If, however, the U.S. Congress fails to reach an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, the government will likely run out of money to pay its bills as early as September, resulting in the U.S. (catastrophically) defaulting on its debt and struggling to pay things like federal employees’ salaries and Social Security.
The debt ceiling is an absurd and extreme method of selling a grand lie, and both parties are complicit. That lie is “taxpayer money” and the entire concept of taxation as “revenue” that the government uses to spend. This lie, and that of the currency issuer needing to “borrow” its own currency, is responsible for the growing misery index in America and is part of a grand design to privatize every aspect of American life to benefit corporations and market capitalism.
The monopoly issuer of the nation’s sovereign fiat currency (Congress) cannot “run out of” money. Even Trump has acknowledged this fact. The concept of the ceiling was intended as a self-imposed limitation on Congress to replace the gold standard, which had already failed at the time it was abandoned. It is also a red herring that allows Congress to abdicate its responsibility to “create the currency for the common welfare” as mandated in Article 1: Section 8 of our Constitution.
No nation that is a net importer and allows extreme wealth accumulation (both currency drains) can help but grow the currency supply if it is to maintain a stable economy and allow for sufficient currency to retire private sector bank debt. Once one realizes that any “revenue” of government only serves to lower the mostly irrelevant number of the national debt, and cannot survive that accounting process to then be “spent” again by Congress it becomes quite obvious that all the political rhetoric surrounding our monetary system is based on lies and the inclination of voters to project their household budget rules on their government.
Republicans use the ceiling to motivate their base in demanding spending cuts (basically cutting their own share of wealth) and Dems use it to justify calls to increase taxing of wealth. Dems, being mostly feckless and ineffective, have consistently lost this battle, as is evidenced by the trajectory of top tax rates since ’80, and probably would gain by telling the public the truth about money creation. That is if the public interest is their goal.
America obviously needs to tax its extremely wealthy more, but it is a large error to tie spending for the public purpose on doing so. This is what has caused the extreme decline of our infrastructure and the general economy. The wealthy pose the most formidable and well-funded block to take on politically because they can simply purchase the election of corrupt politicians to protect themselves from taxation. Their investment is paid back in multiples and the working class is kept subservient to employers, as well as dependent upon private bank debt to maintain their lifestyles.
