- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
Your point about public finance being a game of trying to be closest to the firehose of new money, while those further out only see diluted spending power, is correct. But the above part is not. Every borrowed dollar has a lender on the other side. So while there are numerically more debtors than lenders, it's incorrect to say that everyone is in debt.if there is a fixed amount of money in circulation, and every participant in the pyramid has taken out some form of loan (which is a reasonable approximation of the current economic situation, most people are in debt, if not directly, then the state takes out loans in order to pay their salaries or social transfers)
There's exactly as much debt as there is credit, and the people extending that credit (whether they're shylock moneychangers taking advantage of the financially illiterate, or retirees buying bonds for the guaranteed income) do so because they're willing to delay spending and risk their savings for some return.
If you have a savings accounts (or checking account, money market account, etc), you're on the credit side of the equation. The "extra money" for your interest payments (your reward for giving up current spending for future spending) comes from someone else's future spending (which they traded for current spending).