[mojomark]

Thanks. I do understand the value in holding debt, to my engineering brain it's analogous to a heat sink - without it, energy (money) has impetus to flow. I guess I don't have a good sense for what "the right" amount of debt is for a country, so to your point, I don't really have solid reason to assume we should even care about buying down our debt.

I think the root of my confusion was clarified by the other reply above - it's not that the US just has a stash of excess capital coming in and UBI is a way to spend it, but rather UBI is a way for a government to step in, and force it's ultra-rich citizens to put their money back into the economic engine at the base level... like an artificial mechanism to account for some percieved flaw in the natural capitalistic process.

[ai_critic]

No problem!

The big thing--usually missed by most folks, especially engineers whose intuitions and experience are correct but in the wrong domain--is that you don't balance a country's budget like you do a household's. The scale is different, the incentives are different, the problems and tools are different.

Of course, to confound things, it's entirely possible that we should treat a country's balancebook like a household's, and it's just the dumb luck of near 3/4 of a century that we've gotten away with assumptions like mine. :)