Opinion | The national debt crisis is bogus. You can stop worrying now.

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We all have so much to worry about these days: international, national, local and familial. As my summer good deed, I’m going to take one off your plate: the national debt. You can ignore it.

Did that help? For most of you, no, because it wasn’t near the top of your priority list anyway. Why? Because you’ve been hearing the national-debt doomsday story your entire life without effect. As proof, in 1982 the Reagan tax cuts pushed the debt past $1 trillion. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth at this milestone and the financial millstone we were hanging on our grandchildren. We are today 37 times that level and two generations onward with no millstones and no economic hardships from this debt.

A large number of economists know the national debt crisis is bogus. Many in Congress do also. So, why haven’t you heard this before? Because the current neoclassical economic mainstream output from sources ranging from college textbooks to Nobel professionals is dependent on a self-perpetuating orthodoxy with faulty base assumptions and immense inertia that can impede your career if you drift too far off center. It’s as if the mindset of a lot of mainstream thinking still has gold-backed currency and fixed exchange rates floating around. In Congress, most are either incompetently ignorant or deliberately deceptive. The constant whine at public benefit spending is, “How are you going to pay for it?” That’s the wrong question. Likewise with the recently passed tax cuts, the need to pull money from critical health care assistance is superfluous. It’s strictly for political and personal worldview purposes and to present a charade of fiscal responsibility.

These must seem like pretty wild claims to those who don’t understand how money works. Let’s correct that.

Where does money come from? In this country, the original currency comes from the U.S. Treasury via the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed). The Treasury issues what is called a fiat currency, i.e., a currency that has no intrinsic value or backing like gold or silver and depends upon the trust and confidence of the public. Its value can float vs. other currencies. We are taught that the government collects taxes and uses that income to fund itself. That’s backwards. Currency has to first be distributed before returning as taxes. The government spends out into the economy and collects some of it back in taxes to assure its currency is accepted and to moderate its flow in private hands. The concept of spending “taxpayer dollars” is specious. In spite of misleading analogies to our household budgets or ignorant claims by Elon Musk, the federal government cannot go bankrupt; it issues the currency. Nobody else can do that. Comparing federal finances to a household budget does not compute.

So let us redefine the national debt as the sum total of all funding the U.S. government has invested into the U.S. economy. When government spends, somebody in the private sector gets the money. A government deficit becomes a private-sector surplus. Everyone is focused on only one side of the ledger. The government may issue bonds as an alternative form of money distribution that allows the public to make safe income-producing investments, further moderate the private money pool and help regulate interest rates, but bonds aren’t necessary for deficit spending; they are just a congressional requirement. Congress and the Treasury could instruct the Federal Reserve to tap a few keystrokes and deposit any amount of purchases or loans into private banks’ reserve accounts at the Fed, and this has happened in the past. Don’t take my word for it; the information is from Ben Bernanke, then Fed chairman, in a “60 Minutes” interview in 2009.

Budget surpluses are undesirable because they pull money out of the private sector. The balance of money flowing between the Treasury and aggregate private holdings is a closed loop. Federal surpluses (which result in corresponding private-sector deficits) have been a precursor to many financial crises since the founding of the republic.

But, we are told, the debt is greater than our gross domestic product (GDP) and interest payments on the debt are greater than the defense budget. True, but who established that those particular measures have any derived quantitative meaning except to scare people into social benefit cuts? The U.S. debt was more than 100% of GDP at the end of World War II with no harm done, after which we lurched into the greatest economic growth period ever. The Singapore national debt has been higher than 100% of its GDP since 2000, and the Japanese higher than 200% since 2010, and they’re both still standing tall.

The right question to ask regarding federal spending is not “How do we pay for it?” but rather “How do we invest federal funds and marshal available resources to benefit the most people and create the best society that everyone can thrive in?” Finding the money is the easy part.

But — you knew there must be a but — there is still no free lunch. The private economy must be able to absorb the amount of funding circulated and then grow with it. There has to be a ready surplus capacity in workforce, materials, plant and equipment, infrastructure, etc., to make use of the funding. If not, you get inflation, and you don’t want that. Policy efforts should be focused on analyzing the capacity of the economy to absorb judicious investment and stop harping about the debt.

Finally, we waste so much energy fretting about this debt that we completely ignore the effect of bank-created private credit. It was excess private debt (margin borrowing and bad mortgages) — not federal debt — that helped trigger the 1929 Great Depression and the 2008 Great Recession. No mainstream neoclassical economic model saw those coming, which belies a good part of their intellectual foundation.

So in addition to skipping debt-panic stories, the next time you hear anyone in Congress say “We can’t afford it” to any proposed public benefit investment, tell them, “Yes, we can, and you should know that.”

Dennis Fazio, of Minneapolis, is a financial adviser to nonprofit corporations.