The government is about to run out of money because of an arbitrary cap on how much it can borrow to make good on bills that it long ago promised to pay.
Lawmakers and the White House are haggling over the conditions under which they will, once again, temporarily raise that cap, known as the debt ceiling. But the better solution would be to abolish it entirely — no strings attached.
The debt ceiling, which has been around in some form for about a century, is sometimes portrayed as a way to impose fiscal discipline upon spendthrift legislators.