Essentially a debt ceiling means: * legislature determines the government's income by setting tax rates * legislature determines the government's spending by

Essentially a debt ceiling means: * legislature determines the government's income by setting tax rates * legislature determines the government's spending by passing the budget law * legislature determines the maximum amount of government debt by law Obviously if the budget law requires spending that exceeds the tax income, the difference has to be raised by the government by issuing debt. Now the legislature can pass these different laws such that the executive has no choice but to break one of these 3 laws, as it is arithmetically impossible to follow all of them at the same time. I fail to see what the benefit of that would be for anyone. If the legislature wants the government to spend less, they can simply pass a smaller budget.