[Poison Pill]

There would no longer be a lever to exact spending and deficit concessions.

That hasn't existed for years. The debt ceiling only exists in name. Nobody in Washington, and almost nobody in the country, wants to reduce government spending.

Frankly, I'm surprised it took Trump and Schumer this long to publicly ridicule the idea of fiscal responsibilty.

[Alberta's Child]

There's a reason why you rarely ever heard any discussions about the debt ceiling until the last decade or so. Until the QE, QE2, etc. fiscal policies of the last two administrations, interest rates on U.S. bonds effectively served as a "debt ceiling" that forced our government to either operate in a fiscally responsible manner or pay the price for fiscal responsibility through higher interest rates.

As the U.S. faces its inevitable decline as a world power, our ability to set artificially low interest rates for our own debt will disappear. At some point, nobody with an IQ over 40 is going to buy a U.S. Treasury note unless it pays an exorbitant interest rate.