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Total credit card debt having just hit a record $1.1 trillion, up $363B since 2021. That's $7.3B a month. Buy Now, Pay Later schemes, projected at $117B this year, aren’t even counted. (fred.stlouisfed.org)

submitted 3 days ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/usa@midwest.social

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[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social -1 points 3 days ago

CW: leftism

Here's a concept that we don't think about often: Money is not wealth. Wealth is stuff, things, goods that make life better, or even just possible. It's just that in an advanced, industrialized, market economy, money is so trivially exchanged for wealth that we confuse the concepts.

But think about a billionaire dropped off in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness in the middle of winter. In that situation, wealth means food, warm clothing, firewood, tools to construct a shelter with, y'know, the things that would let him survive. Money is not wealth, except perhaps if he had billions of dollars in cash with him. Cash could be wealth, in that it's a material object that he could stack to build shelter, stuff in his clothing for insulation, to burn for warmth. But intangible money is not wealth.

So, the fact that all of those American citizens were able to buy things with credit shows that the United States is a fabulously wealthy nation. We can provide materially for everybody! What's more, the billionaire class is also fabulously wealthy, with an enormous share of the material bounty that our advanced, industrialized economy can produce.

See where I'm going with this? "Debt" is just numbers in a computer. Again, money is not wealth; the wealth was produced and distributed without money, but with this fake concept called debt attached. We could just wipe the ledger clean, erase all of the debt, and it wouldn't materially harm anybody. (In fact, it would benefit tens of millions of people.) The lenders already have their material needs fulfilled hundreds of times over. Nobody would starve. Nobody would even have to cancel their vacation.

Something to think about.