I, for one, welcome our Japanese OverlordsFollow

They're "theoretically" for sale.

Not entirely. He also cares about the value of the currency the debt is in relative to his own. As the total quantity of debt increases, this concern becomes self fulfilling. In order to entice others to buy the bonds, you have to offer a higher interest rate. This (combined with other related factors) causes inflation, which affects the relative value of the bonds when they mature. This makes the next round of lenders demand even higher interest rates. Rinse and repeat and you end out in an inflationary spiral.

High public debt, no matter how you deal with it, risks creation of said inflation problem. While that *can* potentially help you get out of debt (cause you don't have to pay off as much as you borrowed relatively speaking), that only works if you stop spending more than you can afford at some point. So far, there's no sign of this coming from the Dems. One can only presume that their eventual solution will have to be massive tax increases (gee! If only someone had seen that coming...).



Again. It's not really the selling of the bonds that is the problem, but the lack of people willing to buy them. This factor only highlights that. If you know you have to wait X amount of years for the bond to mature, you're going to be really really hesitant to invest if you're unsure that what you'll get out the other side is going to be worth more than what you pay in today.




Sure. Maybe. But it's not like we're doing that stuff to any greater degree today than 5 years ago, or 5 years before that... What has "changed"? I'd argue that the politics are the excuse for the economic decisions and not the other way around, but obviously we'd both just be speculating either way.

Yeah, I kind of thought that was obvious from context

Siding with Smash on this one. I had an argument with a history prof once based on his statement that the Great Leap Forward was a miscalculation. I contended that it was a deliberate sacrifice.

That's pretty much what I meant. Or rather that it wasn't worth it to China to attempt to drive the nation that supports its own economy into collapse. You might well disagree on that point but that was the point I was making. I suppose I should have been clearer.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Most mecha anime I've watched that have flying mecha tend to be set at a bit later stage of technological development(or on a non-Earth planet) than what we currently have.

The most I'd expect right now is mecha that have rocket assisted jumping.


I'm interested in hearing more about this.

I'm sure there are smarter people than I who have actual facts and figures at hand. But my theory is based on the fact that Mao and his gang had made very few actual missteps, and by the 60s gave every appearance of having learned from those.

What they planned to do was absolutely revolutionary. They were determined to drag China into its rightful position in the world, and to do that they knew they had to break it and rebuild it from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy, and the means they chose to do that was to move people off of their family farms and into collectives. This was not going to be a simple or clean process, and the People (remember them? People's Republic and all) were not going to go along with it willingly. So they had to be forced, for the good of the nation and their own descendants.

My professor I mentioned above then stated that Mao had, indeed must have had, no idea how much loss of life this would entail. I averred that he couldn't know the actual numbers but he must have a rough idea, and factored a few million deaths into the equation. One expendable resource China had was small-p people, and he was willing to spend as many as it took. The warm fuzzy feeling based on the idea that he didn't, and by the time he realized it the process was too far gone, is incorrect in my view because at that point he would have faltered, and as far as I can see he did not falter.

Mind you, until recently and to some extent even now China has been and is a closed book. It's all theory, on my part at least.

Could always say "We're owned by the Empire!". It has a good ring to it, though I don't think we really qualify as an Empire anymore.