People who are serious about economics at the federal level should make fun of such simplistic thinking that denies the existence of monetary sovereignty and fiat currencies. Not only is such thinking wrong, but it is 180 degrees wrong and dangerous.
The common-sense notion of the U.S. national debt is that we can’t keep running up deficits forever.
This is a great example of such thinking. It presumes that our government is funded by a combination of taxation and borrowing. The truth is that our government "funds" the economy with money it creates in deficit of what it claws back in taxation. As the monopoly issuer of US dollars, it neither needs nor uses its own dollars back to enable spending. It has an infinite ability to create its own monetary unit and there is no "infinite+1" in math that would enhance that ability.
It is the only source of net monetary assets the private sector has and represents the "net" payment for the resources, labor, and expenditure the private sector contributes to provisioning the government. A "balanced" budget, or worse a surplus, effectively steals those from the private sector without providing a store of value for them. No economy can withstand that resource and currency drain for very long without becoming deflationary.
But the point is that the U.S. having the dollar as the world reserve currency is not set in stone.
Not only is it not set in stone, but it isn't even true. Our Federal Reserve offers a clearing bank for business transacted in US dollars and that is attractive to many international interests who desire dollars, either to conduct commerce or to purchase our Treasury bonds, which are still the most secure parking for excess dollars in the world.
The US backed out of the Bretton-Woods agreement in '71, formally ending any relationship between US dollars and international trading formally. The system was working so well that it simply persisted. It is the size and productivity of the US economy that makes its currency desirable for trade, not any formal contract.
If we need to use another currency to obtain a needed resource there are plenty of investors wanting US dollars to make the trade, assuming we can continue investing in our people to create an economy worth investing in. That won't happen if we don't recognize that dollars drained away in excessive taxation and foreign trade need to be replaced in the economy.
Taxation should be targeted where dollars accumulate in excess and spending should be targeted to increase productivity or our economy will rely on private bank debt with no means of net retiring that debt or being net saved. While this bodes well for Wall St and banking, it creates a fragile economy that crashes with every downturn in the business cycle.
These downturns kick off reactive spending in social safety nets to forgo misery that could be avoided with a more logical approach to money creation. One such approach is the federal job guarantee that doesn't rely on involuntary unemployment as the current Fed policy of hiking or dropping interest rates does. The program would properly value labor and set a bottom for private-sector employment with a livable wage and benefits while also injecting federal money where and when it is needed.
You either pay with actual austerity or you pay with austerity through inflation. The former is honest and the latter is dishonest.
Austerity econ is favorable to only the top of the economic food chain and horrible for anyone else. There is no need for causing misery in any rich economy, and ours is the richest in the world. Sadly, your perverse economics is easily adopted by the people who relate to money as "users" of the currency.
Such thinking has no place in a sovereign fiat economy except to enrich the already rich at the cost of lives and well being of others. If the people ever discover the economic truth that Congress can afford anything it can resource you might want to find a deep hole to hide in for a while until your advocacy for their misery is forgotten.
