In Defense of Defaulting on the National Debt
With the acknowledged national debt now a politically and economically unpayable $30 trillion (in reality, its unfunded liabilities are far greater), Americans should start to become acclimated to the realities of the United States’ eventual, inevitable default. While it may seem unfathomable, and the results too catastrophic to imagine, in fact the likely damage to everyday Americans would be minimal in the short term and unquestionably a net plus in the long term.
This is far from surprising and not a new problem. As Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff detail in their comprehensive review of the subject, history shows that great powers defaulting on their debts was long the rule, not the exception, and that the long-term implications of various regimes’ repudiations of their external debts in particular were minimal or a net plus, depending on the circumstances.
As a way of starting, it is helpful to contextualize the current numbers we’re talking about, because, frankly, they would have been unfathomable previously. As the old math joke “What is the difference between a million and a billion? Basically, a billion” illustrates, the orders of magnitude under discussion are scarcely comprehensible. But the reality is that trillion dollars is $999 billion plus another billion.
The present debt level has only been manageable because of the artificially low interest rates provided by successively accommodating Federal Reserve chairs dating back to Alan Greenspan. With both fiscal and monetary policy having been run heedlessly off the rails for
Article from Mises Wire
