Seems like everybody with a mouth is having something to say about raising the limit on the debt. Most of it is amazingly uninformed but that in itself is not unusual.
Watched Mitch McConnell do a number on how he will demand no new taxes, the end of the Healthcare law and the restructuring of Social Security as payment for his vote to raise the debt limit. This just illustrates two things. One he has no interest in helping the American people or in fact the country survive a Republican caused depression and two, he doesn’t understand how the debt limit works or how to deal with it. McConnell is dishonest about his goals, disrespectful of his constituency and disingenuous on his positions, but thankfully dumb enough to, in this instance, be honest about it
The Republicans have decided that it gives them a new bullet for the gun they are using to blackmail concessions out of the Democrats. But if you are going to choose a weapon, you should, at least, have some familiarity with how it works and how much damage it can do.
The U.S. debt is the result of past decisions and actions not future possibilities. As such it has nothing to do with future policy. Raising the limit allows the government to borrow enough money to pay debts it has already incurred. Again, it has nothing to do with what happens from here on. We have already, as a nation, made the decision to spend this money, most of which, has already been spent. Now we are just borrowing the money to pay off the debts we’ve already incurred. This makes not raising the debt limit to cover what we owe, ridiculous because if we don’t pay the interest on what we owe, we default. For those of you who work on a more down to earth model, that’s when the shylock sends the big guy with the stone hands over to break a significant bone.
So threatening not to raise the debt limit is the act of an illogical child, the kind of childish behavior we have come to expect from Boehner, McConnell, Gingrich, Ryan and Cantor.
Almost all the business and banking community, most of them Republicans, oppose any thought of not raising the debt limit. It therefore seems that a handful of Republican politicians, are willing to endanger the economy of the United States and in fact the whole world just to achieve their own petty ends.
Is it because they are too dumb to understand what they are doing, or is it because they are so determined to force our national economy to function under a fiscal policy that has already been proven a failure? They don’t want to raise taxes, they don’t want to cut military spending but they do want to cut entitlements to such an extent that we as a country, can no longer function as anything but a third world nation.