No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Ok, so the idea that "government debt is the debt of the citizens" is not entirely true.
In general government takes on debt if it's planned spending is bigger than its revenue.
There are many reasons for that phenomenon, the main being, that the government undertakes many programmes (for example social security) that it needs to pay for, as well as the cost of its operations etc. being bigger than the profits from those operations.
There are two types of govt debt - external (owed to foreigners) and internal - owed to its own citizens (which is why saying that each individual citizen "owes" some amount of govt debt is inaccurate). The latter is mostly in the form of govt bonds and loans from national banks.
There are two main impacts of govt debt:
High debt can cause an increase in interest rates, which will lead to a fall in private investment (which is a component of GDP, and translates to future economic growth i.e. high debt --> high interest rates --> lower investment --> slower growth)
And obvious one is the risk of a sovereign debt crisis like in Greece, when the government is unable to repay its debt, leading to an economic crisis, collapse of the economy, IMF loans and all that "good stuff". That is an extreme situation, and usually means that the country is in deep shit regardless of debt.
There are also tangentially related risks.
Inflation - One might ask "Why not issue more money to pay off the debt?" Inflation is the answer why. According to theory, one of the forms of inflation is monetary inflation, when there is so much currency available, that the purchasing power of the currency unit (i.e. $1, 1€ etc.) falls, so prices rise to keep up with the fall.
The decrease in purchasing power of the currency also means, that foreign currencies become "stronger" in relation to it. That's good if you're earning your wages in dollars, but your home currency is falling (since your wages effectively rise in value) but if you're in the opposite situation it can be a problem.