“Borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,” mused a sixteenth‑century figure named William Shakespeare, who went on to advise: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
Americans, who like to talk about their Christian faith more than study it (“The wicked person borrows and does not repay, but the righteous one is gracious and giving”) have twice elected the self-proclaimed “king of debt,” an infamous deadbeat and serial bankrupt, as president of the United States, while entrusting the national purse strings to the control of his self-abasing toadies in Congress.
