this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
362 points (95.9% liked)
World News
32352 readers
994 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, if we stopped being the world's police we might have tax money for something else.
Taxes don't pay for anything at the federal level. They are deleted. We used to literally burn them back when we collected physical money. We can afford both our current military spending, and every single progressive policy that AOC or Bernie can dream up just fine. (Not saying we should, just that we can. I think we should scale back on certain aspects of the military, but that's a whole other discussion) The government just "prints" more money and deposits it in the appropriate accounts via the Federal Reserve. Taxes are merely an anti-inflationary device to ensure that inflation stays stable. Running deficits doesn't cause inflation. If it did, Japan would have been thoroughly fucked in the last 30 years of running the highest deficit by percentage of any country in the world. In reality they are running the largest deficit economy, and barely fighting off deflation.
Edit: this only applies to a sovereign fiat currency.