I’m with stupid
We know how this works. You borrow money at a high rate — say, on a credit card — and the interest accrues and drives you further into debt, so you’re borrowing more and accruing more interest and before you know it, you’ve lost everything and you’re fighting a pack of wild dogs for the first chance to pick from the dumpster*.
We might feel sorry for these people. In the cases where it was bad control of outgoings versus incomings, of course, we might feel more sorry for them being so stupid. The bad news in this case is that it’s us.
Of the 9 trillion of public debt the US is going to accumulate over the next few years, over half of it is interest on US debt. What’s worse is that that’s interest on debts that weren’t accrued at credit card rates but instead at the lowest lending rates possible. And the Fed chooses how much money to print.
We turn, as we so often do**, to Borges:
Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
When we look at the debt, we are building the picture of the originator of the stupid and, lo, it is our own***.
We suck. You people more than me.
*It may, of course, be that the dogs are actually there for some delicious “long pig”. Smelling bad enough to be unpalatable for wild dogs is hard to do, but a few hours spent sniffing the customers in the average role-playing games store may convince you that it can be done.
**Casual readers should note that this is not strictly true.
***This is a play on an Eddington quote of similar sort.