The newest skirmish over the appropriations is, as always, less about arithmetic than about credit. A nation that cannot honor its obligations cannot expect to borrow at decent rates — and a modern, free nation must borrow.

Those who counsel default, even briefly, even as a stratagem, do not appreciate the slowness with which trust is built and the speed with which it is lost. Every prudent lender, foreign and domestic, watches not whether the United States pays, but whether the United States squabbles before paying. A nation observed squabbling pays more, forever, for the privilege of borrowing — and the difference, compounded across the trillions of dollars in outstanding debt, is measured in real schools, real roads, and real defense not provided to the citizenry.

The deeper objection to these recurrent crises is that they are entirely manufactured. The debt has already been incurred; the spending has already been authorized by the very Congress that now hesitates to permit the borrowing necessary to settle it. To threaten default on bills you yourself ordered is, with respect, not statesmanship. It is theater performed at the public's expense.

I have, since the founding of the Treasury, held that a national debt, if it is not excessive, is a national blessing — a binding interest of the propertied citizenry in the soundness of the Republic. But the corollary has always been the same: the debt must be serviced punctually and predictably, or the blessing becomes a curse.

Two reforms would relieve us of this seasonal melodrama. First, the appropriations debate belongs at the moment of authorization — when the spending is proposed — and not at the moment of payment, when the bills are already due. Second, the practice in other serious nations of automatic continuing resolutions, which prevent shutdown by default while the political process resolves its quarrels, deserves the most serious consideration.

The arithmetic of the federal budget is challenging; the politics is not impossible. What is impossible is to enjoy the credit of a great power while behaving, in the public eye, like a household debating whether to honor the rent.