Lindsey is saying that the probability of U.S. bonds losing face value through inflation or default is high, given the size of the deficits we will be running and the improbability that any deficit-reduction plan now out there can significantly reduce them.

Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s are already talking of downgrading U.S. debt if the debt ceiling is not raised by early August.

Is America then headed for an inevitable default?

One Chinese economist is already accusing us of defaulting, as the Fed’s flooding of the world with dollars has seen the dollar lose 10 percent of its value against other currencies in the last year.

Holding $1 trillion in U.S. debt, China has watched the purchasing power of that U.S. paper plummet. Understandably, Beijing fears that if we ever pay back all they have lent us, it will be in U.S. dollars of far lesser value.

What should House Republicans do?

Stick to their principles and convictions.

For the cause of the deficit-debt crisis has been the explosion in federal spending under Barack Obama to the largest share of the U.S. economy since the climactic years of World War II.

Administrations of both parties contributed to this rise in the federal share of gross domestic product. But the GOP committed itself in 2010 to rein it in, without raising taxes. On that pledge the GOP triumphed and should keep its commitment.

First, because it is a solemn undertaking with a nation disgusted with politicians who say one thing and do another. Second, because our fiscal crisis, like Europe’s, is a result of too much government, not too little revenue. Third, because there is no credible school of economic thought that says raising taxes on the productive sector when one in six workers is unemployed or underemployed is the way to prosperity.

Under Obama these past two years, the nation relied on the U.S. government to pull us out of the ditch. But Obama’s $787 billion stimulus, his three deficits of 10 percent of GDP, and Ben Bernanke’s tripling of Fed assets by buying the bad paper of big banks and $600 billion in U.S. debt all failed.

For Republicans to agree now to a tax increases that would violate their principles, their promises to the voters and their basic philosophy—and be icing on the cake of Obama’s debt-ceiling increase—would be politically suicidal.

Indeed, were the Republican Party to do this, it would raise the question of why we need a Republican Party.