In democracy, citizen decide how the tax money is spent by voting, usually it’s an indirect vote : you elect people to vote the budget, which makes sense considering the difficulty on the tax. But typically, left wing will put more money in education, healthcare, and rehabilitation programs while right wing will put money in police, militaires and supp rt outsourcing essential services to private corporations. Stuff can be complex as you need to pay pensions, state worker, fulfill international commitment (EU budget, NATO budget) and maintain all the existing infrastructures, and only then you can invest/re-allocate budget (which can trigger an outrage, cutting welfare expense or closing a hospital can have dramatic consequences for citizen)
If there isn’t enough money se government can borrow money, typically they don’t go the bank but say they need X billions for Y years and find investor ready to lend them this money (it tends to be quite safe, do you foresee US or Germany not paying their debt in 5 or 10 years?) alternative is to print money (aka inflation) or raise taxes. For structural investment that will bring monee, it makes sense to pay them over 10 years with the extra tax yield thanks to the new highway/university/dam. However, it also means that instead of “taxing the rich” you borr w their money and give them back, while us commoner do n’t directly see our tax money ney back
workerONE@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Money collected from taxes is basically recorded in a ledger / account by the Treasury. Some people look at this as the end of the lifespan of that money or the destruction of that money.
Money begins its life by being spent by the federal government. They essentially create money with the press of a keystroke (granted they are spending funds which are approved by Congress and allocated for projects), the money credits a Treasury account, then they transfer it / spend it which puts the money into circulation.
The federal government does not NEED the money you pay in taxes to find their spending. Money does not come from people. It is created solely by the treasury. The federal government WANTS to limit the amount of money put into circulation (compared to the amount thru collect from taxes) in order to prevent runaway inflation.
The federal government does not need to have any debt. But they chose to because creating so much money that they can pay off all debt would create inflation.
The federal government believes that balancing is important. They want the amount of goods and services that America exports to the test of the world to match the amount Americans import. Each year there is a deficit which means that America receives more goods and services from other countries than it exports. In order to balance this, each year the Treasury issues bonds equaling the amount of the year’s trade deficit. We don’t have to do this but we choose to because we believe it will create financial stability.
The bonds that are issued by the US Treasury are essentially us debt, which means that the US collects money and gives a promise to make interest payments and to repay those bonds when they are due. This is where US debt comes from. It is from bonds that are issued by the Treasury and which will come due to be paid at the end of the Bond’s term.
BTW, banks essentially act like a store for money, where their job is to not run out of money. Their biggest fear is a bank run where everyone tries to withdraw at the same time. Deposits that are made, for example into checking accounts, are added to the bank’s reserves but can be used for anything from lending to investing to paying withdrawals. When you make a deposit at the bank, the bank creates an entry in their Ledger saying that they owe you that amount of money. That money is a liability for them (they must pay it to you) and they simultaneously credit their reserves.
booly@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
No, in the modern system, money is created by commercial banks when they give a loan.
At the moment a loan for $1 million is created, a bank takes $0 and then turns it into two accounts: a loan with a balance of negative $1 million owed, and a deposit account with a balance of $1 million that can be withdrawn. From the bank’s perspective, and the borrower’s perspective, they went from having $0 to suddenly each having $1 million in assets and $1 million in liabilities, for a net value of zero. Obviously there are going to be fees and stuff paid out, and interest charged over the life of the loan, but you can think of that as fees for services rendered.
The money in that deposit account, created out of thin air, can then be spent elsewhere and enter the economy.
The limits on the ability of banks to do that indefinitely is default risk (the bank is left holding the bag if the borrower doesn’t repay) and liquidity (the bank needs to be able to use the loan balances as an asset on its balance sheets to go and borrow cash for its own operations so that its accountholders always have the ability to withdraw money on demand) and government regulation (the Federal Reserve and the FDIC have various regulations requiring their balance sheets to be able to survive stress tests and other adverse economic events).
So even though the government, through Federal Reserve policy, controls how private market participants might choose to create money, the actual act of money creation happens in the banks, not in the government (except when the government is acting as a bank by lending money through its loan programs).
workerONE@lemmy.world 3 days ago
When a bank issues a loan it creates a credit in the borrower’s account. When the borrower withdraws/transfers the money from their account the money comes from the bank’s reserves. The bank’s reserves consists of deposits and other liquid assets. The money in the bank’s reserves started its life by being created by the federal government. You may argue that the bank is loaning money that it does not hold in reserves, but for lack of a better description, this is a huge liability for the bank that can create insolvency issues (bank run). For this reason, I do not agree that banks create money when they issue loans, since in the end their loans must be paid from the reserves. These reserves are not created by the bank.
AfterNova@lemmy.world [bot] 3 days ago
So that’s what is going on. Good reply.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
For the benefit of non-Google users, here is the unshortened URL for that Bank of England article: bankofengland.co.uk/…/money-creation-in-the-moder…
With that said, while this comment does correctly describe what the USA federal government does with tax revenues, it is mixing up the separate roles of the government (via the US Treasury) and the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve is the central bank in the USA, and is equivalent to the Bank of England (despite the name, the BoE serves the entire UK). The Federal Reserve is often shortened to “the Fed” by finance people, which only adds to the confusion between the Fed and the federal government. The central bank is responsible for keeping the currency healthy, such as preventing runaway inflation and preventing banking destabilization.
Whereas the US Treasury is the equivalent to the UK’s HM Treasury, and is the government’s agent that can go to the Federal Reserve to get cash. The Treasury does this by giving the Federal Reserve some bonds, and in turn receives cash that can be spent for employee salaries, capital expenditures, or whatever else Congress has authorized. We have not created any new money yet; this is an equal exchange of bonds for dollars, no different than what you or I can do by going to treasurydirect.gov and buying USA bonds: we give them money, they give us a bond. Such government bonds are an obligation that the government must pay in the future.
The Federal Reserve is the entity that can creates dollars out of thin air, bevause they control the interest rate of the dollar. But outside of major financial crisis, they only permit the dollar to inflate around 2% per year. That’s 2% new money being created from nothing, and that money can be swapped with the Treasury, thus the Federal Reserve ends up holding a large quantity of federal government bonds.
Drawing the distinction between the Federal Reserve and the government is important, because their goals can sometimes be at odds: in the late 1970s, the Iranian oil crisis caused horrific inflation, approaching 20%. Such unsustainable inflation threatened to spiral out of control, but also disincentivized investment and business opportunities: why start a new risky venture when a savings account would pay 15% interest? Knowing that this would be the fate of the economy if left unchecked, the Federal Reserve began to sell off huge quantities of its government bonds, thus pulling cash out of the economy. This curbed inflatable, but also created a recession in 1982, because any new venture needs cash but the Feds sucked it all up. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration would not have been pleased about this, because no government likes a recession. In the end, the recession subsided, as did inflation and unemployment levels, thus the economy escaped a doom spiral with only minor bruising.
To be abundantly clear, the Federal Reserve did indeed cause a recession. But the worse alternative was a recession that also came with a collapsed US dollar, unemployment that would run so deep that whole industries lose the workers needed to restart post-recession, and the wholesale emptying of the Federal Reserve and Treasury’s coffers. In that alternate scenario, we would have fired all our guns and have lost anyway.
AfterNova@lemmy.world [bot] 3 days ago
Doesn’t the government of the UK own the Bank of England?
booly@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
They control the base currency by physically printing dollars and lending money directly to banks. Then, more significantly, they influence the money supply by influencing how much commercial banks are lending, through interest rate operations, and sometimes through market operations that provide liquidity for certain types of securities (especially government bonds).
Taken together, it’s the power to create or destroy money in response to macroeconomic trends.