With Republicans planning to enforce the debt ceiling should they control the House of Representatives, Treasury Secretary Yellen wants to hike the limit so high that it won’t be hit until after the 2024 elections, ensuring President Biden’s orgy of inflationary spending continues. 

The New York Times wrote of the secretary’s position on the debt ceiling, “Ms. Yellen said she believes that Democrats, who will retain control of the House and the Senate through at least the end of the year, should eliminate it as an issue for the rest of President Biden’s term.”

Note that Ms. Yellen’s concern is to “eliminate … the issue” rather than eliminate the policies that lead to Congress banging its head against the ceiling every year or so. Rather than respect the law, she supports getting rid of it by blowing off the roof all together, as she told the House last September.

“I believe it is very destructive,” Ms. Yellen said, “to put the president and myself, as Treasury secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills…” Indeed, spending too much puts many citizens in dire straits, but they can’t print greenbacks to fix it.

The Treasury has operated for decades on the motto, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” the financial policy of Popeye’s cash-strapped friend, Wimpy, who never has any intention of paying his debts and just returns to mooch again the next time hunger strikes. 

It may be old-fashioned thinking in the nation’s capital, but it’s the American people who decide how much they’ll pay for government operations — not the other way around. We are the credit card company setting a limit on what the Treasury can charge to satisfy its voracious appetite.

Ms. Yellen told the Times, “I always worry about the debt ceiling,” which is the purpose of setting it in the first place. The Treasury secretary is supposed to worry about spending anything beyond what the elected representatives of the people approve, not try to yank the decision out of their hands.

Respecting this concept but requiring flexibility to fight World War I, Congress created the limit in 1917 with the Second Liberty Bond Act, empowering the Treasury to rack up bills or issue bonds without going through the legislature.

Today, Ms. Yellen sees that limitation as an inconvenience, refusing to rein in spending to help whip inflation, which is a top issue for the country and will be the mandate of any GOP House, one the secretary seeks to outflank.

The Times might have asked about all this, or about why Mr. Biden needs to raise the debt ceiling at all when he’s going around the country boasting that he has “reduced the debt,” claiming credit for the end of pandemic spending as if it’s a surplus. 

On “60 Minutes” in September, the president said, “This year, it’s going to be over $1.5 trillion, reduced the debt,” conflating the national debt and annual budget deficits while adding to the confusion with his trademark unintelligible prose.

PolitiFact rated this claim a half-truth for leaving out this context, not to mention ignoring that the national debt blew past the $31 trillion mark in October with no signs of slowing its rise, much less shrinking as Mr. Biden implied.

Citizens are already worrying about the value of their dollars, their savings, cost of living, and future prosperity for their children as the Treasury prints money with no thought of tomorrow, only of pushing problems past the next election.

The administration can’t put our financial house in order by tearing off its roof and piling on more stories of debt. If Democrats pass Ms. Yellen’s end run around fiscal responsibility in the lame-duck session of Congress, it’ll just super-size the spending binge and serve up more inflation. 

America cannot spend its way out of trouble by raising the debt ceiling into the stratosphere, nor can it continue the cartoonish economics of buying hamburgers today and promising to pay for them on Tuesday, because unlike Wimpy’s world, in real life, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.