Donald Trump says he wants to abolish the debt ceiling entirely. Elizabeth Warren agrees with him, arguing that “Congress should terminate the debt limit and never again govern by hostage taking.” They are at best half-right.

It’s true that brinksmanship over debt-ceiling hikes is a highly inefficient way to debate federal spending and that a well-run system would not use raises in the debt limit for that purpose. But a bad debate over spending is better than no debate at all. That’s the system we currently have. We no longer have a functioning system for the input of Congress into the details of the budget, just take-it-or-leave-it last-minute deals that are their own form of hostage-taking and brinksmanship. And that’s just the parts of the budget that get voted on. As I’ve previously observed:

Vast proportions of the federal government are effectively self-funding without annual or biennial appropriations — the CFPB is dwarfed, in that respect, by Social Security and Medicare. These self-licking ice-cream cones simply operate on autopilot, unaffected by who wins or loses elections. Perpetual appropriations stand the system’s design on its head: Instead of a majority of a single house of Congress being able to say no and bring things to a halt until its consent is obtained, the appropriation needs to be affirmatively repealed by both houses and the president. That creates a bias toward spending, and channels inter-branch negotiations into blunt instruments such as brinksmanship over the debt ceiling. The result, combined with the ballooning debts created by this system, is that the portion of the budget that actually gets decided annually by the elected Congress is a small and shrinking fraction. So much for democracy. And state legislatures don’t really control state spending anymore, either, because so much money is raised through the federal tax code and then funneled to the states. Good luck voting any of this out.

As Dominic Pino notes, since the 1974 budget “reforms,” debt-ceiling fights have often been the only lever by which the federal leviathan has been moved in the direction of a tiny bit of austerity:

As Brian Riedl wrote for NR last year, the debt ceiling also provides a regular opportunity for spending reforms precisely because it creates an arbitrary deadline before which Congress must act. This used to be uncontroversial and was practiced by Republicans as well as Democrats. “Of the eight largest deficit-reduction laws since 1985 — such as Gramm–Rudman in the 1980s, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, the 2009 PAYGO law, and 2011 Budget Control Act — all eight were attached to debt-limit bills,” Riedl wrote. What [Chip] Roy is demanding is simply a continuation of that principle. . . . Eliminating the debt ceiling entirely, as Warren and other progressives want, would be a gift to big government for generations. It would remove one of the only tools currently in existence by which Congress has enacted deficit reduction in the past few decades.

Roy argues that “My position is simple — I am not going to raise or suspend the debt ceiling (racking up more debt) without significant & real spending cuts attached to it.” I’d extend that principle to eliminating the debt ceiling. There’s no need to keep doing this, except that it’s the only way we have. I’d be fine with eliminating periodic votes to raise the debt limit. But the price of eliminating that last lever must be real, systemic reforms to create better ones. If we’re going to live unroofed without the debt ceiling, it can only be part of a broader package of reforms to how we enact and reauthorize federal spending to remove its numerous systemic biases in favor of more spending, and require bipartisan and inter-branch affirmative consent for more spending, or for continued spending.