There is certainly no deficiency of things needing to be done, as any short walk around any major city or small rural town will prove. The federal government, as the monopoly currency issuer, can “afford” anything that is for sale and priced in dollars, including our excess labor the private sector can’t utilize. We should have been making use of it all along while also shoring up the economy against business downturns instead of simply sending people insufficient payments and then deriding them for being “lazy” or making bad choices instead of fixing core deficiencies in our system.

Full employment should be the primary mandate for Congress, not servicing mostly irrelevant numbers on a spreadsheet labeled debt to be misleading. There is no debt that the private sector is responsible for. It is our national “savings”, the store of value from past productivity, not a mortgage against future productivity, reflected in Treasury bonds.