Well, 12 times a year.

To the people that buy that debt in the form of US treasury bills, bonds and notes.

The United States government raises money by issuing bonds. It’s a “bond” as in “a promise.” It is literally a promise that if you buy one for a dollar, they will buy it back from you for a dollar and five cents next year. Not the highest interest you can get, but it’s always been rock solid reliable, unlike the stock market which earns more over time but also crashes periodically.

These bonds are just one more investment type that you can buy on the market, like stocks or mutual funds. So anyone can own them. Your grandma can own some. Jeff Bezos can own some. The government of China can own a lottttt of them.

The national debt is the five cents we have to pay every year on top of the dollar we borrowed last year. If we didn’t use that dollar to earn more than 5 cents of economic growth during that time, it was a losing bet for the US to make. We’ve made a lot of those losing bets. And now we have so many 5 cents coming due, and not enough new incoming tax revenue from our general economy to easily pay them.

Borrowing money makes sense if you can use it to grow. We are still paying off the massive borrowing we did for World War 2, but the thing is our economy has also grown massively since then so that debt is like nothing to us. WW2 put the US into a position of world dominance that has been hugely beneficial for us monetarily. So that debt was a good bet.

But we’ve been borrowing more and more and growing less and less. Now we’re borrowing to pay off the borrowing we did before, and that’s a rapid spiral down the drain.

So in the end, the national debt isn’t scary if you think America can keep growing rapidly. It’s built in that growth mentality that we’ll just keep getting bigger and bigger and have more and more to work with. That’s held true for 75 years, but it really can’t hold true forever. It’s the same dumbass growth mentality that fuels the rest of capitalism.

The reason grandparents always think the debt is scary is that they are past their own growth phase of life and spend their time trying to figure out how to live long term on what they’ve got now and nothing more. This is old people’s daily reality. And then they look at the government behaving like a teenager saying no no I can borrow like crazy to go to college because when I get out of college I’m going to earn so much money I won’t even feel it when I pay it back.

You get that college —> big earnings leap once in a lifetime (if you’re lucky) and we’ve been trying to live that leap continuously as if it’s going to just go on and on for centuries.

The people who hold the bonds.

The oligarchy

So subsidising retirees.

They do pay these debts. That's exactly what this article is pointing out. We are spending this money on debt rather than something beneficial to citizens. Yes, we print our own money but we still have to pay our debts.

I feel like your explanation is missing some details. Because if you owe $1010 in 2027, what good does the comparison to 2026 do you? You can't pay with last years currency...?

I'm not disagreeing, mind you. Economics is rather arbitrary, after all. Just confused (which does not surprise me).

Zimbabwe was ahead of the game!

I got got this way with some bonds that my grandmother bought me when I was born. They were some kind of long term bonds that took a very long time to mature. I had no idea that I even had them, they were in my parents closet or something, and my parents completely forgot about them as well. I was like 35 when they gave them to me. At that point they had been fully matured for a very long time, but because of inflation, the buying power of the money earned actually made them worth less. I forget the exact numbers, but it was like:

$100 matured to $200

But a quick lookup with an inflation calculator, $100 from the year I was born showed that it had the same buying power as $280 now. So the $100, while going up in number, actually went down in value. Certainly better than keeping the $100 under the mattress, but that sucked.

Oh and it was significantly more than $100. Nothing near life changing amounts of money, but probably money that I could have used earlier in my life - to help with student loans or something. When there was less inflation.

You're describing this like it's a life-hack, and not the entire reasons major economies moved away from the gold standard. To be able to take on debt "for free"

Aaand that's not how youmake money, no.

But, what about the petroshaholders??