The thought was that cutting Russ! a out of SWIFT, seizing the central bank’s assets, and pulling out Western corporations would destroy the economy. They predicted a tanking of the ruble, money printing to make up the difference, and the resulting hyperinflation would make the bills less useful than toilet paper and get the angry dictator to the negotiating table
There was one group of economists who said that Russia would fare just fine. They understand that "real" macroeconomics is about resources, not money and exchange rates. They subscribe to the MMT perspective of economics.
Russia would be able to survive the opposition even if it didn't provide about 40% of the energy and wheat the EU needs. That was just icing on the leverage cake. Whatever it lacks in real resources and abilities can be easily resourced from China. It developed a working relationship with the manufacturing giant while America was scapegoating it for domestic political advantage over the last four Presidential terms.
Trump's tariffs on his own nation's consumers were not ignored by policymakers in either China or Russia. Biden's sanctions and capturing of any dollar-denominated assets of Russia will not be ignored by anyone trading US dollars either. While the invasion of Ukraine seems without provocation to those in the west, most of the world understands that US fund managers have made a power play to separate Russia from its markets for energy and food in the EU by using Ukraine's resources.
Anyone who thinks Biden's son was named to office in a Ukrainian energy company without any prior experience was a fluke of coincidence is a fool of the highest order. A simple search for the investors who stand to gain from a shift in suppliers in the EU market will disclose those who provoked Putin's actions. He was simply blocking a corporate takeover of those markets, as he did by backing Assad in Syria's civil war.
That thirty trillion-dollar debt becomes as real as a heart attack. The joyful money printing to fuel the weapons contractors will drag the whole country into the abyss.
This is where your analysis goes astray. Despite a terrible distribution of monetary assets domestically, the US, like Russia and China, is not dependent upon selling debt or an exchange rate to "fund" its economy. Any detriment posed by that thirty trillion could easily be countered with simple tax legislation to recapture it, although that would be not worth the effort as it would serve no purpose beyond reducing a mostly meaningless accounting number.
Rather than building infrastructure and investing in the citizens or communities, America has been spending trillions dropping bombs. And soon it might not be able to spend those trillions with the same gleeful nepotistic nonchalance.
This has never been an "either/or" choice for our government at the federal level. It could have easily done both, but it chose not to support the working class out of political deference to the donor class, which just happens to include the massive defense industry and those expanding their influence to countries like Ukraine.
Every dollar created by Congress that isn't matched in taxation (deficit) becomes someone's fiscal asset in the private sector. This isn't even advanced econ, but just common dual-entry spreadsheet accounting. Where those fiscal assets end up is dependent upon where they are spent, meaning that "ALL" suffering in this economy is a political choice, not a matter of what we can "afford".
How strong can the nation be if sixty-four percent of citizens are living paycheck to paycheck, forty percent don’t have $400, and almost three-fourths say the country is going in the wrong direction?
How long can this level of anger be left to simmer, fester, and grow without having very real and catastrophic consequences?
The anger presently serves the oligarchy, so it will likely continue until the average voter understands the economic reality of a sovereign fiat currency. That anger and desperation is what got Trump elected and may even do so again, thanks to the "many" gold bugs, crypto pushers, and econ illiterate "experts" that actually want the national debt reduced because they can't get past their own relations with money as "users" to "grok" how the nation's finances as the monopoly "currency issuer" are different from their own.
If the current direction of America's anger remains constant against its government in general there is a very real possibility that a constitutional convention will pass a "balanced budget" amendment to our Constitution. This supreme ignorance will spell the demise of our domestic economy with no potential work around. It will instantly, and possibly irrevokably, make America a third-world economy.
