National debt is largely meaningless, especially in the current economic climate. Its an accounting function more than anything else. Most of our current “debt” in the US is money borrowed by the Treasury from our version of a Central Bank, the Federal Reserve. Its essentially borrowing money from ourselves. Unless increased debt translates into significant or hyper inflation there is no problem with national debt rising way higher than it is now. In fact, hyper-inflation has only occurred in a very few instances historically, and none of those instances were due to over-printing of currency. In all those instances there were other circumstances that really caused hyper-inflation. In the case of Germany and Zimbabwe, the two classic cases, it was the expropriation and destruction of the vast majority of their productive capacity that caused hyper-inflation – in other words, there was enough cash but not enough to buy with it. That is what causes hyper-inflation, not a large increase in national debt.
Add in the supposedly scary “bond vigilantes” who, any moment now for the past 5 years, were going to demand higher returns for purchasing US treasuries, and we have another bogeyman put to rest.
In our current economic environment, with large amounts of our productive capacity in mothballs due to lack of demand, there is NO WAY inflation will be an issue. That is why Japan is in no danger. Scary sounding numbers, as many have already commented on in this thread, are just more irresponsible stupidity from the press.
If you are really interested in how our economy actually works, you should read about Modern Monetary Theory, the closest we have come yet to actually explaining how economies work. “MMT”, as it is known, is currently in the ridicule stage within the mainstream press, but will, just like Keynesian econ in a prior generation, be the only option left after our next collapse and all mainstream economic theories show their utter uselessness and destructiveness. I thought that would’ve happened after 2008 when neoclassical/neoliberal econ policies were shown to be total failures, but powerful people and institutions have a way of holding on even after they have been discredited. Read Steve Keen, Bill Mitchel, Stephanie Kelton, Bill Black and Michael Hudson if you want to understand how things really work, economically speaking.
