Comment on Revolution.
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
They didn’t want to pay for an overpriced subscription service to “elite” soldiers who didn’t know the land or understand the style of warfare. Plus, they didn’t want to abide by treaties that would stop them from aggressively expanding and killing natives just because they couldn’t afford that subscription service. So they clicked “unsubscribe” but you know how hard it is to unsubscribe from these things.
The whole thing is very ironic though, because after Britain wracked up massive war debts fighting over a colonial border squabble and then lost all the colonies trying to pay those debts, France wracked up massive war debts supporting the colonists, with the aim of weakening the British, and trying to raise taxes to pay those debts is how the king got his head chopped off.
Phunter@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
More people should learn how national debt actually works. People equate it to household debt or business debt too often.
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
I understand that it’s not. But I also understand that the government is currently paying a trillion dollars every year just on interest. And that countries are reconsidering the dollar as a stable reserve currency.
National debt isn’t the same thing as other kinds of debt but you can only go “money printer go brrr” for so long before consequences start to show up.
KernelTale@programming.dev 3 days ago
What I am going to say definitely does not apply to current USA but there are also downsides tohl having no debt. If a countries economy outgrows the debt the debt shrinks and results are positive. This is not hard in when a country doesn’t have something weighting it down like covid or right wing populists. Countries also want to own each others’ debt, so they can use their currencies whenever needed. When USA was predicted to wipe off its national debt it was optimal to keep some of it for those reasons and to also keep USD the main world trade currency.