Sunday, April 29, 2012

9 - Deficits & Debts

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Deficits & Debts - CrCo > .

Debt ..

1) Budget deficit - the amount by which a government's spending exceeds it's income over a particular period of time.
a. Debt - the accumulation of budget deficits.
b. In the same way our GDP grows every year, due to population growth and productivity increases. And our ability to sustain debt grows along with our income.
2) "Default"- the investors who loaned the government money lose billions and the government loses all credibility, and it causes massive recession.
3) Debt ceiling - limit on the amount of national debt that can be issued by US Treasury.

The bulk of the Can't Go Broke video uses the United States as an example, but generally you can apply these ideas to any country that issues its own sovereign currency, like the UK, Japan, etc.

Another thing to note is that Japan has an even bigger national debt than the U.S. when you compare their debt-to-GDP ratios. The debt number used at the beginning of the video ($28 trillion) is the gross national debt of the United States. Some economists prefer to focus on a different, slightly smaller number, called the “public debt.” That number takes the overall debt and subtracts from it any intergovernmental debt — in other words, debt owned by different parts of the U.S. government.

With the deadline to file tax returns coming up in the U.S., one of the things we found most interesting is that taxes don’t need to be collected first before a government spends; it flips our whole understanding of why we are taxed and what the limitations to government investment could be.

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