The newest skirmish over the debt-ceiling reconciliation, like the half-dozen before it, is being treated in some quarters as a normal exercise of legislative oversight. I would offer a different read: it is theater performed at the expense of public credit, and the expense is not zero.

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. The difference, compounded across the trillions in outstanding obligations, is measured in real schools, real roads, and real defense that the citizenry does not receive.

The deeper objection is that the crises are entirely manufactured. The spending was authorized by the very Congress now hesitating to permit the borrowing necessary to settle the bills. To threaten default on bills you yourself ordered is not, with respect, statesmanship.

Two reforms would relieve us of the seasonal melodrama. First, the appropriations debate belongs at the moment of authorization, not at the moment of payment. Second, an automatic continuing resolution — adopted by Switzerland, by Germany, by serious modern parliaments — would prevent shutdown by default while the political process resolves its quarrels. 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.