The use of voter ignorance concerning how our money is created to restrict spending for the public purpose is the greatest con in history. The idea that the currency-issuing government would, or even could, borrow its own currency back to enable its spending is so absurd as to be comical, but it has remained at the center of America’s fiscal policy since it left the gold standard.

Congress creates the US dollar by its Constitutional authority (Article 1: Section 8) every time it spends into the private sector, and it destroys dollars when it collects them as tax payments. The difference between dollars created and those collected/destroyed via taxation is the “national debt”, which any reasonable person’s logic would also inform them is the net money supply of dollars in the non-government sector. The only way to “pay off” this number would be for the government to collect all outstanding dollars in the economy as tax payments, leaving the private sector in default of all private debt and without any store of value to compensate it for the resources and labor used by the government sector.

Is $22 Trillion too much money to have in circulation in America’s economy? We can, and should, have that conversation, but let’s do it from the perspective of our monetary and fiscal reality, not the false knee-jerk reaction to the word “debt” as it would apply to us as “users” of the nation’s currency. Perhaps if we can manage to stop fear-mongering over meaningless words and accounting entities we can get our country back on track spending public money for the public purpose as Congress is Constitutionally mandated.