What are some odd ways to balance your counties debt?

An odd way may be for government to spend less, like we have to do when we’ve not enough money.

Put all the money on red.

[NSFW response]

You could regulate sex (register all sexual acts with the government), so that each activity was taxed and paid for. $5.00 tax for Oral sex, $25.00 for anal, $100 tax for actual coitus. It’s not likely that people will stop doing sexual things, so it would be a ready made means of raising revenue. (Assuming you could figure out how to keep track)

Of course, that approach makes us all prostitutes and the government a big pimp. Which arguably, it is already.

You’ve found my bugbear, so no humour from me on this one.

The way a country “balances its debt” is to simply not issue it.

In other words: it stops printing and issuing bonds and simply services the interest on existing ones until maturity, which it does trivially because it controls the central bank that creates the required money from nothing.

This leads me to another short explainer. @Chestnut has invoked what I’ll call the household fallacy. The idea that a government that controls and issues its own currency has a constrained budget in the way a household might do, which it hasn’t, since there’s no risk of insolvency and no one will come to repossess the furniture from the Capitol and White House.

There’s a few issues with this line of thinking, but the main point it misses is that spending is someone else’s income. When the government allocates spending, it is also creating income for the non-government/private sector. It’s “creating jobs” as right-wingers love to say.

Income can either be saved or spent again.

When income is spent, it becomes someone else’s income again, which is taxed. As this initial government spending (becoming income for the private sector) cycles through the economy through repeated transactions, it gets taxed a bit each time, until practically all of it is “paid back” in taxes.

What isn’t paid back are savings, which is where the deficit and debt come from, with government debt itself being a saving scheme for the private sector.

Legalize and tax prostitution.