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Comment on Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt?

Money collected from taxes is basically recorded in a ledger / account by the Treasury. Some people look at this as the end of the lifespan of that money or the destruction of that money.

Money begins its life by being spent by the federal government. They essentially create money with the press of a keystroke (granted they are spending funds which are approved by Congress and allocated for projects), the money credits a Treasury account, then they transfer it / spend it which puts the money into circulation.

The federal government does not NEED the money you pay in taxes to find their spending. Money does not come from people. It is created solely by the treasury. The federal government WANTS to limit the amount of money put into circulation (compared to the amount thru collect from taxes) in order to prevent runaway inflation.

The federal government does not need to have any debt. But they chose to because creating so much money that they can pay off all debt would create inflation.

The federal government believes that balancing is important. They want the amount of goods and services that America exports to the test of the world to match the amount Americans import. Each year there is a deficit which means that America receives more goods and services from other countries than it exports. In order to balance this, each year the Treasury issues bonds equaling the amount of the year’s trade deficit. We don’t have to do this but we choose to because we believe it will create financial stability.

The bonds that are issued by the US Treasury are essentially us debt, which means that the US collects money and gives a promise to make interest payments and to repay those bonds when they are due. This is where US debt comes from. It is from bonds that are issued by the Treasury and which will come due to be paid at the end of the Bond’s term.

BTW, banks essentially act like a store for money, where their job is to not run out of money. Their biggest fear is a bank run where everyone tries to withdraw at the same time. Deposits that are made, for example into checking accounts, are added to the bank’s reserves but can be used for anything from lending to investing to paying withdrawals. When you make a deposit at the bank, the bank creates an entry in their Ledger saying that they owe you that amount of money. That money is a liability for them (they must pay it to you) and they simultaneously credit their reserves.

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litchralee@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
For the benefit of non-Google users, here is the unshortened URL for that Bank of England article: bankofengland.co.uk/…/money-creation-in-the-moder…

With that said, while this comment does correctly describe what the USA federal government does with tax revenues, it is mixing up the separate roles of the government (via the US Treasury) and the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve is the central bank in the USA, and is equivalent to the Bank of England (despite the name, the BoE serves the entire UK). The Federal Reserve is often shortened to “the Fed” by finance people, which only adds to the confusion between the Fed and the federal government. The central bank is responsible for keeping the currency healthy, such as preventing runaway inflation and preventing banking destabilization.

Whereas the US Treasury is the equivalent to the UK’s HM Treasury, and is the government’s agent that can go to the Federal Reserve to get cash. The Treasury does this by giving the Federal Reserve some bonds, and in turn receives cash that can be spent for employee salaries, capital expenditures, or whatever else Congress has authorized. We have not created any new money yet; this is an equal exchange of bonds for dollars, no different than what you or I can do by going to treasurydirect.gov and buying USA bonds: we give them money, they give us a bond. Such government bonds are an obligation that the government must pay in the future.

The Federal Reserve is the entity that can creates dollars out of thin air, bevause they control the interest rate of the dollar. But outside of major financial crisis, they only permit the dollar to inflate around 2% per year. That’s 2% new money being created from nothing, and that money can be swapped with the Treasury, thus the Federal Reserve ends up holding a large quantity of federal government bonds.

Drawing the distinction between the Federal Reserve and the government is important, because their goals can sometimes be at odds: in the late 1970s, the Iranian oil crisis caused horrific inflation, approaching 20%. Such unsustainable inflation threatened to spiral out of control, but also disincentivized investment and business opportunities: why start a new risky venture when a savings account would pay 15% interest? Knowing that this would be the fate of the economy if left unchecked, the Federal Reserve began to sell off huge quantities of its government bonds, thus pulling cash out of the economy. This curbed inflatable, but also created a recession in 1982, because any new venture needs cash but the Feds sucked it all up. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration would not have been pleased about this, because no government likes a recession. In the end, the recession subsided, as did inflation and unemployment levels, thus the economy escaped a doom spiral with only minor bruising.

To be abundantly clear, the Federal Reserve did indeed cause a recession. But the worse alternative was a recession that also came with a collapsed US dollar, unemployment that would run so deep that whole industries lose the workers needed to restart post-recession, and the wholesale emptying of the Federal Reserve and Treasury’s coffers. In that alternate scenario, we would have fired all our guns and have lost anyway.

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- AfterNova@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Doesn’t the government of the UK own the Bank of England?
  
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booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Money begins its life by being spent by the federal government.

No, in the modern system, money is created by commercial banks when they give a loan.

At the moment a loan for $1 million is created, a bank takes $0 and then turns it into two accounts: a loan with a balance of negative $1 million owed, and a deposit account with a balance of $1 million that can be withdrawn. From the bank’s perspective, and the borrower’s perspective, they went from having $0 to suddenly each having $1 million in assets and $1 million in liabilities, for a net value of zero. Obviously there are going to be fees and stuff paid out, and interest charged over the life of the loan, but you can think of that as fees for services rendered.

The money in that deposit account, created out of thin air, can then be spent elsewhere and enter the economy.

The limits on the ability of banks to do that indefinitely is default risk (the bank is left holding the bag if the borrower doesn’t repay) and liquidity (the bank needs to be able to use the loan balances as an asset on its balance sheets to go and borrow cash for its own operations so that its accountholders always have the ability to withdraw money on demand) and government regulation (the Federal Reserve and the FDIC have various regulations requiring their balance sheets to be able to survive stress tests and other adverse economic events).

So even though the government, through Federal Reserve policy, controls how private market participants might choose to create money, the actual act of money creation happens in the banks, not in the government (except when the government is acting as a bank by lending money through its loan programs).

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- workerONE@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  When a bank issues a loan it creates a credit in the borrower’s account. When the borrower withdraws/transfers the money from their account the money comes from the bank’s reserves. The bank’s reserves consists of deposits and other liquid assets. The money in the bank’s reserves started its life by being created by the federal government. You may argue that the bank is loaning money that it does not hold in reserves, but for lack of a better description, this is a huge liability for the bank that can create insolvency issues (bank run). For this reason, I do not agree that banks create money when they issue loans, since in the end their loans must be paid from the reserves. These reserves are not created by the bank.
  
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  - booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Your own link from the Bank of England starts off with the thesis that agrees with me:
    
    This article explains how the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans
    
    And you might as well link to the canonical URL of the PDF or the Bank of England website landing page for that article instead of Google Drive acting as a middleman.
    
    The money in the bank’s reserves started its life by being created by the federal government.
    
    No, you’re misunderstanding how the money supply works. The creation of physical printed money might happen by the government, but those physical dollars represent such a small portion of the overall money supply.
    
    First of all, through fractional reserve banking, one physical dollar can get multiplied many times over to represent many dollars in circulation. Especially because most transactions happen on paper, through a ledger that transfers funds from one account to another.
    
    Everything you’re saying still relates to the practical limits of money creation by commercial banks, in terms of creditworthiness (banks don’t want to lend money they can’t get back) and liquidity/regulation (banks don’t want to be left vulnerable without sufficient reserves to satisfy account holders demanding their deposits).
    
    Realistically, the bank takes one of their own assets, such as the balance on the loan, and uses that as collateral to borrow liquid cash as needed for its own reserves (which are only a fraction of the total deposits in its accounts). And every dollar in a circle in a closed loop that doesn’t touch the Fed is a dollar that doesn’t actually trace back to a governmental entity. The Fed is a lender of last resort, but they’re a last resort because they generally charge higher interest than bank to bank loans.
    
    So of the entire money supply, the vast majority of it is dollars created by banks, not dollars created by the government.
    
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    workerONE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    You’re right that that article does talk about banks creating money and it’s true that banks can create money when they lend more than they have in reserves and assets. But my larger point was that although people can spend the money, to the bank it’s a liability when they can’t cover withdrawals during a bank run. If they were liquidated they would have a negative balance in the amount that they had loaned out or created and they would now have a liability .Also, you mentioned fractional reserve banking but that no longer exists. It ended around 2020 when the government changed regulations and no longer requires banks to hold any ratio of reserves to debt.
    
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- AfterNova@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  So that’s what is going on. Good reply.
  
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