Can We Exercise Some Common Sense?
Common Sense on our Debt If Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury, is correct, the United States could default on its sovereign debt on June 1, 2023. That would be the first time in our history, and by all accounts of economists and others who know what they are talking about, that would be bad. But I am not an economist, I am a somewhat simple person, so I want to write about this in terms that I can understand. First, let's acknowledge that borrowing to pay expenditures has been a feature of the United States and its political system since the Founding. The warring colonies borrowed to prosecute the Revolutionary War. And in fact, the people who wrote the Constitution and were there at the creation, the people we call "the Founders," knew this was a problem. While Jefferson and Madison on one side of an argument, disagreed with Hamilton on the other, Hamilton won the argument. The Funding Act of 1790, which Hamilton pushed for, allowed