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I try to fill the @davidgraeber shaped hole in my heart by listening to podcasts and interviews of his. Such enormous sympathy for humanity combined with such an incredible ability to see things as they actually, fundamentally are.
1/ https://www.writersvoice.net/2011/07/debt-david-graeber/
1/ https://www.writersvoice.net/2011/07/debt-david-graeber/
Many of you are very familiar with his work, but it never hurts to restate some of his most profound insights, which only seem glaringly obvious once he’s pointed them out. This interview covers his history of debt.
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Graeber notes: debt is just a promise. We make promises all the time. Those promises start to become problematic when we begin *accounting* what we owe each other and using coercion to enforce it. But a promise is just an agreement, which can be renegotiated or...forgotten.
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B-b-but you can’t just forgive or erase or default on debts! The whole system would come crashing down! Moral hazards! Not fair! Who will pay! &etc forever!
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But Graeber notes people forgive or forget or renege on debts *constantly.* Donald Trump promised, variously, a new middle class tax cut, a healthcare plan, and an infrastructure bill he never even pretended to draft. These were promises of value that he defaulted on.
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Some people will insist that we have to distinguish between promises of this sort and the financial promises of debt. The why is not entirely clear—maybe because Trump’s promises were fairly vague and not really measurable in an accounting sense?
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Well, let’s try out another promise of value by a politician that *is* measurable in an accounting sense: @JoeBiden pretty explicitly promised everyone $2,000 stimulus checks.
7/ https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-georgia-senate-runoff-2000-stimulus-checks-immediately-2021-1
7/ https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-georgia-senate-runoff-2000-stimulus-checks-immediately-2021-1
Now, he’s telling us that we will instead be receiving $1,400. That’s a $600 difference! Joe Biden, in essence, made us a promise to pay us $2,000 and now owes us $2,000. He is *in debt* to us for $2,000. But he has already unilaterally defaulted on $600 of that debt.
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Now, this sucks. People will be hurt by the loss of even this meager stimulus. It sucks to be on the receiving end of a broken promise. Public trust in the promises of politicians, already low, will diminish. But will it cause chaos? Will it create moral hazards?
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The simple answer...no. This sort of thing happens all the time and the system keeps chugging along. Joe Biden created a debt of $2,000 to every American and then erased nearly half of it. The system keeps working. No one has to pay for it; we don’t have to “find the money.”
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I really want that to sink in. We don’t have to raise taxes to pay for that debt. It’s just gone. The promise was made, and then adjusted downward, and life just goes on. It’s a promise. A social fiction. It has no gravitational pull. Its power is what we give it.
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The key difference between the debts we all owe as part of daily life in late capitalism—for our homes, schools, cars, health, etc etc etc—and Joe Biden’s debt to us is that our debt is governed by contracts and laws—the coercive force of the state—while Biden’s is not.
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That’s what happens when you have such enormous gulfs in power between creditors and debtors. When we make promises, the law will make sure we keep them. When the rich make promises, they can be erased, ignored, defaulted on, renegotiated, etc.
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To borrow the phrase, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” That’s the only practical difference—the extent to which we can be coerced into keeping our promises to the letter and cent.
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A lot of this probably feels silly, like I’m playing cutesy word games. Biden’s promise is “like” debt but it’s not really debt. But that’s not because there’s anything fundamentally different about one promise or the other.
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That feeling arises because our political, legal, cultural, media, educational, and economic institutions have worked very hard to fossilize some kinds of promises into “debt” that *must* be repaid or else, and the promises of politicians, which, what are you gonna do 
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But as Graeber brilliantly, hopefully observed, these are all social constructs—they have life only because we created and sustain them socially. Which means that we can change them, too. And just like Joe Biden defaulting on us...well, you get the idea.
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