US should not have a debt ceiling

Michael Ernest repeats dangerous debt and deficit mythology in his recent letter to the editor (“Van Hollen’s attack on debt ceiling irresponsible,” May 4). He “can’t believe” that U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen wants to remove the debt ceiling, but very few nations have debt ceilings.

Somehow, the sky stays aloft in nearly 200 countries.

The federal government of our wealthy nation is not like a credit card holder. It is charged in the Constitution to be the issuer of the currency; therefore, it can pay its debts. It is, of course, possible that issuing too much currency could cause inflation, but our recent inflation has other causes, including pandemic-related bottlenecks in agriculture, manufacturing and shipping and monopoly firms here in the U.S. raising prices more than their costs have gone up.

Cynical forces are foisting deficit mythology on the public for their own purposes: namely to keep wages low, cut social spending that helps keep our workers alive and healthy, and obscure the unfairness of low taxes on corporations and billionaires compared with the rates that working people pay.

Deficit hawks have been proved wrong time and again. The government spent to get us out of the 2007’08 Great Recession. Inflation did not rise as the hawks predicted.

The government spent again to extract us from a catastrophic drop in employment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This worked well to put people back to work and avoided much of the hardship that could have occurred. Compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the loss of employment was more rapid in the pandemic, but the level of suffering was much lower and the recovery much faster.

Yes, there is inflation, but this has been caused by specific problems in the global supply chain and by concentrated pricing power here at home and not by too much money supply in the United States.

Van Hollen is correct to try to put the U.S. on the same footing as other wealthy nations.