[Copernicus]

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Its the same thing as if I loan my money to my friend who will repay me with interest. If you take a loan to yourself and promise to pay yourself back 2x, you aren't making any investment. This is because you would have the 2x ANYWAY.

I am not surprised by Copernicus's direct concealment of the program, but I am pretty surprised you fail to understand the difference.

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And Im not surprised that you let your polictical agenda cloud your reasoning or justify your lying about what you do understand.

"If you take a loan to yourself and promise to pay yourself back 2x, you aren't making any investment. This is because you would have the 2x ANYWAY."

This is obviously true, and has nothing whatsover to do with the prudence of doing just that. If your savings account yields 5% and you have an investment opporunity "guaranteed" to yield 8%, then "borrowing from yourself" makes perfect sense, even though your net worth is unchanged at the moment of the transaction.

If you're an investing savant and your investments are earning 10% (but have exhausted those opportunities), but you can borrow at 6%, then go out and finance the purchase of your guaranteed 8% investment..even though at the moment of your transactions your net worth is unchanged. Its not that hard to understand on a personal level.

When you escalate it to the government level the transaction is fundamentally the same as the first transaction, although the decisions carry fiscal/monetary/risk and intergenerational consequences that in fact make it MORE appropriate for the Government to "borrow from itself".

If a thread starts on deficit spending many of the issues overlap, and of course, there are situations where deficit spending is appropriate and others where it isn't. The conflation of spending and funding discussions only serve to obfuscate the issues, which are totally independent, but are a common tactic in these attempts to disseminate myths about Social Security, so keeping spending out of this discussion can only improve it.

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A real world example of lending money to yourself is borrowing from your 401k and paying yourself back with interest. It's not like that doesn't happen ever, it happens quite frequently. If you're not very dilligent, frugal whatever, probably don't want to do it. If you are though it can be a rational thing to do.

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Yeah, in a prior thread I used the IRA/401(k) example but then the obfuscators wanted to get into the minutae of it, such as tax effects, instead of the big picture.