When a nation, a business, or a family shirk their responsibility to budget their affairs it generally means there is a moral breakdown somewhere. The purpose of a budget for the government is to submit to the people's representatives in such a transparent way that the people's representatives votes on the allocation of resources as well as the imposition of taxes can be determined up or down by the electorate. When our government proceeds for decades on continuing resolutions, the system breaks down, representative democracy is frustrated, graft and corruption and crony capitalism thrive.
All of this is made possible by the practice of simply borrowing money without consideration of the long-term costs to society and certainly to the next generation. This power to borrow money is unique to postwar America as the world's superpower and reserve currency. This, coincidence of factors permits our government to print money almost at will, to receive funds from foreign countries because we are the reserve currency and the largest economy, to avoid inflation by the additional coincidence of cheap Chinese goods to import, cheap labor to import keeping domestic wages down, and the digital revolution keeping costs overall down.
For the time being there seems to be no present-day economic consequences to running up a staggering debt of $22 trillion. There are no political consequences for doing so and there will be no political consequences so long as there is no pain. Indeed, the political consequences run the other way because those who complain about overspending tend to lose elections. Those who promise to keep the music playing tend to win elections.
