What Is Debt

What does raising the debt ceiling mean? Can I call my credit card company and raise my debt ceiling?

By raisilng the “debt ceiling” is that the same as saying “we’re not in debt’ until we reach X amount of debt? What does China and the other countries think of America raising the “debt ceiling”? Is raising the “debt ceiling” a way of putting off the American debt until the next Presidential election? Bush raised the “debt ceiling 7-8 times” and we still inherited a huge debt.

The debt ceiling is self-imposed. It’s more like telling yourself that you won’t accumulate more than $500 on your credit card than it is like your actual credit limit.

Our actual credit is limited by our ability to pay our creditors’ interest back (our creditors, incidentally, aren’t some kind of world bank, but instead are millions of individual investors who buy bonds). Countries have credit ratings, as do currencies – if we started defaulting on our debt, investors worldwide would no longer consider it wise to buy bonds and currency from the United States, and we would no longer be able to spend into the deficit, since we would have nowhere to get credible money. (Deficit spending, contrary to what some incredibly idiotic pundits would have you believe, has nothing to do with ‘printing money’ in the United States.)

There’s no set numerical limit at which point the United States’ credit rating suddenly collapses – it’s a matter of whether we can make good on our interest, not a matter of whether we have $10 trillion in our pockets (just like your mortgage – not having your house’s value in cash on hand doesn’t hurt your credit rating; falling behind on your payments would). The only concrete and immediate drawback is that the more we borrow, the more we have to pay in interest. Currently interest consumes about 7% of the federal budget.

Money As Debt 1: what money is & why we are bankers’ slaves

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