Debt Ceiling Demystified

 The purpose of the debt ceiling was never supposed to be to limit growth of the debt. As I understand it, the purpose was to eliminate an enormous time-wasting problem Congress was saddled with. The term was merely accountants' jargon, and was never expected to interest the general public.

Every year, Congress has to spend a bunch on money by passing an annual budget, and to raise revenue to pay for the budget by passing an annual tax code. All too often, the tax code would not bring in enough revenue to pay for the entire budget, resulting in a shortfall of revenue, after which Congress had to vote separately to approve each and every routine line-item expenditure that remained after the revenue ran out. The debt ceiling, which arguably was given a name that has aged poorly, was created as a routine administrative procedure to combine all those remaining line-item expenditures into a single package that could be approved with a single routine vote. It's basically just a software patch to fix a glitch in the synchronization between the budget and the tax code.