When you're in debt and can't make the payments, you can borrow more to make the payments, but of course it means future payments will be even bigger.

Well maybe you can't, because after a while a bank wouldn't lend to someone who is mishandling their life this way.

But the US can. It directs the Fed to lend it the money, which the Fed then creates and lends. The Fed does as it's told (and it can also trade for its own account, which some people worry about.) Thus the Fed allows us to expand debt-based money infinitely.

We failed to pass the internal law that would allow us to direct the Fed to lend us the money to make the next round of payments on our current debt. That's what just happened.

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We were starting to pay down debt during the Clinton administration, but then Clinton went on TV (this speech is impossible to find but I remember watching it) and said he'd start borrowing more because the world depended on being able to invest in US Treasury 30 year bonds, and if we're not borrowing we're not issuing bonds.

He actually said that. My mouth was hanging open. And ever since then, the debt has mushroomed to unimaginable numbers. Now that I see how weird things have gotten 25 years later, I wonder if the intent was to get us into unpayable debt with such a level of craziness that nobody even knows how much we owe anymore.