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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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You can’t borrow real things from the future, and when people are discussing the economy being good they are talking about real consumption, investment, etc.

If you have a bunch of physical resources you could use to build infrastructure which will provide a moderate amount of value per year over the coming decades, or in goods which will provide a large amount of value now but no further value in the future, that gives you the options of "invest in the future" vs "consume now". If the default action is "invest in the future", and you make the decision to consume now instead, I think that reasonably counts as "borrowing against the future".

On the object level of this thread, it's debatable whether allowing more immigration is borrowing against the future or investing in the future, and it probably depends to some extent on how generous you expect future entitlements to be, but "is our current policy borrowing against the future" is a real and meaningful question.

You absolutely can. This is easy to see in a world where other countries exist: any policy which in effect borrows from them, and pays for imports with the borrowed money, will do so. There's reason to think this is happening: the US government takes out debt to raise money, spends it on things, some of which spending will ultimately be used to buy imported things. The main question is to what extent is that happening.

At some later point in the future, we'll need to have the money to pay things back.

Of course, the question is how large this effect is. Per this website, it looks like our recent trade deficits is about a trillion dollars worth, give or take. It looks like US GDP is about 25 trillion, so that would look like about 4% of our economy from the last year was borrowed?

(I'm not an economist; someone who knows better, please help. I don't know how bad that is.)

I'll note that that's not just government debt or something. The US dollar being used as the world reserve currency would have a similar effect: people want dollars, leading to a net import of goods.

I'm not sure whether there's a way to do so if an economy were isolated; I think you'd be right in that case.

You could let in a bunch of immigrants who produce marginal value now working as fry cooks and uber drivers and later collect retirement benefits far in excess of their contributions in the form of social security and Medicaid. Or you could borrow money from abroad and use it to buy imported goods.

Oh, that's another good example of a way that could happen.

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