That said, if taxes aren't paying for anything in America, do they burn the money? What do they do with it?
They use tax receipts to reduce the national debt, which is just a tracking mechanism for the number of dollars in the economy. Once that is done there is no accounting procedure that would allow double use of an asset so all new spending, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, is via newly created money.
Money is created by printing it on paper (or plastic) and minting coins. It is not created out of thin air. The amount of money is determined by figures unknown (Federal Reserve? Rothschild?), and I have no idea how the amount of money to be created is determined. I also don't care.
Only about 8-10% of the money supply is represented by currency. The bulk is simply computer entries marking accounts up or down. Banks, including the Fed, can only create credit accounts that are balanced by promise to pay contracts with borrowers, making them zero-sum in terms of the "net" money supply.
Only high-power money created by Congress can retire private bank debt or be net saved without incurring additional bank debt. It's sad that you don't care from the perspective of a progressive activist because knowing how it works makes all of the "pay for" nonsense in budget appropriations BS.
Congress can afford anything that can be resourced in the private sector without creating inflation, even without increasing revenue. Neither taxation nor borrowing is a funding mechanism for any sovereign fiat currency-issuing government. Both require existing currency and that currency is destroyed against the debt that created it upon entry to the government sector.
South Africa was bankrupt when it gave up on apartheid. We all knew that. So, you're saying America is bankrupt.
I don't believe South Africa used a fiat currency that it controlled prior to the end of apartheid, but I could be in error. If it still used the British Pound it would have to obtain those to pay its obligations so it wasn't monetarily sovereign.
Even if it was, it may have gotten some terrible advice from its central bank. The banking system is at a great advantage if the politicians conflate the nation's monetary system with their own relationship with money as "users". The position of a currency-issuing government is much different.
By limiting the amount of currency creation by government banks "finance" much of the economy that would otherwise simply be paid for by the government. It's not hard to see which they would prefer.
America is a sovereign currency issuer with a free-floating fiat currency. It can never "go broke" in terms of its own currency, which it creates on-demand. This is one primary reason investors have used our Treasury bonds as secure storage of excess capital since WWII.
