Treasuries are gold

United States government debt is gold. I mean this almost literally.

Would you rather have a bar of metal worth $10,000 or a Treasury security worth $20,000?

Tomorrow, after the government has issued a few billion dollars more debt, would you rather have a bar of metal worth $10,000 or a Treasury security worth $20,000?

Ostensibly serious economists will say I am missing a critical point here. If the government issues too much debt, the value of that debt will fall. This is true, but what is too much debt? If we think about Treasuries as gold, it changes the nature of the question. Is $20 trillion of gold too much? $40 trillion? Who's to say.

Complaining about the US national debt is like a 17th century Spanish king whining about how much gold he has given his subjects. The fix is either to mine more gold (create more debt) or, if your subjects have so much gold that they don't value it anymore, demand some of it back (raise taxes).

Pretending to fret about the amount of gold in the economy is a distraction from real reform. If teachers, doctors and nurses, construction workers, and others are willing to work for gold, and we can magically mine gold, we have the option to give it to them. We are wealthy and powerful enough to provide affordable education, healthcare, and modern infrastructure to ourselves, if we want to.

Of course, we should be wary of a time when there is so much gold that people don't value it anymore. When this happens, we can demand some of it back and bury it or put it to better use.