Let's get rid of the federal debt limit

:popcorn:

---

Consider one wholly artificial symbol currently making waves in Washington: the federal debt limit.

Under current law, the U.S. government is permitted to have no more than $14.294 trillion in debt outstanding. We're almost there. At the end of February, there was about $99 billion in headroom left; in 2010, when the federal budget was about $3.7 trillion, that was the equivalent of roughly 14 minutes of government spending.

Sometime between the middle of April and the end of May, according to the Treasury Department, that borrowing headroom will run out. If Congress doesn't vote by then to raise the statutory limit, the Treasury will start implementing a series of dire steps to stave off default on existing bonds and other obligations.

As happens almost every time the debt limit draws near — it's almost an annual event, and sometimes semiannual — there is currently an outbreak of posturing by fringe elements in Congress over whether to raise the limit.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20110313,0,507980.column

handle unlimited debt.

Kind of like how we let people buy houses they couldn't afford...

Except he created a bunch of sock puppets to argue with critics of his own columns, and was suspended by LATimes for it...

I found this funny because it admits - perhaps inadvertently - that our money is really sort of fake, arbitrary, a convenient fiction, so the debt limit is really just a way to keep a rough score on how we are doing productivity-wise.

But he is no authority figure.