Murphy Kicks a Rock
Bob Murphy thinks it is a terrible time for the United States government to borrow more. At one point in this essay, Bob goes totally off the rails: "This is because government debt involves present citizens living at the expense of future taxpayers..." Now, in the endless Internet debate on whether debt government debt "is" a burden on future generations, again and again, all I have ever seen the proponents of "yes" show with their models is that, used in a certain way, government debt can be a burden on future generations. No one has ever shown that it necessarily is such a burden, which seems to be the claim Bob is making. With reference to Murphy's models in particular, Daniel Kuehn and I repeatedly duplicated any inter-generational transfer he modeled in a way that didn't use debt at all. As Noahopinion put it , "So I think this tells us something important about debt in the real world. What matters is not debt, it's intertem...