You misunderstand and are also guilty of assuming-bad-faith, one of the main things that undermines the basic potential for any reasonable exchanges (especially online in plain text). You can disagree with something while assuming good faith.

> This $233T does not include the currency generating debt

To be clear: The MMT stuff wasn't a reply to the article but to other people commenting and wrongly conflating the "National Debt" with the article's focus on other debts.

> why would there be any limits on government spending at all ?

You seem to be totally misunderstanding or making out some straw man. Creating currency doesn't even make demand. The only reason anyone demands the currency itself is being forced to pay taxes in it. If you give me $1 million, that doesn't increase my demand for more pants or food or anything. To whatever extent I want a bigger house than I can afford, then giving me dollars could give me the buying power — but only if you don't give the dollars to everyone else too. If I control the same portion of the currency, then my buying-power is unchanged and we just get inflation.

Government directs things by unevenly creating currency, and unevenly taxing. By sending checks to people who take certain actions (building infrastructure, investing in whatever the government wants to subsidize) and taxing stuff to discourage (tobacco, pollution…), the government influences what happens or not.

But that can only go so far (the government could give one guy a check for solving all diseases, but that doens't make it possible). And the government can be controlled by special interests who direct things for their power and profit. The government can also aim to subsidize or penalize certain things but have unintended consequences that completely undermine the goal.

There's nothing about government spending (or taxing) that makes it good or bad inherently. It's just a matter of the actual effect of the policies.

You could make an evidence-based argument that most of the government direction is interference in the market and mostly causes problems and is negative. Whatever your position, it's a question of policies and effects. The facts of fiat currency spending and taxing don't change.

Do governments owe interest on government debt? Yes. Do these interest payments come out of the same pool of money that is used for everything else, say social security or pensions? NO, there is no fixed pool of money. The federal government issues currency, it doesn't have it. When interest rates go up, does that mean interest payments go up? Yes. Will that compete/endanger social security spending? NO — the federal government will NEVER EVER have a check bounce. SS cannot be insolvent or go bankrupt. The problem is that, to use Warren Mosler's example, if we have 300,000,000 retired folks and 1 working guy, the problem is not whether we can pay him enough to take care of everything.

Currency actions (spending and taxing) can only go so far toward changing real facts on the ground where it matters.

> …prevent this debt from actually coming due…

That's a non-issue. There is no such thing as the National Debt becoming "due". There's no basis to even talk about that, it's not a thing and can't be.

The "National Debt" is literally private savings. Wiping out the "Debt" is the same as wiping out the private savings of the currency.