Yeah, the place to solve this is within Congress. If they want to keep the debt limited, they can control that by passing budgets that fit. If they want a rule to manage that, they can make one.

when was the budget that relast time Congress passed was fiscally sound? 1980?

Do you mean balanced? The last time the US budget was in surplus was 2001.

But debt can be fiscally sound, as anybody with a mortgage knows.

A healthy mortgage (like any healthy debt) has the expectation of timely repayments and reduces over time. What we see here is the exact opposite to the point debtors are worried about interest default.

Turn of the century. The Democrats left a balanced budget for George W. Bush but the Republicans decided that meant tax cuts were needed so they could continue campaigning against “big government spending”.

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-und...

The most significant long-term problems they created were probably exempting rich people from Social Security taxes on more than their first $125k of income and Medicare plan D, both of which created massive time bombs as the boomers headed towards retirement. The longer we delay dealing with those, the harder it’ll be to close the gap — which is exactly what they were counting on to build support for privatization.

Doesn't matter. The problem is that passing the budget does not automatically authorize the debt to pay for it. All that needs to happen is welding those two together.

> original sin was introducing this debt ceiling concept in the first place

It was for efficiency:

"Between 1788 and 1917, Congress would authorize each bond issue by the United States Treasury by passing a legislative act that approved the issue and the amount.

In 1917, during World War I, Congress created the debt ceiling with the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, which allowed the Treasury to issue bonds and take on other debt without specific Congressional approval, as long as the total debt fell under the statutory debt ceiling" [1].

There is no original sin. We just need a law that permanently authorizes the Treasury to borrow as needed to pay for the things the Congress told it to spend on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_d...

Having such a permanent law would be constitutionally iffy. The power to borrow money that is part of the US national debt is specifically reserved for Congress, and this is essentially part of what makes the United States a democracy in the first place: only the body made up of the country's elected representatives can tax and borrow in the name of the country. (Other countries have similar restrictions, though not necessarily debt caps; for example, in the UK Parliament must passs a budget each year or the government effectively cannot finance itself and continue operating. This would probably not work well in the USA because Congress has trouble passing budgets reliably.)

You’d include it the language in the budget. When the Congress actually has a choice as to whether or not to spend the money. Doing it after a contract has been issued and the bill is due is asinine.