> Many of these issues he addresses - healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and education, are enabled by federally assumed debt.
> The core problem, I believe, is that federal debt is like a blank check that nobody is personally accountable to repay.
This statement is more about ideology than facts: « free money, inflation, federal government doing shit» is like the constant refrain of conservatives for everything …
It's not even relevant in the context of this article :
- housing debts are individual debts, and they are indeed being repaid. Same goes for college tuition debts.
- this attempt to mimic a monetary economist reasoning is wobbly since those figures are expressed in constant dollar: those are cost increase in addition to inflation.
Who is personally accountable to repay government debt? Taxpayers. The politicians that assume debt are not accountable to repay it. that is all I meant by that comment.
The federal government has a hand in underwriting mortgage financing (they own Fannie and Freddie, and they keep the profits from those entities).
The Student Loans are personal loans, underwritten by the federal government.
I am not saying the federal government should never do these things, or that these programs are the root of all evil. However, the federal government has been generous with these programs. I think the incentives of providing easy money through debt to the economy are easy in the short term, and that this cost-disease is one of the long-term results.
If debt is akin to borrowing from the future, then maybe we borrow from the future at the future's level of inflation.
> federal debt is like a blank check that nobody is personally accountable to repay.
that statement is applicable to rising costs in, e.g. federally (or state or municipality) funded infrastructure programs such as the subway construction project that was one of the examples in the article.
the individually assumed debts (student loans, home mortgages) are being paid back and there is accountability there. however, the individual accountability of those debts is not a way out of the cost disease. the fact that individuals are now willing and able to take on larger and larger debts to pay for these perceived essentials is exactly the reason why those things keep going up in price: the buyer's have more money to pay for them (even if it debt and not really wealth).
> Many of these issues he addresses - healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and education, are enabled by federally assumed debt. > The core problem, I believe, is that federal debt is like a blank check that nobody is personally accountable to repay.
This statement is more about ideology than facts: « free money, inflation, federal government doing shit» is like the constant refrain of conservatives for everything …
It's not even relevant in the context of this article :
- housing debts are individual debts, and they are indeed being repaid. Same goes for college tuition debts.
- this attempt to mimic a monetary economist reasoning is wobbly since those figures are expressed in constant dollar: those are cost increase in addition to inflation.