This assumes that the people funding the national debt are disproportionately the wealthy. I didn't have evidence then but now I do.
The chart below, taken from his 2013 article in New Political Economy, shows the share of the U.S. public debt held by the Top 1%. This share follows the general historical contours of the overall distribution of wealth, and is currently hovering around 45% – approximately the same level as at the turn of the twentieth century.
Equally startling is the extreme concentration of debt holdings by corporations...in the first decade of the millennium, 2,675 firms – representing a tiny 0.05% of all corporations – owned a whopping 82% of the public debt held by corporations. This concentration is significantly higher than it was in the 1950s, when a similar number of firms, representing 0.2% of all corporations, owned 66% of the debt held by corporations.Who owns the public debt? (Real World Economics Review blog)
No wonder profits are so high!
This also explains why even though the government is perennially underfunded, the Republicans can simultaneously portray the deficit as an existential threat while making it their central policy to reduce tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. In fact, they just passed the "Death Tax Repeal Act" (HR 1105) which would eliminate taxes on the country's richest people while increasing the deficit by 269 billion dollars over the next ten years. Yet they will still turn around and claim things like the deficit is too high, and unemployment insurance must be eliminated.
This drives more borrowing, which is the point. Republicans then go one to claim that the solution is to just to reduce spending to whatever the tax rate happens to be, yet when they get in office, they never do that! In fact, both government spending and budget deficits have historically risen far more under Republicans than Democrats. And the claim that reducing taxes on the wealthy somehow supercharges the economy and increases revenue is failing year after year everywhere it has been tried.
So the next time someone says that "we" own the deficit, or try to portray the people owning saving bonds as salt-of-the earth ordinary people like grandma saving for retirement, you can call bullshit. The concept of "national debt" is a redistribution scheme pure and simple, whether here or in Greece.
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