Hey, they’ve got a survey of 38 academic economists backing them up!
With the White House and Congress engaged in their second major battle in 18 months over the debt limit, some lawmakers, economists and analysts are offering a simple solution: Just get rid of it.
The U.S. is one of the few nations with such a borrowing mechanism. And as political fights over raising the limit have escalated in recent years, chilling financial markets and triggering the first-ever U.S. credit rating downgrade, critics said the time has come to make a change in Washington.
“Congress has gone from grandstanding on the debt ceiling to actual use of it as an economic weapon of mass destruction,” Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said. “It’s extremely dangerous.”
They sure do love their violent rhetoric whenever a discussion of the debt ceiling comes up, don’t they? At least calling it a WMD is a departure from the tired “holding a gun to the head” nonsense.
The article does give one paragraph to the real importance of the debt ceiling: it forces a public conversation about spending. True, Republican leadership hasn’t handled it well, getting run over by the administration’s hyperbole last time and appearing to be getting ready to do so again. The forced conversation will be much more fruitful when the GOP learns how make its case clearly and forcefully.
And beware of any politicians who seek ways to operate more stealthily.
Aw, that’s okay, we just owe it to ourselves. (Dems want to legalize pot, too, don’t they?)
Why not? If you refuse to create a budget, then doing away with a debt limit is a “logical” conclusion.
There should be NO conversations on such language as PAYGO or Debt Ceiling. They shouldn’t exist! The elected members of congress are sent there to be disciplined and responsible adults managing the revenues the government takes in and spends not to mention, what they borrow. Of course, if one looks at the historical debt charts since becoming a nation, spending, debt and borrowing has never really been a problem of concern for any of them.
The remaining domestic major economies are doing fine but cannot begin to touch on the revenue needed to responsibly address the debt problem even if spending was reduced down to only defense, social security and medicare and zero anything else. High unemployment again reduces the incoming revenue. Most likely, we will not see anything sustainable, near what was once deemed acceptable unemployment levels for a long time, if ever again. Bottom line is pretty simple! We have a revenue problem to adequately address the spending and accumulated debt problem. Defense, social security, medicare and medicaid ain’t going away. So exactly where do does the GOP plan on spending cuts to divert ‘directly’ to pay down the debt? Folks have been asking for that answer for a long time now and never gotten even a remote answer.
The nations debt to GDP and pay-down was in pretty good shape until Reagan, Papa Bush, GW Bush and now Obama. The GW Bush debt alone, adjusted for inflation and interest at this moment, is at about 12 trillion dollars.
Mr. Kruiser, I would LOVE to hear your thoughts and ideas on how, exactly, the Republicans and Conservatives in Congress are supposed to get their messages out to the apathetic and/or ignorant majority of Americans when most of the media is on the side of the Democrats/Socialist/Liberals/Progressives? They can come on PJMedia and TownHall.com and Fox news but the people who go to those sites, and watch Fox News, are probably already believers. It’s the 51% we need to reach and they all watch 30 minutes of CBS News once or twice a week.
Suggestions??
This is a long term goal kind of problem and that’s not what people want to hear. You’re so right about the echo chamber problem we have and I’ve been trying to nudge people outside of it for years. Two things I will try to give quick coverage here:
1) We absolutely have to get new GOP leadership, preferably some who at least understand that the party is horrid at messaging. Yes, this isn’t a quick fix.
2) Conservatives need to start creating entertainment content but not branding it as political or conservative (NBC doesn’t brand itself as political or liberal, for example, but is). Just make it entertaining and subtly weave a political thread through it. We have to stop whining about not having influence in Hollywood and think more along the lines of creating digital content first. There are a few of us in the entertainment industry trying to do this now.
Perhaps I’ll do a longer post delving into the topic in more depth.
As long as I can borrow as much money I can myself print, there really is no problem.