I would agree on your assessment of the US debt as meaningless . . ..
Or not, in the somewhat longer run.
We can keep keep bailing out financial firms, give favors to pharma firms, trash the environment, have a stupid war every ten years or so . . . until we can't. Sort of like a Ponzi scheme, the question is how long will people keep trusting our economy is working on their behalf? And, how far can we squeeze out those actually adding value and replace them with those extracting it? We wouldn't be the first "empire" to collapse. Personally, I'm pulling for us to truly renew ourselves.
So we can look at some of our biggest sectors and wonder - should we keep shoveling them free money, tax and regulatory preferences, and an allotment of bought and paid for politicians?
1) Let's start with financial firms. They're supposed to be seeing that loans end up going productive uses. How have Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc. done with making sure worthy businesses get affordable loans. Was it Goldman's aluminum warehouse or derivatives scams? Maybe JP Morgan foreclosing on people (taking their homes) who werent' even its customers? How about assuring the old steady 7% a year growth in savings and retirement plans we used to count on? Anyone think we've been getting a great deal for our trillions of bailouts - and more to come?
2) How about pharma, medical conglomerates, and medical insurance? Anyone delighted about how most of the low cost drugs (and an increasing percent of real innovation) now come from overseas firms? How our own industry has US citizens spending around 2x on drugs, with a special law that keeps us as cash cows? What are we getting for giving them more of our GDP than any other country?
One can add health insurance denying coverage until patients die (yea, profits!). Hospital conglomerates charging $100 for an aspirin? We really want to double down on that?
3) How about oil, coal, and refining and shipping interests? The former costing us trillions for repeated wars in the Middle East and a subsidy near the cost of each barrel of oil for a fleet to assure safe passage? Plus a bit of acid rain, rising respiratory disease, periodic too-cheap-to-take-precautions spills (Exxon, BP, hundreds of pipeline and rail incidents). The tax and regulatory breaks to build pipelines and facilities to move our own oil and gas to the highest bidders overseas? The surge in hidden PAC money to make sure we deny the current and future costs of climate change. What are we getting for slowing the pace of developing alternatives, in order to further enrich the incumbents?
4) Maybe large scale real estate? Apparently if you're a Trump or a Kushner you don't have to pay taxes. Latest forecast is that many small property owners will go bankrupt in the current pandemic / recession and their buildings bought up by large real estate groups using taxpayer-backed "free" money to make those purchases. Resulting in higher prices a year or two down the road. Reminiscent of how people lost homes in 2008 and guys like Mnuchin (our current Treasury Secretary) bought them to turn a huge profit. He was actually supposed to help people keep their homes - but figured he could make some money buy using that taxpayer money to kick them out and buy them himself. What are we getting (besides rising costs) for subsidizing large scale real estate with tax and zoning breaks, eminent domain, and now free money to buy up even more of the nation?
5) Then there's education. Lots of schools already at risk, including private universities all the way up to a Harvard or an MIT. Trump now putting those behind the 8 ball by demanding they either lose the income from foreign students or drop plans for distance learning. We know he has students' best interests in mind from the stellar job Trump University did defrauding students and the work of private school and "young earth" advocate Betsy DeVos is now doing as Secretary of Education.
What are we getting for the combined attack on education -- and turning what's left into for-profit businesses? And, yes, some of the teachers' unions are self-interested as well.
6) Then the military. "Cost-effective" never seems to be part of the equation. We're spending zillions more than the next big spender, often on obsolete but profitable (for the makers) technology, and are arguably less safe than ever from biological weapons, cyber warfare (not even a thing if Putin says so), nuclear proliferation (Pakistan, Iran, S. Korea), loss of alliances, or just the millions more who hate us or merely think we're led by a clown. Meanwhile, at a fraction of our spend, Russia has us on our heels and China is speeding its way toward its vision of dominating world's resources, international transport, industries, and commerce.
7) Even some old line manufacturing companies seem to want to get in the making money on money act (rather than making decent products). We have GM ignition switches. . Boeing killing 737 Max passengers to meet quarterly profit projections. General Electric struggling after thinking it was a Credit company that deserved a high tech software company valuation. And so on. I'll give GM some credit for recent improvement, but neither the world nor I consider them the #1 choice in autos these days. Only Otrit likely had seats booked on the next 737 Max fight out. And a guess is that of the last hundred appliances bought by PM members, there were a lot more Bosch, Miele, Samsung, LG, maybe Mitsubishi and Haier than GE in the mix. Plus the long lines of other products with unintended consequences, kept profitable by their makers by lies, misdirection, and now hidden political influence long after we learned of the hazards (asbestos, tobacco, opioids, maybe marijuana or methane and other greenhouse gas releases today). The point being that short-term management decisions at our own companies have been hollowing out our industry.
We live on a planet with finite resources. I'm not a gold bug. But there is some sense to understanding that there are limits to both population and physical resource-intensive growth. We either recognize them or end up booming and busting -- with increasing risks the bigger the busts. Pegging the total amount of currency and thus investment to a finite source such as gold is a pretty arbitrary constraint to growth. But pretending we can have infinite debt to fund infinite growth is just plain nuts. Inflation (too many freshly printed dollars chasing too little real world products and services) isn't the only limit to try growing the economy with debt.
It's not just our industrial capacity (and less of that given lack of investment) but shortages of incoming supplies that can be limits. Maybe not enough well trained people. Too battered a supporting infrastructure. Some key natural resource in short supply.
We're more frequently finding ourselves with cheap, clean and abundant water in short supply; or maybe rare earth materials in unfriendly hands. We start being unable to afford the annual costs of storms and smashed coastal infrastructure. Storms and drought and soil loss decimating agriculture. Wildfires raging each year. Maybe just more killer hornets, fewer pollinating bees affecting agriculture (along with soil loss, storms, drought). We find more people displaced, more starving, more on the dole, and a less secure and productive world. Or just more pandemics and a government and healthcare system unprepared to respond. Sad how a tiny strand of viral RNA has tanked our economy.
I'd agree we can do a bit of "printing" our own money. But unless we start investing it in ways that have a real return for customers, citizens, patients, maybe true national and environmental security -- seems to me we're not going to get away with it for all that much longer.
