Since people are misreading this comment, either deliberately or because I have not been clear enough, I am going to assume good faith and edit the comment to be more clear.
---
And 6.7x the amount of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global exceeds the entire annual budget of the US government.
Imagine if the US could just magically borrow from next year's budget, but at zero cost? That's the net effect of having an entire additional several trillion dollars laying around.
In hard numbers, that 6.7x works out to around $9.3 trillion, of which it's a pretty safe assumption that you can "borrow" around 3% of it annually, forever. That works out to around $280 billion.
It ain't chump change. We could easily end homelessness in the US with that amount, and have much more left over to do even more social good.
After we take the 50-ish billion a year it would take to eradicate homelessness (keep in mind, we can sustain this in real terms approximately forever), let's move on to higher education. The Debt Free College act would reportedly cost the US $75 billion a year.
No problem. We've only spent half of what we can borrow in perpetuity from the future with this hypothetical sovereign wealth fund laying around.
Let's go for the triple crown and give everybody universal, employer-independent health coverage.
Oh, guess what? That was a trick. Implementing universal healthcare, simply replacing premiums by taxes, would save the US many more billions of dollars we could put to good use doing even more social good.
And, so, now, we've reached a point where nobody in the US needs to ever worry about student loans, medical costs, or homelessness again. (Well, okay, not nobody -- we still need to figure out something for the people who have taken out student loans already, but I think we can probably handle that.) It's not quite the extensive welfare state that Norway has, but it's pretty damn close.
Guess what happens to the labor market under those conditions? If you said "it becomes much more like a free market," you guessed right! And who can argue against that, really?
Comparing a pension fund, which is designed to pay out over, well, indefinitely, to an annual budget, makes no sense. One is a rate. One is a total. It's like saying you can fly 400 mph but the earth is only 90 mega-miles from the sun and since 90 is less than 400 the sun is not that far.
Numerology doesn't work in economics.
The fact is that Norway has this luxury solely through massive per capita oil wealth. The US cannot come close to this.
