A debt-limit fight in Congress is not unprecedented. Our national debt is.
Congressional battles over the U.S. debt limit allow the press to indulge apocalyptic fantasies. Some claim that a delay in raising the debt limit could cause a "global economic collapse" or would be equivalent to a "nuclear war."
Yet the U.S. has been engaging in heated debt-limit battles for decades, and, far from sowing economic chaos, such battles have been one of a few things that have helped rein in deficits. While a temporary delay in payments would be ambiguously bad, it would not be the end of the global economy. The greater threats to the economy are the proposals to...
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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