> it's also the only speed bump left to unlimited money printing.

I have never once heard during the budget negotiation process, "we cannot increase this budget because it will put us over the debt limit."

The debt limit restricts the US from paying for things it has already purchased. It in no way stops the US from purchasing them, or budgeting for them, in the first place.

Using the debt limit as a means of controlling future budget negotiations (in other words, "adopt my budget priorities or I will tank the economy") is exactly why Fitch downgraded US debt, thereby increasing the cost of debt service and exacerbating the problem you're concerned about.

> People will complain about the debt ceiling -- granted, it's kinda dumb -- but it's also the only speed bump left to unlimited money printing.

This is wrong. This is a misunderstanding of what the debt ceiling is.

Congress has the power of the purse and can pass what ever budget they want.

They can say tomorrow that they will spend $1,000,000,000,000 a year on what every they want and the debt ceiling can't do anything about it.

The Debt ceiling is only about existing spending. Which has already been authorized. And ironically, almost always by the party no longer in power who is trying to block the debt ceiling from being raised to pay for the spending they authorized when they were in power.

It does nothing to stop congress from authorizing new spending after the fact.

Congress can chose to lower spending when they are in office. The fact that neither party has done that in over 30 years indicates that neither party cares about the national debt until the other party is in power.

Even the size of the debt would be ok as long as gdp is growing faster than the debt. It’s not, which means the deficit spending is being used on things that are not growing gdp faster than interest rates on that debt.

Like any business, government debt is fine as long as it’s used to fund expenses that have an roi greater than the debt servicing costs. Otherwise there will be a default (tho for government inflation is also an option)

It is not like paying credit card bills with a credit card. The US government' debt is not like personal debt. We need to, collectively, stop talking about it that way.

Congress passes the budget. If they want to reduce spending, they should pay the political price of having to attach their own names to those cuts. As it stands, it is simply used as blackmail for extracting concessions without actually decreasing spending.

It seems like you may not understand how budgets at the federal level work in the U.S. Congress passes spending bills and the President signs (or vetos) them. This has nothing to do with the debt limit as such. Eliminating the need to vote on a debt limit will not in any way lead to a situation in which runaway spending can occur that is not already present in the current system.

The grand bargain you speak of has already occurred. It occurs when Congress passes a budget that is signed by the President.

The problem with printing it is that we'll always be able to just print more, because it's effectively a number in a database and we probably don't even need to literally print out dollar bills for it.

But we'll have piles of currency and we'll be lacking in actual things to buy with that. It acts as a regressive, stealthy tax so it's always politically favorable even if it's bad for us economically.

And it has downstream effects because of the demand for inflation-proof goods that are easy to get cash for (gold, silver, property you can rent out), which has other effects like making housing an investment and it being hard for people who actually want to live in those, etc.

Then you game the inflation metrics to make things look good and people wonder why numbers keep going up and they can't make any progress on actually improving their lives because they have no idea what they're really being taxed.

They'll keep getting away with it as long as people see numbers going up and never realizing the source of the problems.

I don’t see congress doing the responsible thing and dealing with the debt. Not to mention, there isn’t as much that can be cut from discretionary spending as you would think. Any meaningful cuts decimate everything outside of defense.

We’re not (in my option) going back to zero interest rates, so interest will make balanced budgets impossible to achieve.

Also don’t see much appetite to cut defense as we’re aligning to have China and Russia as enemies.

Rather I think we’ll resort to more of the Fed buying up the debt who can remit the interest payments back to the treasury.

I could see a scenario where they even just retire/redeem treasuries so the debt just goes away. The downside it’s inflationary but also does this erode confidence in the system where things are (even more so) centrally controlled.

Why worry about the national debt? It's largely owed to some part of the US government, or to the Fed itself. Foreign ownership is 7.3T, with Japan the largest at just over 1T.

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/05/the-federal-government-has...

There is as yet no feedback loop on the U.S. Congress to provide any braking. It runs open loop.

The only thing in view that has the slightest hope of stabilizing matters is an Article V convention, as far as I can tell.

https://conventionofstates.com/

Welcome to Argentina

We know how to reduce the deficit: raise taxes on the rich. It's not rocket appliances. It's just a complete non-starter given the current GOP. The people screaming the loudest about the deficit are the same people preventing any real steps to fix it.

> The US is constantly paying off old debt with new debt. Except this year the cost of those funds quadrupled -- which means, even more debt.

And? Why is this a problem?

Given the UK has never (AFAICT) had a surplus, that means they've simply continue to roll over debt, dating back to the South Sea Bubble (1700s), Napoleonic Wars (early 1800s), Crimean War (late 1800s), and WW1 (1900s):

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/oct/31/paying...

The UK has been doing it for four hundred years: they have in several instances been over 150% debt-to-GDP, and twice went over 200%:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_national_debt#H...

(Their current woes are of dumb decisions unrelated to fiscal issues, though the decisions are not helping the economy.)

> If interest rates stay high for several years […]

You mean like they did in the 1980s?

* https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-...

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

* https://ritholtz.com/2016/10/long-history-long-10-year-us-tr...

Over the long-term (centuries), the general trend of interest rates is downward (with sporadic spikes, which often correspond to wars):

* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/700-year-decline-of-interes...

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2020/eight-cen...

For most of the 2010s people were complaining about inflation being too low (along with interest rates).