The question is not new to me, for I built the first system of public credit this country ever possessed, and I did so on a principle the present age has half forgotten: that a debt, if it is not excessive, is a national blessing. It binds the propertied citizen to the fortunes of the Republic, it furnishes a sound instrument in which savings may rest, and it gives the government the means to act with energy in the hour of need.

But the principle carries a stern corollary. The debt must be serviced punctually and predictably, or the blessing turns at once into a curse. Every prudent lender, foreign and domestic, watches not merely whether the United States pays, but whether it squabbles before paying. A nation observed squabbling pays more, forever, for the privilege of borrowing, and the difference, compounded across trillions, is measured in real schools and roads and defense the citizen never receives.

What troubles me in the modern quarrel is that the crises are manufactured. The spending was already authorized by the very body that now hesitates to permit the borrowing to settle the bill. To threaten default upon obligations you yourself ordered is not statesmanship; it is theater, performed at the public expense.

So I would not counsel you to fear the debt in the abstract, nor to worship a balanced ledger as though arithmetic were the whole of policy. I would counsel you to fear two things only: a debt contracted for consumption rather than for lasting works, and a politics that treats the honoring of the nation's word as a bargaining chip. Guard the credit of the United States as you would guard its honor, for in the end they are the same thing.