If you believe the media hype, a storm awaits America. The US government will have to fight off neo-Nazi religious fanatics, massive climate change, financial armageddon, mass species extinction, alien invasion, dollar dominance collapse, Russia and/or China, near-earth celestial objects, new pandemics, systemic racism, and evil billionaires, likely all at the same time.

While more than one of those threats are overblown and/or unlikely, nobody knows what the future will bring other than that something bad will certainly happen at some point. So why aren’t policymakers eager to pay down the national debt? A small national debt is the best security blanket America has ever had, and arguably the reason it expanded so quickly and won all of its wars, the important ones anyway.

To pay down the national debt means, at least, to run balanced budgets consistently, which makes the current debt less onerous as the nation grows more populous and prosperous. More aggressively, it means running budget surpluses as the US government routinely did in peacetime throughout its history and as recently as 1956.

The most immediate benefit of paying down the debt is to end the recurring debt-ceiling crises. If America’s putative leaders really want to prepare the nation for future exigencies, they need to fight over how much to reduce the debt, not how much to increase it. Reducing the debt gives the government more fiscal “dry powder” to use during future emergencies, without bashing Americans with high taxes and/or inflation.