When the debt ceiling was first adopted in 1917, it might have been a useful way to prevent a president from spending however much he wanted. But since 1974, Congress has had a formal budget process designed to control spending and the taxes needed to finance it.
There's no reason for Congress to authorize borrowing for spending that Congress has already approved, especially when a failure to lift the debt ceiling would be so horrific.
Having a debt ceiling doesn't discipline government, anyway. Remember: The national debt is obligations government has already made to those who lent it money. Discipline has to do with setting spending limits and legislating tax increases, not penalizing the lenders.
Which is why most modern democracies don't have debt ceilings. Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia -- they do just fine without explicit borrowing limits.
Even more basically, the nation's debt is a meaningless figure without reference to the size of the overall economy and the pace of economic growth.
After World War II, America's debt was larger than our entire annual Gross Domestic Product, but we grew so much so fast in the 1950s and 1960s that the debt kept shrinking in proportion.
Today's debt is also higher than our GDP, but that's a problem only because the debt is growing faster than the economy is growing - so it's on the way to becoming larger and larger in proportion. But if we begin to spend more on public investments that will grow the economy (e.g., education and infrastructure in Biden's bills), the debt will start to decline in proportion to it.
This is what we ought to be focusing on. Fighting over whether to raise the debt ceiling is a dangerous distraction. Abolish it!
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