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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 1208754, member: 11668&quot;]Well, I still can&#039;t get past it....&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>The only reason the government needs to go into debt is that it spends more than it takes in in tax revenue.&nbsp; If that situation were reversed, through spending cuts and/or tax increases, then the government would begin to pay down the debt.&nbsp; If they did that for long enough, they could pay down the debt all the way to zero, even while the Federal Reserve still existed and the FRNs still circulated.&nbsp; (The Fed would have to start holding much larger quantities of assets other than Treasury debt, but this could be done--they were studying this issue seriously back in the late &#039;90s, when the government was running a surplus and projections showed the debt could be paid off in a decade or two.)&nbsp; There is no connection between the existence of the Fed/FRNs, and the existence of the national debt.&nbsp; Either would survive the elimination of the other.</p><p><br /></p><p>If &quot;the debt is the money and the money is the debt&quot;, then why do you keep talking about &quot;debt-free money&quot;?&nbsp; You&#039;re still contradicting yourself.&nbsp; As I&#039;ve been saying all along, USNs are debt too: debt owed by the Treasury to the holders of the USNs.&nbsp; They&#039;re interest-free debt, yes--but as I pointed out above, paying interest to yourself is the same as paying no interest at all, so the FRNs are still just as good as the USNs in this regard.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, keep in mind that the value of all FRNs in circulation is less than $1T, while the total national debt is around $14T.&nbsp; If we tried to pay off the national debt by using USNs, that&#039;d multiply the amount of paper money in circulation by fifteen.&nbsp; Clearly this is absurd--where&#039;s all that paper supposed to go?&nbsp; Currently, many countries and investors like to hold on to Treasury bonds because they pay interest; nobody would want to sit on a large pile of non-interest-bearing USNs.&nbsp; So either the Treasury would have to redeem the extra $14T in USNs (hey, there&#039;s that debt right back again!), or else the USNs would rapidly become worthless due to the massive excess of supply.&nbsp; (Note that this isn&#039;t exactly inflation--the *dollar* would still retain its value, but a $1 USN would be worth far less than a dollar, possibly zero if it were truly non-redeemable.&nbsp; People would just have to do all their dollar-denominated transactions using checks or electronic payments, since the paper money would have little to no value.)</p><p><br /></p><p>So to answer your final question: If it were &quot;possible to have debt-free money and no interest payments&quot;, I doubt that anybody would argue against it.&nbsp; The only reason you find anyone arguing against it is that <i>it&#039;s not possible</i>.&nbsp; &quot;Debt&quot; does not mean what you say it means, and debt does not work as you say it works.&nbsp; The only truly debt-free money would be money with intrinsic value (think gold or silver coins); and that kind of money is no help in paying off the existing national debt, because the Treasury doesn&#039;t own enough gold or silver to make much of a dent in $14T.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m sorry to have to break this to you, but we can&#039;t get out from under the national debt just by seeing the light and standing up against the evil central bankers.&nbsp; Our problem is even worse than that.&nbsp; If you think it&#039;d be difficult to convince our politicians to eliminate the Fed, then wait until you see how hard it is to convince them to do anything that&#039;d *really* solve our debt problem![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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