@maporsche,
maporsche wrote:But assuming what you say is true, people can choose to buy a home or buy a car. They can CHOOSE to take on that debt if they want.
Government printed debt is something that would be strapped around the future's ankles...not by THEIR choice, but by OURS. That's not moral.
It doesn't actually matter that much whether the debt is private or public, because repaying it causes investors to drive up prices to extract the money for the debt. I remember at one point during the last recession, some investor eventually popped up and started talking about how they decided to invest in a commodity that they were absolutely sure would be good for rendering returns, food.
When people overspend and then jack up the price of food to force consumers to pay their debts, it forces those consumers to shoulder a heavier burden, etc. What everyone should be doing is going without as much as they can to reduce their own debt burden and thus the burden on everyone else to cough up the money to repay all debt, public and private.
We have to live modest, even austere, frugal lives. When fiscal liberals mock fiscal discipline using words like, 'austerian economics,' it exudes such ignorance. By reducing expenditures, we reduce burden on others. There's no taxing the rich that doesn't get passed on as higher costs for the poor and middle class. It's all connected within the same big fiscal circulatory system. If you want to reduce the burden for the most vulnerable, you can't put more tax pressure on the rich. What goes around comes around.
