But those senators in DC are telling us “it can’t be done on the backs of our grandkids”.

This concept of "borrowing" to fund government spending is the biggest of all the many lies we are told. Because we, as "users" of the nation's currency, must find or earn that currency before we can spend it is easy to project that onto the "issuer" of the currency, but it simply doesn't apply.

The issuer of the currency creates "debt" when it spends and it erases that debt when it collects taxes. Those tax collections cannot then go on to "fund" anything. The US dollar is a tax credit and it completes its lifecycle when it is used to pay a tax obligation at the federal level. The balance between spending and collections is our deficit or surplus, but we cannot "pay down" that number without extracting more dollars from the private sector.

The very term "debt" is a misnomer and refers to the number of tax credits owed to us in return for the resources and labor the federal government demands from us. It represents the cumulative net payment for those since our nation was founded and began issuing its own sovereign currency. It is our only net source of US dollars in the economy.

Every dollar spent in deficit becomes someone's monetary asset in the private sector, not a mortgage on future productivity. It is our net money supply that is able to net retire private sector bank debt or be net saved as payment for our commerce with our government. Any collections in surplus simply mean clawing back those payments and effectively stealing those resources and labor without payment.

Until we decide that we must deal with federal finance from the perspective of operational reality instead of our collective ignorance and myths perpetrated to avoid spending on the public purpose we will make ourselves available as hostages to the likes of Manchin and his fellow neoliberals in government. We could have so much more.