I like when folks talk about the glittery high speed trains in China, that run on a massive deficit and are losing money, not to mention have shoddy safety records.

china's investment in their deep water southern ports was massive part of that spending, which is why hong kong has slipped so far down on shipping numbers

the deficits aren't anything, china is capturing capex due to the capital controls and they are a communsit country so they dont really care about losing money + that video clip

look at where hong was and where it is now in terms of global shipping, that was a big part of that spending

China has just so many inefficiencies in their economy that are state driven, that the US could take advantage of...it it finally cut out it's own govt spending issues and ran a surplus one day.

nah my dude, it doesnt work that way

we can't run gov surplus

Lol. Not for many decades at this point...the debt is too high.

gov surplus would cause massive depression unless private debt exploded by tens of trillions per year

absolutely not

national debt is a non issue, there is nothing to it, it's just a bookkeeping device

You couldn't run a surplus for ages away....but then the China-US competition is going to run deep into the future.

your heart is in the right place but you really don't know what you are talking about

gov surplus isn't like a household surplus we can always pay usd denominated debt

macro isn't just micro scaled up

I know that it is a long-term thing, you have to pay off over a long period of time as to not cause issues. 😛

the us even pretending to run surpluses is what causes most of our problem, it lead directly to offshoring everything to china

no, you dont have to pay it off at all, that's not the purpose of the national debt

I used to live in New Zealand, which purposely doesn't pay off the debt, as to not mess up the economy, even though it could probably pay it off outright.

no country using a modern fiat currency can pay off their national debt, it's literally impossible

Well yep.

that's not a bad thing, that's just a feature of monetary economy as opposed to commodity based barter economy

Though you can still keep it to a low level.

What is low as a percentage varies by country.

no real need to do that either

it's a non issue, really depends on unspent national income and how much employment you want

The US would really have to mess up to end up like Greece of course.

completely different situation, greece is part of a monetary union with other states, they cant devalue or use monetary policy at all

if you owe debt in a 'foreign' currency, all bets are off

EU is a monetary union but not a fiscal union, ulike the US where california taxes are spent in alabam, as well

Well of course, though my point is that what you can do varies by country.

there is no point there, the us can't 'end up like greece' same way denmark cant either. they stayed out of the euro for exactly that reason

Greece had widespread government inefficiencies and corruption that led to that mess.

nah, greece situatin is directly related to the Euro and the monetary union

germany and some others run a surplus, so the other euro countries are stuck because they dont have a fiscal union and they are limited by rules as to what they can do via debt

greek situation was 100% predicted in 90s

Euro zone is a vendor financing scheme for germany, there is nothing the greeks and similar countries could do

Think we are talking about different things. I am talking about a government budget surplus, and the debt directly related only to that.

gov budget surplus is terrible goal under fiat monetary system. the greeks were done no matter what they did as long euro zone has no fiscal union