“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain
Until you can let go of all of the mental roadblocks from a lifetime of having to “get” money before spending and the institutionalized perspective that comes from that when it is encouraged by every facet of politics and media you will never be able to understand macro-economics and government finance. Very little in macro-economics is about “money”, but rather, it is about securing and allocating resources to assure future productivity so we will have things to buy with the money that Congress creates as a no-cost commodity to manage the economy.
You claim that you aren’t the enemy, but then continue to carry water for the enemy when you refuse to consider that a rapidly failing system that funnels money to the masters of the universe while promoting deadly austerity for the masses just might be in error. You don’t even have to be an economist to see the problem. Your background in business should make you familiar with dual entry spreadsheets and the sectoral balance system they are built on and allow you to transfer that to our government and banking system.
The “debt” that has you clutching at your pearls, along with every ignorant or corrupt politician since the ’80s, is nothing more than an accounting entity that allows compliance with this accounting system that demands an opposing entry in one sector to balance every entry made in another. In the case of our federal monetary system there are only two sectors, so it isn’t complicated beyond anyone’s abilities. The simple fact that the entry made in the government (Treasury) sector is labeled “debt” and balances every dollar Congress creates in the private sector (Fed) via its Constitutional authority seems to stymy any cognitive ability of otherwise intelligent people.
Just using the knowledge available to a first-year accounting major would tell one that the government is not revenue dependent for its spending because any revenue it receives is balanced to zero by the debt entry as money moves from the private sector via taxation or borrowing and encounters the debt entry that was created when the money was as a tracking entity. Taxation destroys money (and debt) and federal spending creates new money (and debt), end of the story for money. Borrowing is simply a contract that promises to create new money in the future, with interest, for anyone willing to sacrifice liquidity of their money for the duration of the contract, but the operation of destroying money collected doesn’t change.
One cannot, by any stretch of a fevered imagination, consider destroying money as a “funding” operation. Borrowing provided temporary policy space that allowed Congress to anticipate taxation when we foolishly used a gold standard to restrain its Constitutional authority. Its primary purpose with a fiat currency is welfare for investors and propaganda fodder should any of the plebes desire that their government actually provide a benefit to them. Everyone who ever asked a politician “How will you pay for it?” or spread debt porn is complicit in any misery and death that could have been prevented with federal spending, as they are entirely political decisions, not economics.
