National Debt

Here at last is a solution to the problem of the national debt.

Consider that a debt always dies with the passing of the debtor. At the end of a war the defeated side always has that one compensation: Its government ceases to be and that government’s debts likewise cease to exist. A colleague of mine once had the walls of his office decorated with picture frames that held real Confederate war bonds. That was the one use that could still be made of them. The U.S. had great war debts to deal with after the Civil War; the Confederacy had none.

But waiting to be defeated in a war is time consuming and entails the inconvenience of having your government torn down and being occupied by a foreign enemy. Also, a lot of people get killed and a lot of property is destroyed. Isn’t there a way around these unfortunate side-effects?

Maybe there is.

The U.S. of A. is a constitutional republic. We date the age of that republic from the day of our constitution’s ratification. It is what is known as an organic document in that it actually creates something instead of, like most laws, just regulating it. The constitution, including its amendments, is the cornerstone of the construct we call a republic and all the laws and regulations that have been enacted since that seminal event. It is the living manifestation of the essence of a governmental entity.

But what if it were revoked?

The constitution can be revoked by amendment. It would only require an amendment which, to do it legally, would state that by its effect it thereby revoked and made a nullity of the constitution itself. That would leave the land mass and the people who had lived under that constitution and all of its laws and regulations without their unifying, federal government. Each state would be in the primitive state of the formally ungoverned. The republic would have died—a suicide. And what about the debt owed by that republic? You already know the answer to that. The creditors of a suicide have no recourse. They write off the asset that was owed to them.

It would have to be done in one, uninterrupted moment. An amendment could be passed that revoked the old constitution and created a new one in one motion, with no passage of an instant of time in between. No opportunity could be allowed for a crime, rebellion or establishment of a right or cause of action in any property or other interest during a hiatus of government. The amendment would have to preclude any temporal hiatus.

The woebegone lenders could then use their federal treasury bills, notes and bonds for wallpaper.

But wouldn’t this be unfair to those lenders? Well, there would be a great deal of complaining of course. But it would not be an event unknown to the credit marketplace. A lender always bears a risk when he makes a loan. All lenders in the financial market bear a risk with each loan and periodically take a loss from that risk. It’s part of what the interest on the loan compensates him for. If there is no risk then the lender is being overcompensated, being paid to bear that nonexistent risk. And lenders to the federal government have been receiving repayment from the beginning of federal borrowing for a failure of the debtor than has not yet occurred. It’s high time they paid for it. And a default once every couple of centuries is not a bad credit experience.

Next objection: Wouldn’t it ruin the government’s credit for the future, making it impossible to borrow? Let’s make an assumption. Let’s pretend that would be a bad thing despite the way the politicians have satanically abused the government’s credit in the past. A government that could not borrow would not get into such a mess as we have now. But we needn’t go to that extreme. The government would still have its sterling record of debt repayment right up to the instant of its one and only default in history. And now, debt-free, the new government would have the capacity to start servicing debt in a whole new cycle. And the renewal of the republic is such an extreme solution to such an extreme problem that it won’t be a threat for a very long time. My expectation is that creditors would stand in line to lend their money to the new republic.

Next question: Wouldn’t this be an immoral thing to do? We’ll have to look at that in context. We’re talking about a government committing an immoral act. Do we even have to entertain a concern about this? Does anyone care? How much of what a government does passes any kind of morality test anyway? Should I even be asking this question? No, it’s completely consistent with about everything else a government does.

The one real and practical danger I can see is this: The mendacious and prevaricating politicians will try to slip all kinds of changes into the replacement constitution bringing about extreme changes in government that could never be made by the normal legislative process. Most of us would sooner see the government go bankrupt than have that. It would take an iron will to hold the revocation amendment to its very specific purpose. For the purpose of this exploration of the idea we’ll just have to assume that all this is possible. That detail would have to be hammered out in the process—and that would take some hammering.

Finally, consider the reality of our situation. The national debt is going to default one way of another. At its present level it cannot be repaid. The government has got all of us so deeply into debt that the economy cannot be harnessed to pay its way out. So, if creating a new, debt-free republic is not the way, then what is? The alternatives are either a blunt, defiant default without the pseudo-political niceties or else hyperinflation to an extreme never before imagined on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. How about paying a thousand dollars for a loaf of bread? What will that do to your savings?

When the question of national debt is raised, today’s politicians refuse to even talk about it. They have no solution, no proposal, no ideas. The national debt at the time of this writing is $39,000,000,000,000. That’s thirty nine trillion dollars and a trillion is a million squared. It’s a topic on which the future is hanging ominously in space. And it’s not a very distant future.

Even if the idea of revoking/renewing the republic is not politically practical, how useful might it be as a threat when “debt restructuring” is being negotiated? And that’s what’s coming anyway, isn’t it?

© 2026 Thomas A. Nelson Sr.