The U.S. national debt hit $32 trillion in June 2023 and surpassed $33 trillion in September. The U.S. national debt now stands above $34 trillion and is rising by $1 trillion every 100 days. The trend is exceedingly worrying because the next trillion dollars comes faster every time—and all this is happening in an alleged recovery with strong employment growth and rising earnings.

Debt matters, and there is a reason why U.S. citizens do not see such a positive picture. Negative real wage growth, diminishing purchasing power of salaries and savings, and make it a much tougher position for families to make ends meet.

Proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) defend that the government can run massive deficits if it needs to, and its only constraint is inflation. Reality shows that the government continues to spend regardless of an official accumulated inflation of 20 percent in four years and that it only uses any excuse to spend more than it collects despite rising tax receipts. The government does not reduce the deficit when inflation kicks in and continues to pass on the burden of debt and rising prices to families. MMT is simply an ideological ruse to allow the government to do what it wants with fiscal policy—only to find that there is no turning back when the disastrous results become apparent.

Inflation is evidence of monetary mismanagement, and persistent inflation is proof that the last economic agent that we should trust to defend the currency is the government.

No government truly defends the status of its currency as a reserve of value and generalized means of payment because it will always blame anyone except itself for the loss of confidence in the currency. And by the time that citizens all over the world lose confidence in the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, the damage will already be done and, more important, its consequences will be paid by the average citizen of the United States, not by the incompetent administrators that made debt soar and deficits become permanent.