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America is ‘going broke slowly’ says J.P. Morgan, as national debt balloons and tariff revenue looks shaky
(uk.finance.yahoo.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Eldritch is right, but it’s kinda like Newtonian physics vs general relativity: you can think of (federal) taxes as “funding the government” and it’s not a terrible approximation. But it’s not the reality.
The reality is more like what Eldritch said: money is spent into existence, and taxed out of existence. The issuer of a currency doesn’t need to take the currency from you in order to spend it — they need to destroy it so that their newly-printed currency is actually worth chasing after.
Sounds like a distinction without a difference, right?
Except it matters when we talk about “tariffs funding the government” (cuz they don’t) or “how are we gonna pay for something like the green new deal?” (paying for it is the easy part, controlling inflation is the real constraint).
When we talk about major economic initiatives, it kinda matters for people to understand how money actually works. Musk, for example, had no clue and thought he had uncovered some massive scandal when he gained access to the federal payment system and was confused at how the funds don’t actually come from anywhere: https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/elon-musk-discovers-the-magic-of
I'm not going to pretend I'm an economist, but the idea that the government prints money is not new to me. If the government is "funded" via destroying money (because there is an inflation rate they are attempting to keep constant meaning they can spend X for every Y they destroy) then taking in "funding" via tariffs allows them to either print more money to make up for the additional "income" (aka increased government spending ideally on the public good) or need less money from other sources (lower other taxes - not how it happens but theoretically a possibility), or apply that "excess" to the debt (basically print directly to the debt holders). This does not make taxes or tariffs irrelevant. It is the way the government is "funded" since it needs income to maintain inflation. Is this not a correct reading? I'm legitimately open to learning something right now, but replacing "spend" with "print" and "tax" with burn does not really affect anything considering inflation is a constraint. I understand it's not 1:1 but that does not mean taxes are "disappeared" in any meaningful sense in this context.
It's a very meaningful difference, because these two things (spending and taxing) aren't actually related
Think of it like watering a plant. Watering is spending, and taxation is drainage. What actually matters is how wet the soil is
Our problem isn't the spending, it's that the drainage is bad. We have too much stagnant money. No amount of watering or not watering could fix that... The plant still needs water, even as mold in the bottom of the pot hurts the plant
Generally, taxes are drainage. As money moves around, a little bit drains out of the system at each step
Tarrifs aren't drainage, they're flow restrictiors. They reduce the amount of money moving around, which doesn't help the situation
It's not a perfect metaphor, but to strip it all away - the problem is that billionaires and speculation are collecting money in massive hoards, and the velocity of the money is zero
The actual health of an economy is the velocity of money, the amount in the system is secondary