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Really? Please explain why. I agree dividing per person is not enlightening, but per household seems to have some value. Don't say something about corporate taxes. Corporations don't pay any tax, they just collect tax from their shareholders
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It's not like the government is borrowing money on behalf of the citizens, with citizens gaining a pseudo-liability in proportion to the amount of taxes they pay. Most of that debt will never be paid back, and the system depends on it not being paid back.
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But that’s the point: you don’t “pay it back” in dollars, you pay it back in terms of constraints on future freedom. For eg: uneven inflation means you might have to work harder to maintain lifestyle, or accept a downgrade because the debt is paying to fix/heal stuff elsewhere
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Replying to @vgr @rob_knight and
Thought experiment: in a village of 100 farmers, 50 come down with an illness. To maintain their farms in productive condition while feeding them, the other 50 work 2x as hard. It’s that or lose half the humans and their sunk costs.
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Replying to @vgr @rob_knight and
Collectivized societal debt merely imposes a structure in such calculations. Tech predictably alters leverage (ratio of retirees to workers has increased 4x but total factor productivity has kept pace), But sudden increase in load means tech productivity falls behind for a while.
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Replying to @vgr @rob_knight and
In fact debt is best understood as checks written against future tech productivity increases — ie innovation returns on economic activity. Which may not happen, or happen much more slowly, in proportion to the burdens.
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The reason everyone hates macroeconomics and fiat money in particular is because it doesn't work anything like thought experiments about a hundred farmers!
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Replying to @rob_knight @vgr and
The thing that's real here is a massive loss in productive capacity over the last month, and reasonable projections that this will continue for some time, and that the economy will be less efficient once the disruption is over. The deficit is just accounting.
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Ie 50 farmers sidelined for a while. You’re just making the same argument with more steps
Also I specifically flagged uneven inflation for a reason. Inflation without an unevenness qualification is a meaningless scenario. All the information encoded is in the unevenness
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I'm trying to eliminate the step of talking about missing GDP in terms of government deficits! If we care about how much money-time was lost, we can just look at the GDP figures when they come out.
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why throw away the crystal ball though? the deficit accountung is the crystal ball that gives us an answer now
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