Is the title of a new working paper by Peter Boettke and Chris Coyne of George Mason University. The abstract of the paper reads:
Writing over 230 years ago, Adam Smith noted the ‘juggling trick’ whereby governments hide the extent of their public debt through ‘pretend payments.’ As the fiscal crises around the world illustrate, this juggling trick has run its course. This paper explores the relevance of Smith’s juggling trick in the context of dominant fiscal and monetary policies. It is argued that government spending intended to maintain stability, avoid deflation, and stimulate the economy leads to significant increases in the public debt. This public debt is sustainable for a period of time and can be serviced through ‘pretend payments’ such as subsequent borrowing or the printing of money. However, at some point borrowing is no longer a feasible option as the state’s creditworthiness erodes. The only recourse is the monetarization of the debt which is also unsustainable due to the threat of hyperinflation.
Boettke and Coyne resurrect Adam Smith to show that the debt and debasement patterns witnessed recently in Greece, Spain, Ireland and here in California are predictable and not unique to governments today. The crisis in Washington is not the result of extending the bush tax cuts or the spending of the Obama administration alone, but rather the accumulation of decades of expanding federal government and fiscal imbalance. As the authors’ state, “While pretend payments and the juggling of finances were able to hide the underlying realities for decades, the bill has now come due”.
We need Congress to not raise debt ceiling. God wins in all foxholes. If God won more often, and we let true charity be a individual chose not Government’s role we would be better off. Example stimulus, cash for clunkers and Dept of Ed. at Federal level when each state has own.
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Terrific article.
This refutes many economists who think that because of the dollar, and its use as a world currency, that we are nowhere near the point of losing our creditworthiness.
Well, creditworthiness is based on perception of the masses, who probably don’t have the knowledge of fiat currency, taxation, etc.
People tend to look at government deficits in the only way they know, as households or businesses would run deficits. At some point, it is unsustainable, even for the U.S. Government.
I liked this excerpt from the paper “Government can raise revenues in three ways: taxation, debt, and inflation. To maintain popularity, governmental leaders prefer not to raise explicit taxes, so the preferred method of revenue generation is to borrow and then pay debts back with debased currency. The democratic bias is to concentrate the benefits of public policy on well-organized and well-informed voters in the short run, and disperse the costs of public policy on the ill-organized and uninformed masses in the long run. The least informed and organized interest group at any point of time is future generations.”
This reminds me of how Social Security and Medicare is funded.
I presented this discussion to the Unitarian Universalists last Sunday.
The governmental links and excerpts were pretty revealing, that the trsu funds are no more funded than paying for battleships. UUs are a very liberal bunch, composed primarily of agnostics and atheists. When I asked for a show of hands “Who do you have more faith in, God or the credit of the U.S. Government?”
It was a tie!