Well, since the billionaire class doesn’t pay it’s fair share of the tax burden, that money has to come from somewhere.
This is a popular thought, but even if we take 100% from the billionaires it pays for almost one year for the US.
While I understand what assumption you’re running under no one said for only billionaires to pay. The idea is progressive tax brackets the less you make the less you pay percentage wise. We also need less loopholes for the people that can buy lawyers and manipulate their funds to get out of paying what they should. There is no reason companies and the extremely wealthy should be paying an effectively less tax percentage than the diminishing lower middle class.
It’s not about only billionaires paying, it’s about them not being a magical money source. A higher rate might feel better, but it’s not solving government revenue problems.
Now imagine if we had taken 30-40% from billionaires every single year… hmm…
We could have a couple year of almost not having a deficit.
I wonder how many debt collector calls the Whitehouse gets a day
If you had 34 trillion in debt and a centuries-long history of making on-time payments, you’d have a perfect credit score.
Yeah, this is just people not understanding how credit scores work, part #57294, lol
“Bankers hate him! Get an 850 credit score and dictate the terms and interest rate of your own debt using this one simple trick.”
Hey remember that one time where the country’s credit rating got downgraded due to political idiocy?
Pepperidge Farm remember.
The US govt basically has a perfect credit score. They have almost infinite payment history and almost infinite available credit.
Don’t forget being the only issuer of the currency you get indebted in. If I could get indebted in a currency I create myself, believe me I would
Articles and posts like this really just exist for conservatives to shout that we need to stop federal spending and cut out “unimportant” things like Dept of Education, as described in Project 2025.
The problem is that debt is good. It enables us to pay for infrastructure projects and services. It doesn’t work like a household budget…not on the scale of international economies…because money “in the bank” is money that’s not in circulation.
When money is not in circulation, it’s not being used to pay for goods and services…it’s just…sitting there being hoarded.
You all complain about Musk hoarding a few hundred billions. Imagine if the debt were in the opposite direction and the government had $34T sitting in the bank doing nothing.
And anyone can buy Treasury debt. In fact, last year it was an AMAZING return on investment for anyone that bought into it and holds into the debt for a few years. One of the safest places anybody could put money to earn a return (behind a HYSA at FDIC insured banks).
Fully agreed, the whole “Debt bad! Deficit evil!” trope is just neoliberal propaganda against public expenditure, which translates into a weakening of the welfare state
When money is not in circulation, it’s not being used to pay for goods and services…it’s just…sitting there being hoarded.
This is why I think the velocity of money should be a key economic indicator. Money moving around and doing work is what makes an economy better for everyone. When it starts to pool in the economy it slows down and benefits only a few.
This is another thing I learned from “Making Money”
What about staying at 0? Why is debt better than no debt AND no surplus?
Credit rating also depends on credit to debt ratio. You want to keep it below 35%, so the US wouldn’t need a credit line of $100T or more to have great credit.
I think sovereign debt would work like an AmEx Platimum with “no fixed limit”, which makes makes the algorithm ignore utilization.
International associations managing countries credit scores are all located in the usa. Therefore the incentive to valorize debt.
Credit scores are just some fake shit that boomers made up. It’s so dumb.
Only people who are bad credit risks ever come up with this take, lmao.
The sole function of credit scores is to benefit people who are reliably ‘good for it’ when they borrow money. Without them, everyone is treated as just as high a risk as the worst borrowers who are least likely to pay back their debts, and you gain no benefit from reliably paying back your debts. But with them, your good borrowing is kept track of, and good reputation means lenders trust you more to pay your debts back, so they’re willing to lend more, and they are willing to charge less interest.
Removing credit scores changes nothing for bad borrowers, and hurts good borrowers.
You’re discounting the people who have always lived within their means and so never took on debt. They also don’t have good credit. They’ve never missed a payment. They’re good for the money. But they don’t have a history showing that because they’ve never needed that.
You’re discounting the people who have always lived within their means and so never took on debt.
No I’m not. Those people are unknown quantities, and so also suffer if credit scores go away, because bad borrowers are worse than first-time borrowers, so without credit scores, first-timers will be treated worse.
I’m saying people who don’t play this credit game but otherwise are good financially also think it’s dumb. Not just bad risks.
The thing is you’re forgetting who are good borrowers and who are bad borrowers. A person with a low income with a precarious job will be a very bad borrower, and imposing a higher interest rate on them on top of that is just the final nail in the coffin. We generally believe universal healthcare is good, and we don’t want to discriminate “good health” and “bad health” people and make unhealthy people pay more, do we?
imposing a higher interest rate on them on top of that is just the final nail in the coffin.
That’s the only way to justify loaning to people like that at all, given how much more often they default (and the lender never gets repaid at all). If lenders were forced to give the same interest rate to everyone, that would cause them not to lend to “A person with a low income with a precarious job” at all.
…except that it used to be that your ability to secure a loan was based on where you went to school, how firm your handshake was, and if you happened to have the right skin color and sex organs.
The current system certainly isn’t perfect; and if you’re denied a loan you have a legal right (in the US) to know the reason.
There are systemic issues, to be sure. But the nominal goal is absolutely better than what we used to have.
We can’t ignore that there are other ways of doing it besides credit scores or overt racism. Some countries have no credit scores at all and just base loan eligibility on your salary and employment history.
And how exactly is guessing your credit worthiness based on those factors a better system than literally keeping track of what happened each previous time money was lent to you, when it comes to making a decision on lending money to you?
This is like arguing it’s a better idea to select NBA players by their height, than by their performance in high school and college basketball games.
Sorry, I’m not sure how to answer “how is measuring your credit worthiness based on your income a good way to determine how much to lend you.” I would think it’s pretty obvious that your capacity to repay a loan is dependent on your current income, not how many loans and credit cards you’ve had active in the past.
1 in 4 households earning over $100,000 a year live paycheck to paycheck–not because they can’t make ends meet, but because their money management sucks. A high income has very little relationship with responsible borrowing, despite what many would assume.
If you stop paying your car or home loan it gets repossessed, people with bad money management still have incentives to pay those on time.
My mom should have amazing credit, but she doesn’t. She does literally everything right.
Meanwhile I have really good credit and have no idea why.
It’s just made up shit and we should find a better system.
and have no idea why
Just because you refuse to learn doesn’t mean it’s magic. It is very simple to understand why exactly you have the credit score you do. Maybe mommy isn’t being entirely truthful with you.
I’d definitely recommend getting a credit report (not from the websites that advertise with an insane jingle, but from the actual credit bureaus — you’re entitled to a free report). Mine had debt from a relative with a similar name; I was able to get that removed. They will also tell you in more detail what goes in to calculating it.
I agree that it’s not perfect, and often very opaque, but you should be able to get some understanding of why she doesn’t have good credit.
Does your mom have debt that she pays on time? Is her “doing everything right” visible to credit scoring agencies and aligned what statistic says about good borrowing customers?
Credit score doesn’t mean “runs a good personal economy” it means “likely to pay their loans on time, consistently, based on statistics that are observable”.
Most people who think they understand how credit scores work…don’t understand how credit scores work.
The biggest things are loan-to-limit, payment history, and average age of accounts.
Loan-to-limit is easily achieved by keeping balances below 50%, and ideally below 30%. It’s also helped tremendously by not carrying a revolving balance (paying the statement balance in full each month) and not closing idle cards.
Payment history is of course helped by making payments on time.
And AAoA is probably the easiest. Just don’t close cards. Call and “downgrade” a card if it isn’t worth the annual fee. If there’s no annual fee, there’s no reason to close a card.
Just make sure you use it every now and then and pay it off. I sock-drawered one of my oldest cards a long time ago and it just closed last month from being idle, and that took a hit to my score (high limit gone and it’s no longer incrementing time in my AAoA).
It’s also worth mentioning that credit scores don’t matter until you are looking for credit. Credit cards are probably the easiest way to build credit, as long as they are used properly. But they’ll give a basic card to any schmuck. Where it really matters is getting mortgages and larger loans like cars. That’s where having a good score matters. And also better cards that earn more points/miles/cashback and have other fringe benefits.
putting people in debt is how people with already too much money make even more money from people who never had enough
if it makes you feel any better you’d go to prison if you decided to run a ponzi scheme… unless you’re a bank, that is
Wait a bank is a Ponzi scheme
Not literally. I bet the poster notices the overlap between ponzi and fractional reserve lending and doesn’t care about the differences
Which is?
Bank is legal because… reasons…
Lota of differences but the key is: A ponzi scheme pays returns out of future investment. Fractional reserve lending pays returns from interest collected on investments.
-1000 social credit for questioning government
Ugh… Here we go again with the social credit… It’s been debunked so many times that it’s not even funny anymore. You can ask any Chinese person about it and they don’t even know what it is because it’s really not a thing. Financial credit scores on the other hand…
Hey, buddy
Ever heard of a joke?
Yeah, it might have been funny the first time 10 years ago, but repeating the same joke over and over again, often makes it annoying and unfunny, as is the case with your comment, especially when it’s not even accurate.
Well, 39 people disagreed
Try a buttplug. May help you stop being such a tightass
Plenty of idiots around to upvote your shit, no doubt.
Yawn
We ain’t China…. Yet
Aww hell nahh if they ever do that I’m out of here going to another universe see ya
A social credit score would only harm the bad people
Who decides what’s bad and what’s ok?
The same system which makes laws
You mean the system that makes it illegal to have an abortion or to marry the person you love if they happen to be the same sex as you? Sign me up then cause, yeah, only bad people suffer in that system
Sounds like you don’t like laws and rules in general
Credit scores require you to get some kind of debt. This is because it’s not a score of your financial health. It’s a score of how reliably you repay your debt.
Micro-economics vs. macro-economics
I strongly encourage people who still think like OP to look up what happened the last time we paid off the national debt.
…link?
Andrew Jackson sold off enough Native American land to cause a real estate bubble, and between that and other things started a bank run, and the kind of people that think they’ll win the shell game pretend it’s because non-productive debt is good, and the problem was elimination of debt, not how it was done and other circumstances (among them being on a gold standard so you can actually do a bank run)
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/andrew-jackson-national-debt-reaches-zero-dollars
The US has a fantastic credit score. Being the world’s reserve currency helps.
And collateral lol
The US also has a credit score but with other countries they do business.
Are you immortal? Do you have an income vastly higher than the servicing cost of that debt? Do you owe the large a majority of that debt to yourself? Are you able to, if push came to shove, tell your external creditors to go fuck themselves and dare them to so much as try to collect on the debt you don’t feel like paying? If you can’t answer “yes” to all these questions, you aren’t the US and have a debt situation that has absolutely nothing in common with the US debt.
US debt is currently higher than their GDP. Even if they could leverage the entire country into only paying debt (they can’t), it would take over a year to pay off. At the current average interest rate of ~3%, that’s enough to pay for the entirety of NASA’s budget five times over.
The last time US debt was greater than their GDP was the second world war.
Ignoring, for a moment, the inherent and fundamental differences between an individual and a state…
…in my late 20s and early 30s I bought a new car.
At the time, that car cost more than I had in my accounts plus my other possessions at the time. In fairness, my annual income was more than the total cost of the car, buuuut I also was carrying tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as well, meaning my overall total debt was significantly higher than my annual income, or my “personal GDP” if you will.
Yet when I applied for my car loan, it came through with easy approval and I even qualified for the best possible interest rate.
Why? Because I’ve always paid on my debts adequately and promptly.
Nobody bats an eye when a couple buys a house that costs more than what they can cover with their combined income in one year. Why? Because that’s an arbitrary and unrealistic yard stick of comparison and nobody expects them to pay off a house in a year. They’re able to buy their house and live in it immediately, and pay for it incrementally, over time, as they earn over the coming years because of debt. And the bank is willing to lend the money because they’ll make money in the long run through interest.
Similarly, it’s unreasonable to imply that the US shouldn’t carry more debt than it’s GDP because the two metrics aren’t directly linked in any way. And since the US has excellent credit worthiness, that debt is far safer than the bank’s loan to the homebuyers. And the US gains access to borrowed funds by setting it’s own interest rates through the Fed, which tells lenders exactly how much they’ll make in interest if they let the US government borrow some of their money.
And since the US is a safer bet than homebuyers, that’s why home interest rates are higher than the rate at the Fed: if they were equal, banks would never lend to homebuyers since they could get the same return by lending to the government. So instead, they set their own, higher rates for homebuyers, to account for the higher risk of lending to a party who has a much higher likelihood of default.
…or, since the federal reserve creates money, they could do quite literally 100 strokes on a keyboard at the FED and repay the debt. A state doesn’t fund itself through taxes, taxes serve many purposes but funding a state isn’t one of them.
They said service the debt, not pay off the whole thing. For an analogy, your whole mortgage being less than your annual salary isn’t a requirement; your monthly mortgage payment being a fraction of your monthly salary is.
Do not forget that you are also the very entity that hands out the currency you hold your debt in.
It’s like Dwight printing IOUs for Schrutebucks
Wait till you learn about how the stock market works. Everyone with a share actually just holds an IOU in the DTCC.
It’s all built on bullshit
I remember users on another platform went into full rage mode when I said the stock market was just legalized gambling, telling me how SAFE!!! IT IS IF YOU DO YOUR RESEARCH!!!>
Okay. Black Friday and Too Big to Fail only happened in my dreams.
Tell me you don’t understand how credit score works without telling me you don’t understand how credit score works
