The debt of the government — pubic debt — is serviced by collecting taxes. While in MMT the central government can never run out of money, people, who must pay taxes to service the debt that the central government creates by spending more than it collects in taxes, can run out of money.

The US dollar is, and always has been, self-funding by the authority given to Congress in our Constitution. In your view of public finance who exactly owes this debt and to whom? The entirety of any suffering in this rich country can be traced back to knee jerk misinterpretation of the single word “debt” in public accounting. That debt is mostly represented by Treasury bonds that provide a small return, but regardless of uninformed perception, it is spending in excess of tax collections that “funds” their purchase, not the other way around.

One cannot collect or borrow what doesn’t yet exist, so spending must always be first in the order. Borrowing, like taxation, destroys dollars previously spent into the private sector and cannot survive balancing the debt that created them to “fund” anything. Just the potential for such costly propaganda should be sufficient motivation to end the practice of issuing bonds in sync with deficit spending. We can, and should, set a permanent base interest rate at zero, or pay a small dividend on excess reserves at the Fed.