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Yo_Mama

(8,303 posts)
4. That's right - bond issues are future raises in taxes
Sat Apr 27, 2013, 10:03 AM
Apr 2013

You are spreading current costs over a longer term.

That having been said, there are some things for which costs should be paid over the longer term. Buildings, like schools, for example. But non-capital account bond issues are a problem - if you are just floating bonds so as not to pay recurring costs out of revenue, in the future the implication is that tax rates must increase to compensate.

The problem arises when you float long bonds for short-term purchases. It's no different than families in 2003-2007 refinancing their houses and taking cash-outs to pay off credit card and auto loans. Yes, they got cheaper interest rates, but now they shifted the cost of buying things that should have been paid from current earnings to long-term debt, and although they may have felt like they had more cash flow in the short term, over the longer term they were probably dooming themselves toward paying more overall of their incomes to pay off those purchases.

If you keep doing that, whether it's a municipality, state or federal government, sometime in the future you will end up very broke!

People who get in that situation usually stop spending and go on a personal austerity binge,, but that's hard for governments, so they raise taxes as much as they can, and in the end, it also creates an austerity binge.

Huge overhangs of debt do way on economies, no matter what the current cant is. However total debt burdens have to be looked at. If household debt is high in relation to GDP and business debt is high in relation to GDP and government debt is high in relation to GDP, the situation is very different from a country in which government debt is high in relation to GDP but household and business debt isn't - in that country you can afford to raise taxes!

But if every sector has high debt, the problem snowballs quite quickly, because future investment will be restricted due to the need to at least pay interest on the debt. Nor can you inflate your way out of it, because that means higher interest rates which raise the carrying cost of new investments and usually the new debt.

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