Quote:
Originally Posted by ila
I just read a newspaper article today that says that every US president from Eisenhower on has raised the debt ceiling.
I do agree that the US has a debt problem that no one is willing to fix. I also agree that there is a leadership failure. As I see it, it is due to a weak president. That's not to say that a strong president would come up with better solutions. It just means that there is no leadership and hence no direction. The US ship of state is afloat and rudderless with an impending hurricane.
The US is going to have to get its act together. If it doesn't it will put the whole world economy into chaos and cause problems for generations to come. The reason it will cause problems to the world economy is because most money traders are based in the US and they have no idea that there is any other country beyond its borders. They are blinkered and shortsighted. There only concern is maximum profit for minimum effort regardless of the long term consequences.
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There are some very important elements to this entire debt ceiling "crisis" that are getting buried in the hyperbolic bullshit that substitutes for honest discourse (not what ila wrote above, but generally). I put all of this in the following context: I am not a supporter of Barack Obama, and am not a Democrat.
First, this "crisis" has been completely manufactured for political ends. Every single president since Franklin Roosevelt, including every Republican president, has raised the debt ceiling. The radical reactionaries elected under the Tea Party banner manufactured this crisis in an effort to starve the U.S. government of the money it needs to function, because they do not believe in the system under which the United States operates. They are willing to dismantle the social compact that has served the U.S. people (albeit, poorly) since the Great Depression not because it incurs debt, but because they are against its principles and the social solidarity implied by it. It is NOT ABOUT MONEY.
Second, the debt ceiling is a very simple thing that has typically been addressed in legislation no longer than a single piece of paper. It simply gives the Treasury Department the authority to borrow money Congress has already approved for spending. That authority involves going to the bond market and selling U.S. Treasury Bonds, long the most trusted investment in the entire world.
Third, the U.S. Constitution says not a word about the debt ceiling. There is only one other country in the world that has a provision like our debt ceiling, and that's Denmark. The U.S. debt ceiling was an invention of 1917, when federal budget controls were not nearly as stringent and sophisticated as they are today. The debt ceiling votes in Congress have always been more or less routine: some people (Obama when he was a senator, for instance) will symbolically vote against raising them with the full understanding that it will pass, because it must. It has nothing to do with spending in the future.
Fourth, it is a complete fabrication of the Tea Party (and aped by Tracy Coxx in multiple posts) that Barack Obama is some kind of crazed taxer who overspends and threatens to put the United States into bankruptcy. (Yes, Tracy Coxx will pretend that because Tracy Coxx never used those precise words Tracy Coxx is not responsible for such specific, hyperbolic, idiotic views.) The facts are otherwise, though. U.S. indebtedness runs around $14 trillion. Over the past 10 years, $5.07 trillion was run up during the Bush administration. Obama is responsible for $1.44 trillion. The Tea Partiers are liars (in addition to being ignorant).
Fifth, as the Tea Party seeks to delegitimize Obama, it is clear that should they succeed in obstructing all the way to "default," Obama can then order the secretary of the treasury to issue bonds as needed. There is ample legal opinion, highly respected, that the debt ceiling is an unconstitutional infringement on the executive branch, and opinions by very conservative justices now on the Supreme Court (and appointed by Bush) that provide precedents.