We as a nation may be about to embark on a grand policy experiment. If Congress does not raise the public debt ceiling by August 2, the government of the United States for the first time in its history will not be able to pay all its bills. Because spending exceeds revenue and borrowing authority to make up the difference is frozen, government cannot discharge its financial obligations if the debt limit is not raised. Whose bills or benefits will be paid first and whose will not be paid at all? Social Security beneficiaries? Military contractors? Chinese creditors? Medicare service providers? This has never happened before so we have no precedents to guide us or to alert us on what to expect in the national or global economy. Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury secretary and a powerful advocate of government’s properly discharging its legal debt obligations, must be spinning in his grave at the prospect of what may happen.

Consensus inside the Beltway suggests that in principle sharp spending cuts are inevitable, though no agreement yet exists on exactly which programs will be cut and by how much. However, there is no consensus in principle that revenues must also be raised to help cut the deficit. Having signed Grover Norquists’s Americans for Tax Reform “no-tax increases” pledge, Republicans have drawn the proverbial line in the sand on rejecting any tax increases, even on the very wealthy who have clearly benefited the most disproportionately from tax cuts over the last decade or more. Tax increase talk has always been unpleasant and unwelcome in policy debate but in Republican circles such talk has now become toxic. Recounting alternative interpretations of how and why this happened will no doubt occupy future policy historians.

Taxes are the prices we pay for having our government do things. Naturally, most of us would like to get as many government benefits as possible while shifting the tax costs of paying for those benefits to someone else. Senator Russell Long famously defined tax reform as “Don’t tax me. Don’t tax thee. Tax that fellow behind the tree.” Illustrating their well-known capacity for ideological inconsistency, many Americans are socialists when it comes to expecting or demanding government benefits and libertarians when it comes to paying taxes. This ideological inconsistency of course complicates the Herculean task elected officials have in attempting to balance the sharply conflicting demands inherent in making fiscal policy. That we are pressed to the debt ceiling is testament to the political ease of increasing spending and the political torture of raising taxes to pay for it.

Refusal to raise the debt ceiling is new but fights over tax structures and tax policies are not. Such fights, which go back to the founding and before, are at root debates over the fundamental purposes of government. Among the bill of particulars against the British in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the colonists included “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” Changing one of the state-centric characteristics of the Articles of the Confederation, the constitutional framers in the 1787 Philadelphia Convention specifically gave Congress the power to tax without relying on the states for collection. In the Whiskey Rebellion, one of the early tests of federal power, President George Washington in 1794 led troops on the way to Western Pennsylvania to force recalcitrants to pay their duly enacted whiskey taxes. The 1913 ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment specifically gave to Congress the power to tax incomes, a change that according to federalism scholars opened up to the national government a vast potential reservoir of dollars that sharply raised its power and status in relation to the states. In the midst of President Franklin Roosevelt’s unsuccessful attempt to expand its number of justices, the Supreme Court declared constitutional the taxing powers Congress asserted in the Social Security Act of 1935.

From creating a new nation to strengthening a fledgling national government to laying the framework of politically popular benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare, struggles over taxes have played a central role in defining the central purposes of government. In our current fight over taxes and the public debt ceiling, we are having one of those seminal struggles right now. A political decision to absent tax increases from the debt ceiling debate, that is, a decision to tax not even that fellow behind the tree, is a decision to change the fundamental purposes of government. What we cannot now know is the depth of the political storm that will engulf us once the implications of that change for specific government program beneficiaries become clear.