The money system we have now is based on a Fiat Standard, where "money" is a story that we tell each other and the monetary foundation is the debt that we owe to each other. That standard for our monetary foundation came fully into effect in 1971, although it had been growing in strength for the entire history of the US.

The US Treasury does not create the US Dollar. They outsourced that power to the Federal Reserve in 1913. The only times that the US Treasury issued currency directly that I'm aware of were in 1861 when Lincoln issued Greenbacks without any backing to help finance the Civil War and take the creation of currency away from International Bankers (which was needed because the US did not have a Central Bank between 1836 and 1913), and in 1963 when Executive Order 11110 was issued by JFK, directing the Secretary of the Treasury to issue silver certificates backed by the silver reserves. Both of these men were killed, likely because of these attempts to wrest control of our currency away from the banks.

If our currency is exclusively based on debts, then "paying off" the debt would erase all currency from circulation. But that is not the way it works. How it is taught is from the perspective that all money is a creation of the state, and therefore all holders of money are 'beholden' to the state. That is the source of all of our understanding of money in the modern economy, and it is that understanding that is leading us off a cliff into an extinction event.

There is no savings account maintained by the US Government. Since we stopped using gold to back our currency in 1971, the gold we have is an asset that the treasury keeps on hand and on the books, but it doesn't do anything. We're not buying more, and we're not selling it. We're not doing anything with it, it's just an asset that does nothing for us. And every dollar that goes through the federal government is held in checking accounts, simple accounting books because that's all fiat is, an number on an accounting book. It's not real capital, it's just a story. And throughout most of the history of fiat going back to Ancient Rome, that story has been a lie.

If the US Federal Government had paid our debts from the Revolutionary War in gold, we would have run out of gold. That's why Alexander Hamilton came up with the idea of securitizing the debt and turning it into an asset that could be held by the foreign countries that we owed, so we wouldn't actually have to pay them all immediately, we could pay them off over time, plus a little interest. The interest paid on the bonds was the main selling point.

But it was just a story. It was a way of cheating debt, by not paying it off and by having no intention EVER to pay it off. Andrew Jackson saw this for what it was, and ended it in 1836. He paid off the debt entirely and required all US Federal Agencies to only accept Gold or Silver for land being bought in the West, which brought in a decent income for the government in addition to the import tariffs. And when the California and Alaska Gold Rushes happened, it boosted our vaults with a lot of new gold. But the cost for doing this was very high. Banks in different parts of the country started issuing their own forms of currency, backed by whatever gold they had in their vaults. There were some banks that kept the ratio of gold to currency at 1:1, but others that used fractional reserve banking to boost the currency they issued beyond their vault balance. This resulted in some forms of that currency to be worth more than others, and because we had no central bank to maintain standards and oversight, it caused crash after crash, bank run after bank run.

As long as we see money in terms of this story, that is a promise of money and future money that may or may not come from taxes, currency equals debt and we are beholden to it and the holders of it.

We don't want to just turn the wheel, we must break the wheel.

There is a different way of seeing money, where instead of being based on debt it is based on wealth. In the ancient days, if you did not have the gold or silver to pay for something, you had to go without until you earned it. Debts existed, but for a very limited amount of time and the interest rates were high enough that the goal was to pay them off as quickly as possible. We didn't want to hold debt because when the debt collectors came, they would take everything we had or do us harm if they could not find what we owed.

If we changed how we look at capital, away from debt and looking at wealth, we now have the means to really change things. It would require balancing the budget, each and every year. It would actually require pulling in a small surplus in order to accumulate additional reserve assets that generate revenue streams without taxes. It would require changing how we think about currency, store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account.

Bitcoin can do all of this. Today. Stablecoins built on top of Bitcon Layer 2 systems can do this. Today. We could balance the budget, stop issuing new bonds, pay off the existing bonds, and build a collection of assets that generate the revenue stream that our federal, state and municipal governments need for operations without taxes. We could do that today. It would just take people learning about what it would mean and for government institutions to make the transition.