This is also why taxes are constantly falsely conflated with revenue for government’s spending. By creating the illusion of money as a “thing” subject to property rights the fear of government stealing one’s property can be maintained as the little people are forced to pay rates that double, at least, the percentage paid by the oligarchs and cheer for efforts to enlarge that gap. Every politician in the federal government likely understands that there is no mechanism that allows tax collections to be applied to spending appropriations, but to admit that takes away a powerful tool for keeping the unwashed masses in their places.
If those masses ever realized that deficit spending by Congress is the only source of currency in the private sector that doesn’t require them to leverage their own wealth against private debt they would demand nice things like other, and less affluent, nations have. Single payer is already being paid for via taxation and insurance premiums serve only to extract wealth from the middle class, not pay for care, but that’s another issue aside from the great tax/spending con. Currency is created when the federal government funds its spending and it is “canceled” when used to pay taxes. End of story. The wealthy fully understand this and that is why they are so opposed to paying them. You can’t “redistribute” currency that has been canceled, so the “tax the rich” rhetoric is entirely false and only perpetuates the myth of spending being constrained by “revenue”.
When America left the gold standard there was a gaping hole in the accounting process that was used to balance the available currency with the gold reserve. It was labeled “debt/surplus” because it showed if Congress had spending room (surplus) or needed to extract currency to avoid inflating the currency beyond the value of the reserves (debt), which generally was regarded as a bad thing unless we were at war. Being at war all of the years since our founding except for 24 made this balancing act difficult, especially after WWII and the New Deal, so it was finally decided during the Nixon administration to simply quit trying and America went to a fully sovereign fiat currency in ’71. It was generally agreed to that making the masses aware of this monumental change in policy would be a bad thing for the oligarchs, so we still hear about America going broke (impossible) and have yearly fights over raising the debt limit between our Kabuki theater actors otherwise known as politicians. It’s all to perpetuate the illusion and has nothing to do with what America can “afford”, which is any damn thing it wants.
