After the obligatory period of dysfunction and gamesmanship, Congress is finally giving some more money to its small-business rescue plan, which ran out of funds soon after launching. For those keeping track at home, that’s another $300 billion piled atop the $2 trillion original stimulus bill.

As something of a deficit hawk I’d normally have an aneurysm at figures such as these, but of course this time is different. Businesses are shut down, workers are idled. It would make no sense to force them all to just absorb these losses and go bankrupt or even hungry. Borrowing in bad times is a commonsensical way to make the worst economic conditions a little bit better, or to “smooth consumption” if you want a fancy term.

But if now is a good time to turn on the money hose, it’s also a time to feel grateful that we live in a country where this is even an option. We can make trillions of dollars appear by snapping our fingers despite a track record of failure when it comes to managing our previous debts and our entitlement programs. People born elsewhere are facing this crisis with much less cushion and far fewer options.

Think for a second about how we haven’t been saving up for a rainy day. Even before the pandemic hit, the Congressional Budget Office pegged our national debt at $16 trillion, or about 80 percent of a year’s GDP. That debt — driven chiefly by our entitlement programs, unreformed in the face of mass Baby Boomer retirements — was set to increase to more than $30 trillion by 2030, at which point it would have been about 100 percent of GDP. A trillion here and a trillion there to deal with a pandemic seems almost trivial in comparison with what we were already facing: So what if our debt matches our GDP right now in 2020 rather than taking until 2030?

Still, one might worry that this mountain of bills would make it hard to borrow even more. But no, interest rates are incredibly low, because people throughout the globe want a safe place to put their money right now and that place is the United States. And as Karl Smith explained in a recent Bloomberg column, the fact that the U.S. issues debt in its own currency also changes the picture, because we can avert a debt crisis by simply printing money. (This in turn causes other serious problems, though, such as reducing the value of the dollar.) The starring role of the dollar in the global financial system provides us another layer of protection.

This doesn’t mean there’s no need to fix the entitlement system. If interest rates increase in the future, it will get very expensive to maintain a debt in the mid 14 figures. What it does mean is that we are incredibly fortunate as a society, able to borrow ourselves into oblivion even as the economy expands and then borrow still faster to deal with an acute crisis.

Look at what’s happening in the world’s poorer nations as they confront COVID-19, of which there are now confirmed cases just about everywhere. These countries don’t have our hospitals or our drug industry. And they also don’t have our ability to borrow truckloads of money while deliberately tanking the economy.

The website Project Syndicate has done an excellent job this year of covering the problem of COVID-related debt in developing countries. Back in March, Jayati Ghosh warned of “a debt meltdown long in the making, starting in many of the Asian emerging and developing economies on the front lines of the outbreak.” Poorer nations have been ramping up their debts since the financial crisis, and the pandemic could tip many over the edge, particularly those close to China, the epicenter of the outbreak.

This month, Joseph Stiglitz urged the world’s richer countries to develop a rescue plan, drawing on a United Nations report from March 30. “Many governments will find it exceedingly difficult to roll over the debts coming due this year on reasonable terms, if at all,” he noted. These places, in other words, are basically at the mercy of the more fortunate.

No one is having very much fun right now, and no country’s economy will escape harm. But along with all of our complaining, we Americans might take a minute here and there to appreciate how much worse other people have it.