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Im asking for some kind of real economic cost; "Its annoying when the prices are different than I remember" doesnt count, no.
If you dont pay enough interest, people will stop lending you money.
Well, you said that the difference between me and the state is that the state can tax. If it doesnt actually need to do that, then whats the difference? Why cant I have ever-increasing amounts of debt that I service by taking on new debt?
What youre proposing here is "The Ponzi scheme that actually works". Because Ponzi schemes do work so long as the investors dont take out their money, ie stop letting you roll over your debt.
You could look it up, it's not my argument. It's good enough for me that most people hate it, so let's avoid it. It's fun when nickels are worth picking up off the ground and can get you a coke.
When you have your own currency and central bank, people don't 'lend' you your own money at all. You can print up IOUs and tell people they pay 0% or 150%, up to you if you want to subsidize savings.
I said the government levies 'some' taxes every year, reoccurring indefinitely, broadly on everyone. That provides a perpetual anchor value for the government's debt, understood universally, even though the amount outstanding can continue to rise (if people want to keep accumulating it for the future, for a rainy day, to pass down to their kids, whatever).
That doesn't imply anything about somehow taxing it all back and paying it all off or whatever, at some unspecified jubilee judgement day where we have to unwind everything.
I mean, thats some reasons, but when weighed against "prosperity beyond what anyone can imagine" they dont weigh especially strongly. Could you at least link it? MMT has lots of cranks that will be dismissed as not representative.
I also have 'some' income outside taking on debt. I can commit to spending part of it on buying back my own IOUs/debt service in the future. Indeed, my nominal income increases with inflation and economic growth, so this is in many ways like a relative tax. Also assume I live forever. Now can I blow up my debt to infinity? Propably not; propably there is some mechanism tieing the debt amount to the size of the tax base/income, but what?
So, I actually agree that, with fixed expenditures and relative taxes, you can just print money to make up the deficit and it will stabilise eventually. Youll have inflated down the expenditures so that they are covered by the taxes. But this will have reduced the real amount of the expenditures. What is the benefit of doing this over just cutting the expenditures to meet the income?
Indeed, you never have to actually go down to zero debt. But the debt is nonetheless tied to the ability to do that. It can not grow without limits in real terms. Consider: in your view printed cash and government debt are interchangable. So lets say we only print money. Then unlimited real growth of debt would mean unlimited real growth of GDP, or an unlimited willingness of people to sit on cash and never spend it. Neither is realistic.
This question of an "end date" where you unwind everything or absence thereof is in fact very interesting and fruitful to think about more broadly, because it leads to a lot of changes in economics, and Im not sure you understand this in a "settled science" way (else you would have likely lead with that, because thats the only point where your assumptions may differ from classical). For example, imagine you have no time prefencence and an investment that will keep yielding 10%/year indefinitely. What is the optimal amount to withdraw each year? For any given percentage, half of that is better in the long term... but 0 provides no utility at all.
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