For as long as I can remember there has been expanding global debt. Intuitively this is quite unsettling, but its difficult to articulate why.
This is only unsettling if viewed from the wrong frame of reference. If one applies their personal experience with money and the perpetual need to “find” it, usually through providing some useful utility for those who have it which enables them to “find” more of it, you will be stymied if someone asks where the first unit of measure we call money came from.
Those who attempt to answer that question while remaining comfortably in their frame of reference will find themselves delving into the history of barter and metal coinage from our roots in feudalism when the preference of kings for precious metals transferred to local economies to provide a store of value that expanded the barter system. They would ultimately fail to reach any connection between such a system and the modern use of money because there is none logically possible. I don’t know what the potential quantity of precious metal left in the world is, but it hardly as any relevance to the global debt or setting price for the many commodities exchanged daily with money as the intermediary, regardless of what Ron Paul or Glenn Beck says.
Money is not a “thing”, it is how we measure the value of things that we exchange for other things, much as we keep score in sporting events. The governments that command monopoly authority to create money within their jurisdictions impose taxes on their populations and specify their currency as the only acceptable method of paying to avoid penalties serious enough to cause resources they need to be made available in exchange for the currency.
However, the taxes cannot be collected until the government spends enough of its currency into the economy to satisfy the obligation plus enough to drive the currency to become a standard medium of trade that allows a store of value for the commerce created by the tax levy. Should it only spend enough to enable payment of the taxes the people would soon figure out that it is stealing whatever resources it demands and would revolt.
At no point does the currency-issuing government ever “need” its own currency back to enable it to spend. It can always “afford” anything that is for sale priced in the currency it creates at will regardless of revenue. It only needs the people to “need” its currency. Once that need is universally established taxation then becomes merely a way to control inflation and accomplish social goals, such as avoiding extreme wealth inequality.
The only thing that can trip up such a system is accepting debt obligations in a foreign currency it cannot create at will or politicians that don’t understand the way their own monetary system functions and imposes rules on it that only apply to their personal budget process or any entity which “isn’t” the issuer of the currency. The “debt” of any sovereign currency-issuing government isn’t a mortgage on future productivity, but past productivity that wasn’t spent in the economy or captured by taxation. It is our national “savings”.
