`nobody is going to be lending the US money if we don’t pay our debt,`

1) The Fed can loan money by simply creating new dollars and purchasing treasury bills. This has been happening for a long time, T-Bills do first get offered to private institutions but the Fed backstops all auctions.

2) There is literally no way for the US Gov to go involuntarily bankcrupt because of 1). It is the sole manufacturer of US dollars and can always create more.

Read up what happens when countries start creating money from thin air rather than borrow it. Very bad things happen.

100 quintillion (10^20) pengő, the largest denomination bill ever issued, Hungary, 1946.

Well, apparently they become economic superpowers because that is what all powerful nations with monetary sovereignty and fiat money have been doing under the guise of government debt.

Hyperinflation largely happens in countries where the money wasn't really worth much to begin with because it's value was pegged to the price of gold or other currencies. Or because most of the economy functioned on foreign currency and the government borrowed in foreign currency. In this case printing more money to service foreign debt or imports can quickly spiral out of control because as soon as the trust in the local currency erodes it essentially doesn't matter anymore if you have 100 or 100T of it. It's worthless paper.

Taxes are paid in a nations currency which creates demand for the currency scaled to their economy. Borrowing money is the only way to get spending > taxes without an exponential increase in the amount of money generated every year. That exponential growth then gets worse as the economy tanks and debt explodes. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly, things get out of control extremely quickly.

There is a little wiggle room. Governments do get to create a little money as their economies grow or if it’s used in foreign economies without causing significant inflation, but it’s dangerous to just spend it directly. The issue of course excessive printing or any economic contraction.

PS: Foreign debt is of course a closely related issue, but countries don’t create foreign debt unless they are forced to. You can’t get hyper inflation with a currency actually pegged to another currency or gold, those ties break long before hyper inflation happen.

There are better and deeper ways of understanding money. You think fiscally sovereign nations need to borrow their own currency, and that isn't correct. You think government spending necessarily precipitates a currency crisis, and this is not only incorrect but goes against the demonstrated history of the United States from the 40s until today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg

It seems like you are conflating the role of private and public debt, which is a very common mistake. Private debt does cause economic crises, public debt is a misnomer - it's generally speaking not even correctly referred to as debt. It's referred to as a debt for historical reasons, its not owed to anyone, for example.

A paper by the CATO institute showed that world hyperinflations have not historically arisen from monetary policy changes. They have more to do with... eh, its complicated. Collapses of industry in wartime, famines, militarily-imposed foreign debts and single-resource economies living beyond their means. The understanding you are demonstrating is called the Quantity Theory of Money and its being more and more called into question. The Theory of Ricardian Equivalence is toast. Not sure if you know that those are the high-falutin names of the theories you are describing as being patent fact.

> You think fiscally sovereign nations need to borrow in their own currency

No, it can be quite beneficial. However, it’s more dangerous to borrow in foreign currency because exchange rates are outside of complete government control.

> You think government spending necessarily precipitates a currency crisis

No, the inability to borrow in their own currency is one possibility. Bad monetary policy is another, losing a war for existence is another.

We're never going to pay it, and no we couldn't have gotten universal healthcare. If they had the votes, they would have done both, regardless of cost. They don't have the votes for universal healthcare.

Running out of people willing to lend us money is the ultimate risk. The more we borrow the sooner that happens.

You mean the more we don’t pay back? Carrying debt generally increases credit rating.

Only up to a point, try borrowing say 50 million dollars while making 50k. Before lending money people look at your existing debt load to determine if your likely to pay it back. The same thing happens to countries, though more smoothly as they first require higher interest rates.

Governments are not households. Using this metaphor only causes more misunderstandings.

Except Greece for example recently hit it’s borrowing limit with spiraling interest rates. If it could have borrowed unlimited money at zero interest nothing bad would have happened, it could have paid debts with new loans.