What does it mean if you have a poor credit rating? For one thing, it means there is doubt about your ability to repay money that you borrow. The lower your score goes, the more doubt there is.
A good credit score, by contrast, often means you have paid your bills on time, and that you have avoided excessive debt.
Those principles apply not only to individuals but to governments. The government of Greece, for instance, has borrowed and spent its way to financial catastrophe. So there has been understandable hesitation on the part of other European countries about lending Greece more money.
Fortunately, the U.S. government is not in quite the horrible condition that Greece is in.
But it was still a shock back in August when Standard & Poor's downgraded the United States' credit rating for the first time in our history. That followed an earlier downgrade by Egan-Jones Ratings Co., and expressions of serious concern by two other ratings agencies: Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings.
The downgrades were an embarrassing symbol of our country's unwillingness to get a handle on our appalling $14.9 trillion debt.
So what are we doing now to address the debt, which is costing us hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments each year?
Not much.
A bipartisan congressional committee is supposed to come up with a proposal for at least $1.2 trillion worth of deficit reductions before Thanksgiving. Congress as a whole would later vote on that proposal.
But so far, there is little certainty that even the 12-member committee -- much less majorities in both houses of Congress -- will agree on a package of deficit reductions. Democrats are focusing on tax increases, while Republicans want to cut spending.
And even if the committee came up with the prescribed $1.2 trillion in reductions, that amount is far too small, considering the magnitude of our debt. What is not often discussed is the fact that those reductions would be parceled out over the next 10 years. They would not be the immediate, deep cuts in wasteful spending that our crippling debt so obviously needs.
Worse still, supposed long-term cuts that Congress approves today could easily be undone by a future Congress. Similar promises of eventual cuts have been made by lawmakers in the past, only to be ignored when the time came to implement them.
All the uncertainty about our debt has made it likely that the United States will face one or more additional credit downgrades before the end of the year.
Merrill Lynch, a unit of Bank of America, recently predicted that the congressional deficit-cutting committee will fail in its duties, and that at least one of the credit-rating agencies will drop the United States' rating as a result. Among other negatives, that could increase the already massive interest that our country has to pay on the debt.
You would think such a prospect would have every senator and every representative in Congress determined to root out unconstitutional spending -- and to make even constitutionally permissible spending more efficient. But we don't sense an urgency on the part of Congress to begin the painful but necessary work of significantly reducing our deficits and working toward balanced budgets.
That is as disturbing as it is irresponsible.