The founders clearly declared their socialist leaning in Article 1: Section 8 where they defined the powers of government. They gave the power of the purse to the people’s Congress without qualification except for a mandate that it create the nation’s currency “for the general welfare”. This is why all budgets must originate in the house, as Senate oversight didn’t happen until later.

In spite of later perversions of that mandate involving the gold standard, this clause makes the US dollar self-funding. Dollars created by Congress never require funding or repayment, and any “revenue” of the government only serves the purpose of inflation control, as it needs no revenue to fulfill its Constitutional mandate or to provision itself. In fact, it is spending by Congress that “funds” both taxation and borrowing, as spending must happen prior to the currency being available to collect or borrow. Our monetary system, at its core, has always been by fiat.

The concept of taxation/borrowing “funding” our government is fairly recent and is a product of the gold standard that limited the available currency to the value of the gold reserve. Even then, taxation/borrowing only provided “policy space” to create new currency. This worked well only as long as we remained a net exporter and could increase the reserve to enable economic growth. As soon as that status reversed we experienced currency depletion and our only recourse that didn’t include default was to end the gold standard, which we did domestically in ’34 and internationally in ‘71.

Sans a gold reserve to defend, we are now able to use the federal budget to manage the economy again, but that doesn’t resonate with the people’s own budget processes, so is a tough sell, especially considering the anti-government fervor generated by business-friendly conservatives. The fact that the general population opposes its own net revenue source mitigating anyone’s suffering by political choices even when it costs nothing only speaks to its ignorance.