this is a good post, but I don't think the bolded line has to be true. There's a number of ways we could manage that, any number of which would be less complex and problematic than what we do now.
No argument here. This was my primary argument on HF and Shaggy when we were stupidly financing tax cuts with debt in 2001 and 2003* to provide further short term stimulus even thought we were already in an expansion- that we were foreclosing our last, best chance reset the national debt, and ultimately reduce the tax burden on everyone.
We may be fucked. We may run out of options other than minting the coin, as silly as that sounds.
*of course we shouldn't have made them permanent either in 2012, but at that point we were just emerging from a giant financial crisis and didn't have dry powder, which is exactly why it's so goddamn stupid to initiate deficit funded fiscal stimulus in the middle of an expansion.