunderstanding how these systems work, because I think you're imagining that US debt is, like, an account in your Chase app that goes up, then you pay it down. US debt are, obviously, bonds. The USG says "we've got bonds to sell, they're at N year M% interest". Buyers say "we want those bonds we'll buy them". The USG is now in debt, and is obligated to repay those bonds; and sometimes has to print money to do so. This gets at the previous paragraph; money, broadly, is printed to satisfy debt obligations, not directly to service the deficit (proceeds from the initial bond sale are what could be said to directly service the deficit, but that's pennies compared to the size of the overall market).

Extending the Chase app analogy, you have it internalized that if we just get the deficit under control, then we could start "paying down the debt". In fact, probably, even our President understands it like this. But this isn't how it works. To "pay down the debt" would require two things to happen: We stop issuing new treasury bonds, and we pay off the already issued ones over 20/30/etc years as they mature.

The general professional sentiment on what would happen if the US even communicated it wanted to, in totally good faith, begin doing this at some point in the future, is basically armageddon. You have it in your head that, because Dave Ramsey says debt bad, the US should have no debt; but the world wants our debt; it has an insatiable (though, decreasing) appetite for it. Depriving the world of this debt would leave trillions of dollar-equivalents without anywhere to park safe from inflation, which would descend global financial markets into chaos. Tens of millions of people would starve in the first three months, among other undesirable outcomes. Some actively make the argument that the USG refusing to take on new debt would be net-worse for the world than the US defaulting on their existing debt, though its an interesting space to game out; a little game of global-cataclysm worst-thing-to-ever-happen-to-humanity olympics you can play.

But, debt servicing is becoming unmanageable for the US budget; so the best case for the United States is that USG debt demand from the rest of the world drops slowly and naturally, so we can naturally slow the issuance of new debt; and over 100 or so more years let managed inflation catch us up to recover from the utter shitshows that was 2001, 2008, and 2020. Everything I've seen, and I do mean everything, suggests that this is what is happening; but we'll know for sure in 90 more years.