Of course, but we don't have a commodity money standard.
Which is
precisely why any "political capital" we have would be better spent upon trying to create an environment congenial to allowing markets to establish such standards, rather than upon stop-gap "kick the can" bandages such as "debt ceilings" (or "balanced budgets" or etc.). The latter can only serve to (1) preserve the putative viability and extend the lifetime of the fiat standard that we currently
do have, and (2) reinforce the illusion that fiat standards can somehow be responsibly managed and limited.
The fundament of fiat standards, after all, is the
evasion of such responsibilities and limitations. It is deleterious to further enable the continuation of those fundamental evasions.
If we want to push Congressmen to implement one, great.
We can simultaneously push them to cut spending via the debt ceiling.
...not mutually exclusive.
I didn't say that they are mutually exclusive.
They
are mutually counterproductive, however ...
As I said in a previous post, a so-called "debt ceiling" in the context of a fiat standard is "an irrelevant bit of diversionary fluff." It is an exercise in installing smoke alarms after the house is already on fire.
Our political resources are scarce, and as intimated in the part of my statement you elided in your quote of me, it would be wiser not to waste those resources by dividing them between "bolting [...] poor and toothless [...] constraints onto the edifice of fiat" (on the one hand) and working to promote and establish genuine market-based standards (on the other hand).
Effort expended upon the one is effort that cannot be expended upon the other - and to the extent that either effort "works," it works to the detriment of the other. If, for example, a gimmicky "debt ceiling" (or "balanced budget" or etc.) is ever actually efficacious in achieving its ostensible goals (an outcome of which I am in any case profoundly skeptical), it would serve only to treat a symptom - thereby making the underlying disease that much more bearable, and in the same degree diminishing the impetus for any genuine cure. ("Look! it's working! We can get away with it! We don't need no stinkin' market-based commodity standards ...")