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I don't mind the government accruing debts as long as every dollar is spent effectively with a high return. That works out fine. If you accumulate debts and waste your money, that's, of course, a disaster.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

Governments can inflate their way out of debt, but that has consequences, doesn't it?

We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.

I mean, the world has already done a big, big effort to forget debt to countries heavily indebted and with low income. And that has given good chances to countries to get out of poverty.

We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.

The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

The U.S. has a law on the books called the debt limit, but the name is misleading. The debt limit started in 1917 for the purpose of facilitating more national debt, not reducing it. It still serves that purpose. It's unconnected to spending, hurts our credit rating and has been an abject failure at limiting debt.

Yes, it is long past time we get serious about tackling the nation's ever-growing deficits. But the average American family drawn into serious debt cannot just threaten to stiff its creditors. It must cut its spending in the future, but also take responsibility for the debt incurred in the past.