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This Whole Debt Limit Thing

Who has been the most unreasonable on this whole debt limit thing?

  • Congressional Democrats

    Votes: 11 6.2%

  • Congressional Republicans

    Votes: 139 78.1%

  • Obama

    Votes: 10 5.6%

  • They have all been equally unreasonable.

    Votes: 18 10.1%
  • Total voters
    178
  • Poll closed .
Emperor_Gestahl said:
Besides, the trust fund has enough in it to send out SS checks for several years with no debt limit increase. Obama was either lying or doesn't understand that SS bonds are already part of the debt.
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But the people whose job it is to make Social Security payments are paid through appropriated funds. If government services are disrupted, it doesn't really matter how much is sitting in the trust fund if there's no one there to mail the checks, does it?
 
Emperor_Gestahl said:
Servicing "ALL debts" amounts to $189 billion or so, I think we can handle that. Before cutting SS I'd like to see military spending cuts, and actual medical system reform (price caps, force pharmacorps to charge us what they charge the rest of the world, etc).
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The constitution does not really give him that kind of flexibility. He has to pay everything budgeted and appropriated. Period. Since he cannot issue DEBT, he must issue SCRIP. I know that Scrip and Debt are very similar, but not legally in this case.
 
bonzombiekitty said:
What annoys me about the plan is how it just clearly shows that all the arguing over the debt ceiling is nothing more than politics.
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Yes, the ideological types in congress seem to have forced the debate to extremes. While controlling the USA's deficits...and bringing down the debt...are important, I can't help but wonder where these tea party types were during the Bush administration. Now the GOP is all about bringing down the debt (but no new taxes!!!).

Hypocrisy in politics yet again rears it's ugly, misbegotten head, not that it's a surprise.

The tea party folks, if nothing else, have shaken up the status quo, let's hope this little experiment ends well.
 
BenBurch said:
The constitution does not really give him that kind of flexibility. He has to pay everything budgeted and appropriated. Period.
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If you're referring to the 14th amendment it only applies to bonds. (edit for duplication) Otherwise what gets paid and when is up to Treasury, according to the GAO (sorry for apparent broken caps lock at the GAO).

http://redbook.gao.gov/14/fl0065142.php

WE ARE AWARE OF NO STATUTE OR ANY OTHER BASIS FOR CONCLUDING THAT TREASURY IS REQUIRED TO PAY OUTSTANDING OBLIGATIONS IN THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY ARE PRESENTED FOR PAYMENT UNLESS IT CHOOSES TO DO SO. TREASURY IS FREE TO LIQUIDATE OBLIGATIONS IN ANY ORDER IT FINDS WILL BEST SERVE THE INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES.
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bonzombiekitty said:
While I'll grant that the debt is something that needs to be addressed, the debt ceiling is not where you should be leveraging that. The debt exists already. There's money we are going to have to owe. The debt we owe is going to go up whether we raise the debt ceiling or not. If we don't we just won't be able to issue bonds to pay for what we already owe.
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Well said, nice and concise. If we end up owing a "bit" more before we start to mend our spend thrift ways, at least this gives the gov't the ability to pay our OUTSTANDING debts. Defaulting is a very bad option for the USA; we owe too much to too many; EVERY U.S. citizen will pay far more if we default, than if we come to at least an interim solution.

Granted there are no guarantees the next Congress will follow through with anything passed now...but then again their never will be. A balanced budget Constitutional amendment is not in the cards, and would be ridiculous anyway. Their are times when deficit spending must be done ( major wars, majors disasters, major depressions/recessions etc.)
 
BazBear said:
A balanced budget Constitutional amendment is not in the cards, and would be ridiculous anyway. Their are times when deficit spending must be done ( major wars, majors disasters, major depressions/recessions etc.)
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I don't think it's inherently ridiculous. You can easily have a BB amendment give some sort of high bar process for issuing deficit spending. If the issue is important - e.g. war, disaster, etc, you'll likely exceed any high bars in place.
 
leftysergeant said:
Ryan and Agent Orange would be quite comfortable with that. They would like SS gone.
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And millions of starved and heat-stroked seniors would quickly result in Ryan and Boener being "gone" as well. And the same goes for any Democrats who would share responsibility for the mountainous pile of dead former taxpayers.

I suppose they could all run off to Russia, that great oligarch utopia. But then they'd all be on the military's hit list, like bin Laden, whose tiny kill rate would seem amateurish by comparison.
 
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BeAChooser said:
Yeah, that was the same thing democrats claimed in 2008/2009 about the recession, insisting that we had to throw a HUGE pile of stimulus money at it and promising that if we did, unemployment would never exceed 8%.
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Funny how you conveniently “forget” to mention that this was based on faulty numbers provided by the Bush administration and that unemployment was *already* over 8% and in fact had almost reached 9% when the Stimulus passed and was over 9% before stimulus money started to flow.

In fact as soon as Stimulus money did begin to flow GDP stopped declining and unemployment stopped increasing. This occurred almost immediacy, even though the recession had been going on for 19 months during which “doing nothing” had failed to have any positive effect.

(BTW, It’s actually quite understandable that the Bush numbers would be off given the nosedive the US economy took after credit markets froze when Leahman’s went under. It’s almost impossible for economic models to keep up with a crisis this bad.)
 
I love this right-wing meme about how Obama's not working. Remember when he had his NCAA picks and people said he should be governing? And he golfs all the time? Or how he called up Lebron James? I bet all of these people were outraged -- outraged -- at the vacations Bush took.
 
Meanwhile, as right-wingers make dumb anti-Obama jokes, Moody's and S&P say they'll downgrade US bonds if the the debt ceiling isn't raised.

Moody's was the first of the big-three rating agencies to place the United States' Aaa rating on review for a possible downgrade, which means it is close to cutting its rating.

Standard & Poor's has privately told U.S. lawmakers and top business groups that it might cut the U.S. credit rating if the government fails to make any of its expected payments—including Social Security checks—even if it makes all its debt payments, the Wall Street Journal reported citing people familiar with the matter.

The Treasury Department has said if the debt ceiling is not raised by Aug. 2 it will have to start prioritizing payments.
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For those of you blithely confident that we can avoid problems by simply not paying the unimportant stuff and thus avoid a technical default, pay close attention to the middle paragraph.
 
BeAChooser said:
No President could possibly be THAT stupid. So ....
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What is not stupid and what is the problem is that the amount of the requested debt increase keeps the party going to the end of the obama term.

It's not really about fixing the problem, it's about politics.

But we are in the end game of the meltdown now, and all that extends it is the length of time interest rates can be kept artificially low.
 
ANTPogo said:
Meanwhile, as right-wingers make dumb anti-Obama jokes, Moody's and S&P say they'll downgrade US bonds if the the debt ceiling isn't raised.



For those of you blithely confident that we can avoid problems by simply not paying the unimportant stuff and thus avoid a technical default, pay close attention to the middle paragraph.
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Part of the Teapublican party's strategy here is keep the economy in the crapper until November 2012, and try to pin the blame on the Democrats. Some extreme members of the tea-party caucus see this as a way to achieve that goal (and some are just to damn dumb to grasp the consequences).

People are holding tight to their cash while this game, and the whole light bulb issue is sorted and congress can go back to doing something about jobs in this country. Personally, I am sitting on a significant amount of money that I would usually have in the market by now. I'm not making a move until the inmates decide how they are going to play this game out. My wife's job is too closely tied to what is happening in the markets and I don't want to buy right now if it is all going to be significantly lower next month. I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that math.

Daredelvis
 
daredelvis said:
People are holding tight to their cash while this game, and the whole light bulb issue is sorted and congress can go back to doing something about jobs in this country. Personally, I am sitting on a significant amount of money that I would usually have in the market by now. I'm not making a move until the inmates decide how they are going to play this game out. My wife's job is too closely tied to what is happening in the markets and I don't want to buy right now if it is all going to be significantly lower next month. I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that math.

Daredelvis
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Honestly, for quite some time now I've been thinking about making a killing when a market blowout takes out BAC by executing a contract, but I don't understand how it works. I wish there was an explanation of how stock market options work with an example of all the costs involved – payments, fees, taxes, and any rules that say you cannot collect in case of a governmental collapse – but I haven't found one – way too many advertisements for brokerages getting into the search results. Of course it doesn't just have to be a big bank. I'm sure there are a lot of companies more dependent upon the government payments that'll drop in price after a default, but then again, I don't know which companies might have payment problems.
 
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