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Maxed-out Credit Card

References to a 'maxed-out credit card' are a part of the ‘household analogy' beloved of many politicians who like to claim that the affairs of a state must be run in a fashion akin to the way in which a household might be managed.

In this case the reference to the ‘maxed-out credit card' is supposed to imply that the state has run out of credit from its lenders and can borrow nothing more. The implication, which is heavily emphasised by those making use of the claim, is that the state must as a result cut its spending whether it likes it or not as its creditors will supply it with no more money. The claim is used to justify austerity requiring spending cuts by a government.

The claim, like all aspects of the household analogy, makes no sense.

A country cannot, for a start have a credit card.

In addition, a country with its own central bank and currency never needs to borrow: it can (and as a matter of fact, does) create all the money that is required to fund its spending by asking its central bank to create all the money required to fund that spending at the time that the spending in question takes place (see money creation).

The decision by a government to provide savers with the facility to save with it is an option, but not one that they need provide since the end of the gold standard era. During that era a government was supposedly only allowed to issue money if it had gold to back it. Without that gold to back new money creation a government supposedly had, if it wished to spend more than its receipts in the form of tax, to borrow to withdraw money from use elsewhere in the economy so that it might use that money instead to fund its own activities. With the artificial constraint of the gold standard having been removed, there is now no theoretical limit on the amount of money that a government can create. Nor need it borrow to fund its activities if its spending exceeds it tax revenues: it can simply instead run an overdraft at its central bank (called the Ways and Means Account in the UK).

As a result, the concept of government borrowing now makes no sense: instead the government now provides savers with a place of safe deposit for the funds that the government has already created by spending in excess of its tax revenues.

By definition, in that case government spending creates the funds available for those deposits (that some people still erroneously call government borrowing) to take place. Government spending can never be constrained by them as a result.

Nor is it possible in that case that those wishing to save with the government might constrain its spending plans: the government can either run an overdraft with its central bank to fund that spending or use quantitative easing (see separate entry, with all the caveats noted there).

The ‘maxed-out credit card' is mythology wholly unrelated to any economic reality in that case.


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