Digressions what I understand about bitcoin could fit on the top of a toothpick. I bought bc of Fomo
Democrats have left moderate voters behind
- Thread starter JamieDimonsBalls
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I will add on a personal note anything that has ever come along I’ve missed on. Dot coms. Start ups. Flipping houses
And vasectomies. Don’t forget that one.
He’s not wrong.
You could say that about anything. Money represents us humans making choices. Bitcoin will continue increasing in value because it’s a far superior money and savings asset than the current options.
Oh, here we go...
It's an honest question, Goat.
Should I already know the answer? Is this the price you pay by not having me around more often?
No, worries. That’s a good question. Bitcoin is decentralized and Doge isn’t. So, you, myself, or any government can’t make more of it or take over the network. Not the case with DOGE. A very select few could change it if they wanted to. I like Elon, but still don’t trust him with my money. Also Doge doesn’t have a hard cap on the amount produced.
This is not a surprise. We absolutely should expect our standard of living to get lower as our government outspends our economy's ability to fund it with present taxes.
What you're describing is what people like me have been warning about. The problem isn't that we haven't done enough spending and intervention. The problem is that we've been doing too much. And the result is what you just described.
And I'm telling you right now, the problem is going to get even worse as unfunded entitlements exert more pressure -- with the likely answer being to monetize them. Guess what happens to our buying power as they do that?
Ask your nieces.
How is it that we have this disconnect? Unfettered capitalism?
First, who is even advocating for that? Is anybody saying "I think we should have capitalism with no regulations, no taxes, no laws protecting us from each other, no laws against fraud...just the law of the jungle."? Can you point to anybody saying that?
No. What people are advocating for is a less fettered capitalism than we have.
Second, are you suggesting that the American economy we live in today -- the one where your nieces aren't doing as well as you did -- is an example of unfettered capitalism? If what we have is "unfettered", I'd hate to see what you consider to be properly "fettered."
Regulations have grown immensely. Public spending has grown immensely. And the economic angst you're describing is because of this, not in spite of this.
Let me give you two stats on regulation and public spending that will tell the story -- so you can disabuse yourself of the notion you apparently hold that we're suffering because we're living in Friedrich Hayek's America.
In 1950, the Federal Register of regulations had 9,910 pages. In 2024, there were 90,902 pages.
In 1950, public spending (at the federal, state, and local levels) comprised 23.5% of the US GDP. In 2024, it comprises 39.69%. In other words, since 1950, public spending as a percentage of GDP has grown by 68.8%. And it's forecast to go significantly higher.
Here's the chart:
Where do you get this? You think libertarians assume that people are generally moral and wouldn't ever screw anybody else over, if but for a big welfare state and interventionist government?
I really think you're confusing it for anarchism. You should do some more reading on the subject. At least get an idea of what you're talking about. You could be a better critic of it if you did.
Here's a book I've recommended before to people who want to get a primer on it:
So you think that libertarianism (or, at least, embrace of free market economics -- there's a difference) is predicated on a presumption of altruism? Actually, the opposite is true.
We're quite insistent that people primarily act out of their own best interest, not out of somebody else's. I think the key difference is that we don't think this is changeable -- and, actually, that it's a good thing...when done in the context of a sound body of laws and rules.
This is one of the best arguments there is for getting the government out of commerce.
Let me put it this way: it wasn't us advocating for the bailouts of the financial industry in 2008, or the bailouts of GM and Chrysler the following year, etc. It also wasn't us advocating that the government incentivize them to issue subprime mortgages they shouldn't issue.
Jeb Bush (!) really hit upon something when he took up the mantra "The Freedom to Fail." It's a big deal. And he's right. Failure is an integral part of a market economy -- and it's necessary to have it, if there's such a thing as success.
You want the government to stop socializing losses? I agree wholeheartedly. The way to do it is to drag them out of commerce as much as possible.
A good side benefit of that is that it would devalue having influence over government policy. You want to stop having rich people pour billions into elections? Make it so there's no return on investment. As it stands, government influence is very valuable...because the government is very powerful and can make or break somebody. If we strip them of that power, the value of the commodity of influence will plummet.
No. Not even close. Your first paragraph is completely wrong. If you could live on a credit card that seemingly never needed to be paid off, your standard of living (or at least the perception) should go up. And, yet, it still has fallen for most. That's how bad it is.
The problem is, we've adjusted the tax code that everyone should feel "better off", because everyone pays less to government, and therefore keeps more. But money is relative.
As described in my previous posts, that is a fallacy. And explains exactly why people paying less in taxes are not better off.
There is no better representation of a free market than an auction. If two people(person A and person B) enter an auction with $1M dollars to spend, things are relatively equal. If person A receives $500 in a tax cut, and person B receives $1M in a tax cut, person A is necessarily in a worse position to participate in the auction. Period.
Period.
Period.
I’ll reply more later.
Our standard of living has gone down because we monetize the public debt. A guy with a credit card can’t do that.
We’ve badly overspent, for many years, and we’re enduring the effects of it. It’s that “hidden tax” that people like me are always going on about. This is why.
My favorite politician said it pretty well in my favorite speech of his:
When they call the slightest spending reductions “painful”, we will say “If government spending prevents pain, why are we suffering so much of it?” And “If you want to experience real pain, just stay on the track we are on.” When they attack us for our social welfare reforms, we will say that the true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo, and the arithmetic backs us up.
He said this 13 years ago. And we’re spending way more now (both in terms of real dollars and in % GDP) then we were then.Was he right…about what we can expect if we stayed on the track we were on?
Why yes. Yes he was. Gee, maybe he was on to something? (He was)
Paul Ryan?
Edit: Awwwee. Daniels. Any quotes on how much the Iraq war would cost? I'll wait for more. But please acknowledge my last paragraph as fact.
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I agree, but the U.S. government has the ability to print endless money, which is much easier to do than the alternatives of raising taxes or making cuts.This is not a surprise. We absolutely should expect our standard of living to get lower as our government outspends our economy's ability to fund it with present taxes.
What you're describing is what people like me have been warning about. The problem isn't that we haven't done enough spending and intervention. The problem is that we've been doing too much. And the result is what you just described.
And I'm telling you right now, the problem is going to get even worse as unfunded entitlements exert more pressure -- with the likely answer being to monetize them. Guess what happens to our buying power as they do that?
Ask your nieces.
How is it that we have this disconnect? Unfettered capitalism?
First, who is even advocating for that? Is anybody saying "I think we should have capitalism with no regulations, no taxes, no laws protecting us from each other, no laws against fraud...just the law of the jungle."? Can you point to anybody saying that?
No. What people are advocating for is a less fettered capitalism than we have.
Second, are you suggesting that the American economy we live in today -- the one where your nieces aren't doing as well as you did -- is an example of unfettered capitalism? If what we have is "unfettered", I'd hate to see what you consider to be properly "fettered."
Regulations have grown immensely. Public spending has grown immensely. And the economic angst you're describing is because of this, not in spite of this.
Let me give you two stats on regulation and public spending that will tell the story -- so you can disabuse yourself of the notion you apparently hold that we're suffering because we're living in Friedrich Hayek's America.
In 1950, the Federal Register of regulations had 9,910 pages. In 2024, there were 90,902 pages.
In 1950, public spending (at the federal, state, and local levels) comprised 23.5% of the US GDP. In 2024, it comprises 39.69%. In other words, since 1950, public spending as a percentage of GDP has grown by 68.8%. And it's forecast to go significantly higher.
Here's the chart:
Where do you get this? You think libertarians assume that people are generally moral and wouldn't ever screw anybody else over, if but for a big welfare state and interventionist government?
I really think you're confusing it for anarchism. You should do some more reading on the subject. At least get an idea of what you're talking about. You could be a better critic of it if you did.
Here's a book I've recommended before to people who want to get a primer on it:
So you think that libertarianism (or, at least, embrace of free market economics -- there's a difference) is predicated on a presumption of altruism? Actually, the opposite is true.
We're quite insistent that people primarily act out of their own best interest, not out of somebody else's. I think the key difference is that we don't think this is changeable -- and, actually, that it's a good thing...when done in the context of a sound body of laws and rules.
This is one of the best arguments there is for getting the government out of commerce.
Let me put it this way: it wasn't us advocating for the bailouts of the financial industry in 2008, or the bailouts of GM and Chrysler the following year, etc. It also wasn't us advocating that the government incentivize them to issue subprime mortgages they shouldn't issue.
Jeb Bush (!) really hit upon something when he took up the mantra "The Freedom to Fail." It's a big deal. And he's right. Failure is an integral part of a market economy -- and it's necessary to have it, if there's such a thing as success.
You want the government to stop socializing losses? I agree wholeheartedly. The way to do it is to drag them out of commerce as much as possible.
A good side benefit of that is that it would devalue having influence over government policy. You want to stop having rich people pour billions into elections? Make it so there's no return on investment. As it stands, government influence is very valuable...because the government is very powerful and can make or break somebody. If we strip them of that power, the value of the commodity of influence will plummet.
You may make out like a bandit with Bitcoin. I wouldn't try to dissuade you, and I wouldn't have a chance anyway.
Any commodity (to your point) can serve as a rail against inflation. But that just means there's nothing special wrt that about Bitcoin.
To the people on this board who point to fiat money as an excuse towards any of our country's ill's, I would say, the federal reserve is the only adult in the room. They're doing their job.
Our currency has only been weakened as a response. Everytime. Eliminating a tool that limits the scope of a financial crisis shouldn't be a goal. But stranger things have happened.
If you've given a different reason for owning Bitcoin, I've missed it. I do appreciate your passion for it, and it may turn out to be a great investment.
I beg to differ. Name another commodity that we can’t produce more of no matter how high the price goes. Also, that can be moved around the world, settled in 10 minutes, without a trusted 3rd party. And can be secured and taken anywhere with you by memorizing a 12 word seed phrase.
I don’t consider bailing out banks and lowering the purchasing power of the middle class and working classes as a good system. I don’t want central authorities having the ability to pick and choose where inflation and deflation gets to occur. If banks make shitty loans, they should fail. Instead they win when times are good and push their losses onto the average Joe when they screw up.
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It's a natural hedge. If you exchange your money for goods, you no longer are exposed to inflation because you aren't holding the currency. It's quite possible that Bitcoin may (or already has) become preferred to gold. You’re correct that it will be up to the market.
I'm still not convinced on the second point. Skipping the "why" there is a need for monetary interventions, why would you want to take that option away? Do you not believe that the feds QE prevented further hardships?
You do realize that Daniels was little more than a calculator on that deal, right?
The OMB didn’t come up with the assumptions. Why would they? The DoD made them. OMB put a pricetag on their assumptions. Garbage in, Garbage out. Don’t blame the computer.
Daniels was right about the pain being caused by spending in 2011. And it couldn’t be much more evident than it is today: why are we suffering so much of it?
What are they buying at an auction….a boat or an apple?
Obviously, the guy with more money is always going to be able to outbid the guy with less money…for a boat or an apple. But the supply of what they’re both looking to buy matters, as does the rest of the universe of would-be buyers at this auction, how much they have to spend, and what the desirability level of the items compared to their alternative uses.
The reality is that we live in a country where 91% of the people not only own cellphones, but own smart phones.
Why do you suppose it is the rich people haven’t priced everybody else out of the market? Isn’t that what a free market is supposed to do? What gives?
I don’t follow the auction anology at all
If two people have their tax liability reduced, what difference does it make if they end up with different liabilities? A tax cut does not necessarily relate to how much taxes they pay.
The last time I looked he missed by about 6 trillion dollars and counting. That's a lot of garbage. That was also the WH estimate used to promote a war. If Daniels would have said $12 trillion maybe Cheney et al would be more popular today.
It doesn’t matter what's being auctioned. The point I'm making is rudimentary. Just because someone receives money, it doesn’t necessarily make them better off. We've had tax cuts for the middle class since 1980. Why do they yearn for the 1950's and 60's? What gives?
As I explained earlier, the Trump tax cuts were not progressive. The only thing that matters is the amount of money a person has relative to everyone else participating in the market.
If person A has $100 on Monday and person B has $100 on Monday, they're relatively positioned the same. If on Tuesday, person A has $150 and person B has $250, person A is in a worse position.
And this principle holds on a larger scale.
Another way: If we were playing monopoly and we each got $200 for passing go, would you be better off if you got $300 and I got $4000?
I understand the point. The tax cut anology doesn’t support it. A larger cut doesn’t mean more disposable income.
BTW, IIRC, the Trump cuts made the entire code more progressive.
2035: An Allocator Looks Back Over the Last 10 Years
Well, sitting here in the year 2035 and looking back at our endowment’s returns for the last decade is not a pleasant task. World markets have been subpar and our performance relative to world markets has been simply terrible. Hard times are never pleasant. But they have one upside. We can learn...
Credit where credit is due…..calling out the absurdity of modern finance….from one of the world’s best known hedge fund managers
Satire is fun….
I addressed the Trump tax cuts and explained why they weren't progressive about a week ago. It was a direct response to you. They aren't progressive. They appear to be progressive, but they aren't, which is my broader point.
A person's "bottom line" relative to everyone elses bottom line is the only measure that matters wrt a person's ability to compete in a market (even in the aggregate). Tax rates do effect a person's bottom line and therefore matter.
I'm not sure I can make it any simpler. Just because a person received a cut that didn't effect their disposable income, it still had a net effect on their bottom line, correct?
I looked for your post, didn’t see it. There is a plethora of “research” out there condemning the Trump tax reform. Here is one.
This is pretty shabby analysis. For openers, the authors don’t understand cause and effect compared with temporal relationships. That and many similar articles are in the general category of “orange man bad”.
The market is not one thing. If a billionaire receives a larger cut than I do, so what? I can’t compete in the private jet market anyway. But that doesn't mean I am not better able to compete in markets I participate in.
Back to Trump tax cuts. The substantial increase in the standard deduction was a very progressive move. It did a number of things including putting renters on equal footing with much home ownership.
I guess I don’t understand your definition of “bottom line”.
It is simple really. Tax cuts without spending cuts have been just as inflationary. It is just burning the candle from the opposite end.
I fully believe that the government spends too much. I also fully believe that reality would dictate that everyone is going to have to pay more in the future and that burden is going to proportionately fall on those who have the means. I don't want that to be draconian but the whole Elon and Vivek H1B hubbub has reaffirmed some things for me. As crazed said above, everyone is in this for their own selfish reasons and so I am much less inclined to give a shit if billionaires get soaked a little harder. Particularly when they use their money to advocate for things that I think end up being detrimental to the rest of us as a whole. You want your H1Bs and cheap labor? Cool. Now you get to pay an outsized portion to deal with the overall societal impacts of those decisions.
And I say this believing that Space X was a net positive (I don't get Tesla's, kind of a shitty product IMO that wouldn't have been where it is at without the government subsidizing every purchase of one.)
I am not some socialist, I do believe that capitalism, like Democracy, is the best system we have now. However, I remain much less convinced that the GOP platform I wholeheartedly supported in my twenties and thirties was the way to go. (I don't think the Democrats have it right either). Everybody has a cell phone and they are "cheap" (my AT&T bill would disagree but I digress) but I don't think we are as well off as we have been in the past. We have more technology at our fingers but everyone's real experience is moving backwards. And yes, as Crazed mentioned government spending has been a driver of that but so to has been not properly funding that spending and in fact, actually decreasing the rates of what we bring in while increasing what we borrow has been a hallmark of the GOP my entire adult life. (And FWIW, the Democrats are of this crazy notion that only the "rich" have to pay for what they want to spend as well, but at least they offer some half hearted attempt at revenue generation along with their insane spending).
I guess this is my way of saying that the "trickle down" thing hasn't been happening because people like Elon don't trickle it down. They do things like he did in Texas. Move because of a tax break that is supposed to be offset by taxes paid by the high salaried employees he will hire. He then lays off 2,000 of them and replaces them with cheaper foreign labor. So his company isn't paying their taxes at a normal rate and now all the high salaried jobs are gone to a bunch of Indians and the state has to come up with another 2,000 similar paying jobs for the people he let go while intaking less money to maintain the type of infrastructure and amenities needed to attract employers in the first place. Eli Lilly has challenged every tax assessment in Indianapolis since 2012. They are also one of the major companies that complains about not being able to find enough educated employees in Indiana. Well property taxes tend to be the primary funder of education, so......
"Paying employees more means you have to pay more for your Big Mac." Well, apparently companies not paying more means I have to double pay through tax money being allocated to keep their employees afloat and then again because of the inflation those programs cost. And oh yeah, let's reduce the amount of taxes those companies have to pay because then they'll go hire more people and not have to increase their prices, pssh. Look, I am not going to claim to be as big of an economic genius as some of the people that can be linked back to me but even a dumbass like me can take a look at this stuff and say, "Yeah, the GOP got some of this really wrong."
By the by, 26 year old me would argue until he was blue in the face with 46 year old me how wrong this take is. 46 year old me has the advantage of seeing two more decades of how this stuff is just a race to the bottom for too many people. It will be socially destabilizing (well, more than it already is).
IUC, we can all agree that spending cuts are necessary to at least come closer to balancing the budget. Therefore, it is easy to toss the phrase "cut spending" around.
Unfortunately, if cutting spending was all that easy Congress would have done it long ago.
So why isn't easy? It isn't easy because the mandated programs of Social Security and Medicare along with the discretionary defense spending are popular.
Given that Trump cannot run again maybe he will make an all out effort to tackle the popular Big Three. Then with a Republican Congress bitting the bullet behind him, we can actually cut spending.
Have you ever driven a Tesla? Your characterization of Tesla in Texas is way off or I’m missing something. The gigafactory in Austin now employs over 22,000 people. It’s the largest private employer in Austin (I was surprised by that). They employed around 3k people in 2021. They’re currently projecting they’ll get to 60k employees. Texans are still much better off with Tesla being there than them not being there. Let’s not go the European route because businesses take advantages of immigration policies. Let’s just tweak the policies.
Tesla becomes Austin's largest private employer as Giga Texas headcount surges
Tesla becomes Austin’s largest private employer as the headcount at Gigafactory Texas surges to a ridiculously high level. The automaker...
electrek.co
So…did you miss the part where he put a pricetag on assumptions made by others?
If somebody comes to you and says “Here’s a list of items I plan to buy. Can you tell me how much I’ll spend?” You find everything on their list, price it up, they actually buy 10 times that much.
Is the overage on you or is it on them?
There’s probably a lot to that question. And a lot of it likely has nothing to do with the government’s fiscal and monetary policies.
For instance, the value of many types of labor has gone down. And it’s not mostly due to immigration or trade. It’s mostly due to technology. But trying to fight that would end us up in some very illogical positions - such as the incoming president pledging to ban port automation in order to protect the jobs of stevedores.
But, to the extent it does have to do with government fiscal and monetary policies, I’d say it’s because government spending growth has weakened the purchasing power of people’s incomes.
“Hold on to your wallet. Wall Street is gearing up for a sales push that could enrich the middlemen and impoverish you”
“Often these investments have been a costly path to mediocrity for even the world’s biggest investors. As the managers of alternative funds have struggled to resell a glut of overpriced assets, they’ve also been stymied trying to convince big clients to add more money. No wonder there’s an intensifying push to strip away the traditional protections for smaller investors.”
Hoot, at the risk of losing my man card…or really just my basic dignity….
Heh. I’ve said many times that fixing this problem will require a willful act of political suicide. Because it’s almost certainly politically fatal.
Given how little Donald Trump seems to care what the chattering classes say about him, the press, the Democrats, the OG Republicans, etc. he’s probably the perfect president to do it. He’s going to be eternally hated by many, if not most, people anyway. And he’s old and doesn’t have much longer to live. So…why not?
But he’s also vain. And he’s obsessed with his image, which is bizarre considering how he acts. So he almost certainly won’t.
But here’s to hoping….
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IUC, the core problem with what you’re saying here is that federal tax revenues (as %GDP) have more or less remained flat since the 1950s. They rarely get above 18% and they rarely get below 16%. When they do, it’s because of ephemeral macroeconomic conditions - such as in the wake of 2008-9, when they dipped below 15%. On the high side, the dotcom boom put them briefly near 20%. They always revert to the mean within a couple years.
Here’s a table with every year going back to 1950 to demonstrate.
Keep in mind what marginal income tax rates have done over that period. In 1950, the top rate was 91%! In 1964, it went to 70%. In the mid-80s it briefly got as low as 28%. And it’s mostly settled in the high 30s ever since — 39.6% or 37.6%.
But spending is another story. See if you can spot the trend in federal spending as %GDP. It doesn’t revert to any mean. On the contrary, it has followed a very clear trend.
These two charts illustrate our problem. It is not that we haven’t taxed enough. We’ve had very high tax rates during this period. It’s that our spending has grown.
And I don’t think many people have internalized that the problem is set to get significantly worse….because of entitlements. They’re on auto-pilot. And the metrics that determine their annual outlays are moving away from Treasury’s favor, not towards it.
The bottom line is referring to how much money someone has to spend. If discretionary income/money works better, that's fine.
The problem with the tax analysis you provided now and originally (you posted several articles... I think one was from The Guardian) is that it uses percentages as some sort of evidence of progressiveness. Percentages don't purchase goods and services. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but it was from your source. For efficiency- and I'll try to be generous to your side- let's say a lower middle class worker received a $5,000 reduction(read- increase in discretionary income), it would only truly be progressive/beneficial if the people above received less than $5,000.
Why? Because the heart of the matter is that Republicans claim that the tax cut benefits the middle class worker. It in fact, does not. Why not? As I've said for years, if you give everyone something, you've given them nothing. Prices in the aggregate are derived from money in the aggregate. If you shift the amount of money in the aggregate, prices will shift. Agreed? An example is inflation.
So, if you give everyone $3,500, you would expect that inflation would eventually move aggregate prices to a place where no one is better off. But if you give 99% of people $3500, and 1% of people $20,000, as aggregate prices move, the $3500 is eaten away from everyone, leaving the 1% relatively better off.
This fact is important to everyone, whether you invest in rockets, or not. Everyone is competing with everyone else in some form or fashion. Take housing for instance. I don’t buy Dairy Queen, or Coke, but Buffet owns 242,000 acres. I do buy acres.
Full Stop
I can't let this go:
"To illustrate just how much the progressivity of the tax code has increased over the past 40 years, consider that in 1980 the top 1 percent of earners bore 19 percent of income taxes, the top 10 percent of earners bore nearly half of income taxes, and the bottom 50 percent paid 7 percent. That’s twice as much as today."
This goes to the deception of voodoo economic proponents. They are using this statistic as positive evidence in favor of current policy.
When Musk hires lower wage H1B workers, the tax burden placed upon the 1% will continue to grow, and the middle class tax burden will continue to diminish. Yay!
Part of the issue here is that the only true tax cut is a spending cut. What we call “tax cuts” are actually just shifts of the tax burden — whether it’s to or away from middle income people and to or away from high income people….or (more often) to future taxpayers and away from current ones.
Shifting the tax code isn’t really what we need to do. To the degree we do, we need to put more burden on current taxpayers.
But what we most need to do is that fiscal policy change that we virtually never do: cut spending.
IUC, the core problem with what you’re saying here is that federal tax revenues (as %GDP) have more or less remained flat since the 1950s. They rarely get above 18% and they rarely get below 16%. When they do, it’s because of ephemeral macroeconomic conditions - such as in the wake of 2008-9, when they dipped below 15%. On the high side, the dotcom boom put them briefly near 20%. They always revert to the mean within a couple years.
Here’s a table with every year going back to 1950 to demonstrate.
Keep in mind what marginal income tax rates have done over that period. In 1950, the top rate was 91%! In 1964, it went to 70%. In the mid-80s it briefly got as low as 28%. And it’s mostly settled in the high 30s ever since — 39.6% or 37.6%.
But spending is another story. See if you can spot the trend in federal spending as %GDP. It doesn’t revert to any mean. On the contrary, it has followed a very clear trend.
These two charts illustrate our problem. It is not that we haven’t taxed enough. We’ve had very high tax rates during this period. It’s that our spending has grown.
And I don’t think many people have internalized that the problem is set to get significantly worse….because of entitlements. They’re on auto-pilot. And the metrics that determine their annual outlays are moving away from Treasury’s favor, not towards it.
Interesting X post on tax receipts. I thought you might like it. Anytime they get to 18% since 1930s a recession has followed.
Why is it worth more than the next 10 largest automakers combined?
That’s very interesting - especially the part about Orszag. I didn’t know that about him. So he even deliberately tried to raise the revenues baseline and failed to do so.
Because they’re basically driverless. I test drove my buddies a couple months ago. We went for a 20 minute drive. I didn’t touch the wheel once. It’s insane.
He will chair White House Council of Economic Advisers
“The burden the overvalued dollar places on the U.S. manufacturing sector drives carnage across the industrial base of the country, and places an enormous drag on our export sector. American workers bear the cost for global reserve provision. Our borrowing isn’t caused by overconsumption, but the reverse—we import too much because we export reserve assets to facilitate global trade and savings.”
