People perceive government bonds as wealth

Tuesday, March 15th, 2022

Arnold Kling thinks that people perceive government bonds as if they were wealth:

The government borrows $1 from me and spends it on you. You have a new dollar. And I think I still have a dollar, because the government owes me a dollar. Neither of us thinks that we will have our taxes raised next year, when the government has to pay me the dollar.

[…]

I assume that people are myopic and just look around and say “I got paid $x by the government” or “I lent $y to the government and got a $y bond in return” without thinking about what comes next.

Comments

  1. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Surely it depends on what the evil government does with the money it borrows in the form of bonds?

    If we had a wise honest set of politicians & bureaucrats, the money the government borrows would be invested in things which increase future economic activity in the US (infrastructure, etc) and thus generate future additional tax revenues in the US which would provide the government with increemntal income to repay the bond.

    However, we democratically “elect” scum as politicians, and they hire worse scum as bureaucrats. The money those idiots borrow in the form of government bonds is wasted — used to buy imported products which we can no longer make for ourselves, thus generating incremental economic activity in China, Japan, Germany … but not in the US.

    Not sustainable!

  2. VXXC says:

    Key phrase: “without thinking about what comes next.”

    They haven’t had to think about what comes next since 1945, and that was only 9% of the population in uniform, save the veterans and first responders.

    What comes next worst case is government check, in this case best case.

    Mr. G.L is wrong, it’s completely sustainable as long as you not only don’t intend to pay but intend to do your “creditor” serfs in…and they do.

    Doing us in for “sustainability” is what comes now over the horizon and next in our grills.

  3. Sam J. says:

    “And I think I still have a dollar, because the government owes me a dollar.”

    NO, it’s far worse than this picture. It’s far, far, far, far worse. It’s stupendously, fabulously, terribly worse.

    In fact ALL money is created by the FED. To create this money, the US government gives the FED a bond agreeing to pay the money the FED says that the Treasury can now print plus interest. The FED gives us…nothing. Nothing at all.

    So if all money is debt, and it is, then if we pay off all the debt then we will have…no money. It’s even worse than that because we owe them interest so to pay it back we need more money which we only get from them by going into debt…you can see how this debt spiral works.

    The main reason for the reset is that the compounding interest in this fake money system where we actually have NO positive money at all is collapsing, so they have to think up a new way to parasite off of us. They are angling to cause such a financial crisis that we will demand a new money system. This of course they already have mapped out. It will be run from Switzerland, and the value of all currencies will also be run from there.

    Every single bit of this has been talked about openly in the banking and business press. It’s not a secret. They’ve laid out the whole thing. When this comes to pass anyone not in line will have their money revalued from the oligarchical parasitical bankers nest in Switzerland to be worthless and destroy their economy.

    These guys have covered this extensively. No I’m not saying I believe everything or any of what they says, but their parsing of a huge amount of documents and insider publications clearly shows that they are telling exactly what they are doing.

    http://redefininggod.com/

    This guy too covered a lot of this too by reading the documents that they publically put out. He’s gone…somewhere, I don’t know. He posted most of his stuff paid towards the end I believe.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191214131328/https://philosophyofmetrics.com/

    “However, we democratically ‘elect’ scum as politicians, and they hire worse scum as bureaucrats.”

    It annoys me to no end when people say we are responsible for this mess. We are not. The large majority of people have no idea at all what is going on because of all the censorship and the vast, unbelievable sums of cash spent to keep them in the dark. When honest politicians are actually elected, they do all they can to get rid of them in primary elections or actually killing them. Many have been assassinated.

    So don’t lay the burden of honest government on those that are given no choice. This like China or the Soviet Union where you could vote for anyone you anted, as long as they were party members. It’s exactly the same.

    Saying we have choice is like going up to people and asking them whether they wish to die by gas or hanging. They don’t want either.

    Whose responsible. The people responsible for this mess are the people making the mess. It can not be more simple. It’s not difficult. It’s one big ass Jew gas-light trick to give people nothing but bad choices, blocking off all the good ones and then telling them, “well it’s your fault you chose bad things”. No, they didn’t choose bad, it was forced on them.

  4. Sam J. says:

    Oh and by the way we always hear how the government just printing money is such a bad thing. In actuality, if the government just printed money with no bonds, we would be better off. As it is, every single penny we borrow for money now puts us into a negative balance. If we just straight up printed the money, we would at least move towards the black in our balance sheets.

  5. Jim says:

    People love it because who doesn’t love free money? Everyone loves to get something for nothing, not only Jewish moneylenders. When everyday goyish Boomers buy government bonds or watch the value of their stock-market portfolio go up with a warm fuzzy glow in their stomach, it matters nothing to them that they’re living in a house from 1971 and their children are up to their eyeballs in debt and their grandchildren don’t have enough money to leave their childhood bedroom and now the hedge funds are buying up the houses for 2-3x the going rate before the ‘Rona because the only significant remaining opportunity for capitalists to generate money for retirement funds is to charge rent to tenants who not only don’t own title to land but also won’t have any equity interest in “their” property. Don’t hate the Boomers; it isn’t their fault that they need money from retirement funds because they didn’t save for retirement because the value of the dollar dwindled nine-tenths in their lifetime because they needed retirement funds to give them money so they could retire. People have to rent because otherwise they wouldn’t have any money. It’s just how it is, bro, things are how they are.

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