IMF Warns About Soaring Global Government Debt (semafor.com)
- Reference: 0179808458
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/16/1716226/imf-warns-about-soaring-global-government-debt
- Source link: https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2025/imf-warns-about-soaring-global-government-debt
> Such a ratio would be the highest since 1948, when large economies were rebuilding post-war. Today, "there is little political appetite for belt-tightening," The Economist wrote: Rich nations are reluctant to raise taxes on their beleaguered electorates -- but they're facing pressure to spend more on defense, and on social services for aging populations.
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> Higher long-term bond yields, meanwhile, suggest investor wariness over governments' balance sheets. In the short term, the debt concerns manifest in political disruption: France's budget fight recently toppled another government, while the US federal shutdown highlights the tension between new spending demands and deficit reduction.
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2025/imf-warns-about-soaring-global-government-debt
Re: (Score:3)
You're right. And before people chime and say
> but the billionaires don't have the wealth, because if you add up their wealth, it's a small fraction of the problem!
we need to realize a few things: the billionaire oligarch ultra-wealthy folks (the top 0.1% or so ~ those with hundreds of millions of dollars or equivalent, or more) choose to allocate huge amounts of wealth to frivolities (yachts, etc.), which in turn sucks away resources from real concerns (food, housing, health care, the environment, elder care
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> We need to push back against the ultra-wealthy or else we will be left with a mere pittance.
You mean we will be left in mass graves? They are absolutely not planning to give us any basic income.
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I think we will only get mass graves if they can program the robots to dig. Otherwise, we won't even get that.
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> those with hundreds of millions of dollars or equivalent, or more) choose to allocate huge amounts of wealth to frivolities (yachts, etc.), which in turn sucks away resources from real concerns (food, housing, health care, the environment, elder care, education). We live in a world with finite resources and the allocation of those resources matters.
[1]The top 0.1% of earners pay 42% of all income tax collected. [taxfoundation.org]
The top 10% of earners pay 73% of all income tax collected.
The top 50% of earners pay 97% of all income tax collected.
In other words, the 'ultra-wealthy' are actually paying way more than their fair share , if you want to have a honest discussion about 'fairness'. Even their 'excessive consumption', generates economic activity which would otherwise not exist.
> We need to push back against the ultra-wealthy or else we will be left with a mere pittance.
What you need to do is get a job or a trade, and I don't mean your average bullshit barist
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/
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Did you read the link you posted, or is this just your reflex talking-points-based reply for any discussion on taxation rates?
The page I linked uses hard data from the IRS for income tax collection and revenue percentages; the link you posted is a 5-point post talking about how the 'unfairness of taxation rates'. The two are not the same thing.
And again, your link specifically mentions "unrealized capital gains" , which are, by definition, untaxable. I don't have my crayons, but let me try to make it simp
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Share of Total Gross Income - shows the richest keeping more of their money, facts.
[1]https://taxfoundation.org/data... [taxfoundation.org]
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update
Re: (Score:1)
Well... yah?
If you have $100 and I have $5, do I have any right to say what you can or can't do with your $100 dollars, just because I only have $5?
I don't think I do, but if you think so, then give me $50.
It's only fair.
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Ok now do the same analysis for property tax instead of income tax.
What's got me scared about the billionaires (Score:1)
Is that I have come to realize they are preparing to destroy capitalism and replace it with a new kind of feudalism with themselves as the Kings.
Don't think any of us ever imagined capitalism falling to neo feudalism instead of something like socialism or something. Even most fascist regimes tended towards capitalism like China does. So the idea of the trade of goods and services for money with the goal of people obtaining and using capital fundamentally breaking down not from the bottom but from the to
eat the rich (Score:2)
At some point people will stop being distracted by wedge issue bullshit and notice how shitty exploitative rich people have made things, right?
Because where does it end? Everyone's working in company towns again? Better not piss off the boss.
Correction (Score:3)
> pressure to spend more on ... social services for aging populations.
"... pressure to spend more on social services for the imported third world."
Yet even more generic space filler (Score:2)
Were I that slack I'd have been fired from every job I ever held.
Smoke and mirrors? (Score:2)
Has any country really got a profitable economy or is it a giant game of Jenga, with every country borrowing to make the figures look good??!
Fake news (Score:2)
"the US federal shutdown highlights the tension between new spending demands and deficit reduction"
No, this is not true and hasn't been true for many decades. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, all of them want to spend more. Yes, they want to cut back on on some things due to ideology, but they mostly want to expand rather than decrease spending. There's a huge amount of rhetoric, but the actions never match the rhetoric. The only spending reductions ever pushed across are for programs fa
Stupid neo liberalism (Score:2)
This whole narrative is because the neoliberals NEED to get everyone to believe that the 'country is like a household' again. You know, where they pretend the GDP is the same as income and the debt is like having a mortgage, and if you don't pay the mortgage of the big scary bank manager will come and see you. It was the most effective economic narrative we have had since likely forever, because every mom and pop goes 'oh dear, debt is bad!!!'. It meant governments could beat their populations while telling
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> We saw a way forward - just use fiscal stimulus.
Well, thank goodness that just grows on trees.
I'm not going to speak about the rest of the world (Score:3, Interesting)
But American debt is both a positive thing and a necessity for your quality of life. And let me do a classic Ronald Reagan I'm explaining and losing now to tell you why...
So 80% of American debt is owned by americans. We literally owe it to ourselves. This is the equivalent of you loaning yourself money. Only it's a little different than that because you're not a nation state.
When America loans itself money that is effectively creating money supply. That is perfectly fine as long as that money supply is going to the general good and the general public.
Where it becomes a problem is where it is used to finance tax cuts for billionaires which is what it's being done since 2016 at least. That's a problem not because of the debt itself but because billionaires get all this extra cash they use to buy up competitor businesses and then Jack up prices using Monopoly power. But again the debt itself isn't the problem it's the power and leverage we are giving to approximately 2,000 people.
Now let's talk about the international debt. You want that. You want it very badly.
That's because the national debt internationally, which is only about 8 trillion or 20% of our total debt, is leveraged to maintain the high value of the US dollar relative to other currencies.
That high value lets us get trillions of dollars of cheap imports for a fraction of their actual economic value. It's basically a form of economic imperial tribute.
Everyone thinks about cheap TVs and coffee pots but nobody thinks about the hundreds of billions of dollars of steel and lumber and finished goods and industrial products we bring in. Those products are often used by manufacturing companies to produce advanced medical devices, cars and heavy industry equipment like planes and heavy construction equipment that we sell on to other countries.
All this is possible because we wrap countries up into our debt and make our currency and our country as a whole more valuable.
This is a complex almost colonial system (oops just triggered some people) that is why you have been able to maintain any semblance of a middle-class existence while automation devours middle-class jobs for the last 45 years.
Look at the value of the US dollar since the trade war started and the national sales tax hit and you will see it plummeting. That is bad news for you because that's going to make prices skyrocket. You haven't seen it yet because companies saw the trade war coming and stocked up on materials. They are running out and you're going to start really seeing it soon. And you have minimum three and a half more years before we can even try to start fixing this mess.
But everything above is way too complicated for most people to really get their heads around and like I said when you are explaining you are losing so we are well and truly fucked.
Re: I'm not going to speak about the rest of the w (Score:3, Insightful)
Disagree. You aren't loaning money to yourself. If we use your analogy, it's like a father borrowing money in the names of all his kids. Sure, maybe he spent some of it on their food and upkeep, but they are the ones who will ultimately be responsible for the borrowing.
So it's neither (Score:1)
It's money supply. We're talking about nation states here. When the government hands out money in the form of debt it creates that money out of thin air.
You can do that as long as there is economic activity backing that money and if you take that money and you actually invest it then you get that economic activity.
So for example back in 1980 when the Democrats gave Ronald Reagan his military spending in exchange for 1 trillion dollars of infrastructure spending that was a solid investment.
That i
Re: (Score:2)
No, that is completely wrong and utterly stupid. What happens in reality is that creating all of this new money leads to inflation. The economic activity and wealth of a country exists independently of the money supply. You could halve or double the amount of money and all it does is change the purchasing power of a dollar. If everyone woke up tomorrow with twice as much money the only thing that would change is that soon everything would cost twice as much as it did the day before.
You should ask yoursel
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You don't get what he is saying. The other side of the debt is held by somebody. The interest payment is somebody else's passive income. Whose is it? Other Americans.
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Indeed, and we don't owe it 'to ourselves' but to the federal reserve, a private corporation that has bought trillions of US debt. So, no.
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There is plenty of money, it's just being hoarded. If more of it was flowing through the economy and thus being taxed, this wouldn't be an issue.
The funny thing is (Score:1)
Switching to a single pair of healthcare system like watch France and Germany have would save us about half a trillion dollars a year. We could take those savings and use it to pay off our foreign debt in about 15 years.
But we don't want to do that because it would wreck the value of the us dollar. We want countries to hold a bunch of our debt because that artificially boosts the value of our currency which artificially lowers the cost of buying goods from other countries.
It would be one thing if we
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> there's no benefit to workers from having consumer goods manufactured in your country anymore. Stuff like coffee pots and TVs and whatnot are almost entirely built by machines except where slave labor exists.
That is just late 20th century thinking. That worked in mono-polar world where we were the only nation really capable of sustain force projection (security), the reserve currency, and at least some technological superiority.
Advanced Medical equipment - If China wanted to take that market they could inside a decade. Same thing with chips at this point, they have all the precursors. There is nothing left we can produce that is a 'you can't get there from here' for them any longer, it is just a pick an ite
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Plus all the B.S. of the last forty years of 'we will do the design and others will do the boring job of building.' But designers used to spend time on the factory floor understanding how to build so as to write the best designs. If you don't know how something is put together you cannot effectively design something.
You are so close to figuring something out (Score:1)
The problem here is that we are all being forced to compete with China in a global race to the bottom.
What if instead of that we focused on the health and well-being of American citizens?
I don't mean American first bullshit nationalism nonsense. We don't have to close our borders or anything like that to make things better.
The only thing I'm talking about is ending the race to the bottom we have been trapped in since Nixon opened up the globe and the factory automation got going in the '80s.
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Warren Buffet and Apple are the two biggest money hoarders. Look how much money is simply never returned to the economy.
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> When America loans itself money that is effectively creating money supply.
This is patently false. The only way to buy US public debt is with US dollars, that already exist. Buying public debt increases the money velocity some, but that is it. Private debt is what increases the money supply, because all the way up the chain, the Fed created it out of nothing. The Fed is control of money creation.