The Inflationary Fantasy of Public and Private Debt

March 31, 2022

Despite chronic political anxiety about our federal deficit no real action is ever taken to deal with it or the coming defaults in entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.  Any "reductions" in spending are actually reductions in the growth of spending.  Federal, state, and local spending is called "investment" but no governmental official ever establishes the actual accountable return on investment, nor is there ever any audit of that investment's results.  No politician or bureaucrat engages in public discussion of the opportunity costs of removal of capital from the private economy by taxation and regulation.  Most monetary capital so removed is now produced by expansion of fiat (fake) money by the government. Examples include production of government and private bonds purchased by the banking and Federal Reserve, creation of new credit in the fractional reserve banking system, actual expanded printing of new currency, distribution of new monies digitally to the pu…