Congress, Politics

The Phony Debt Ceiling Debate

Submitted by Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger

Humorist Tom Bodett observed on NPR’s “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me” this weekend that if we raise the debt ceiling any higher, we won’t be able to paint it.  In addition to being funny, his comment was more intelligent than most of what passes for debate on the issue.

Raising the debt ceiling is hardly a difficult decision to make, requiring that Congress answer only the following questions:

1. Are we unable with existing revenues to pay our debts as they become due?

2. Do we have the ability to borrow the funds necessary to cover the shortfall?

3. Will the additional borrowing push us over the existing debt ceiling?

If the answer to these questions is “yes,” the debt ceiling needs to be raised. Congress has always managed to get through the process rather easily, voting to increase the debt ceiling 74 times since 1962.  So why the current impasse on a routine matter?

The answer, of course, is that the debate is about something other than the national debt. That something is the trilogy of programs known as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Republican efforts in the past to privatize Social Security disappeared in the Washington fog. The Ryan budget, which includes the elimination of Medicare, has as much chance of passage as I do of appointment to the Supreme Court. (Medicare is already getting hammered throughout the country, even as severe unemployment has increased the number of eligible recipients.)

But Republicans view the debt ceiling debate as an opportunity to move forward with their plans for the Great Dismantling, strongly encouraged by two factors. The first is the large number of freshmen Tea Party representatives who share with the average college radical the notion that compromise bespeaks a lack of moral integrity. The second is the President’s propensity to compromise first and ask for something in return later. The strategy has already borne fruit; the Obama administration has offered cuts in Social Security and Medicare without extracting a single binding promise on revenue increases. Fully expecting a complete collapse of Democratic nerve, Republicans are now treating the public to something resembling the drag racing scene in “Rebel Without A Cause.”

So is it nevertheless an honest debate?  Not by a long shot.  For one thing, everyone knows the debt ceiling must be increased regardless of any other considerations.  Congressional hypocrisy is thicker than Louisiana sorghum on this point.  The phrase “debt ceiling,” after all, is a misnomer.  The limits imposed by the statute apply to borrowing authority.  The actual debt ceiling is whatever Congress decides it will be through its enactment of spending bills. When Republicans exacted continuation of the Bush tax cuts last fall, they certainly understood that the additional debt burden would require increasing the debt ceiling.  Therefore, opposing an increase in the statutory debt ceiling is equivalent to refusing to pay debts one has already incurred.

Moreover, there is nothing honest about hiding one’s real agenda.  Insisting on spending cuts which one knows cannot be accomplished without seriously damaging so-called entitlement programs is stealth politics posing as principled resolve.  The budget cut debate can take place at another time, and the Republican leadership knows it.

The mature solution is to terminate the present negotiations, adopt a reasonable debt ceiling increase as a stand-alone bill and take up spending and taxing measures separately.  Bookies aren’t taking bets on political maturity in the present Congress.

Sources: CNN Money; Austin, D. Andrew and Levit, Mindy R., “The Debt Limit: History and Recent Increases,” Congressional Research Service (Jan. 28, 2010).

57 thoughts on “The Phony Debt Ceiling Debate”

  1. culheath and SwM,

    Democracy isn’t dead and this SS/Medicare issue is just the “flavor” of the election season replacing the old flavors of family values, abortion, gay-rights, etc. Republicans love the emotionally divisive issues.

    Just read kderosa’s comments as he attempts to anger posters with emotionally personal insults … it’s all cut from the same cloth. I tell groups I speak to not to get mad, just get serious.

    I don’t work for any particular politician … I work for issues.

  4. Common-Sense GOP Effort Will Prevent Job-Crushing Default & Deny President Obama a $2.4 Trillion Blank Check
    Posted by Speaker Boehner Press Office on July 25, 2011

    Today, House Republican leaders will discuss with lawmakers a new framework designed to prevent a national default while ensuring any debt limit increase granted to President Obama includes spending reforms and cuts that exceed the debt limit hike. This common-sense plan is aimed at stopping President Obama’s indefensible quest for a debt limit increase that would run past the next election without a process in place to ensure spending is being cut as the debt ceiling is being raised. As Speaker Boehner said yesterday on FOX News Sunday, “I know the president’s worried about his next election. But my God, shouldn’t we be worried about the country?”

    President Obama desperately wants a large debt limit increase that will take him past the next presidential election.

    * The president is demanding a $2.4 trillion debt limit increase all at once – without spending cuts that exceed the hike – and refusing to accept a two-stage process that would ensure government spending continues to be cut as the debt ceiling is raised. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner went on the Sunday shows yesterday to “insist” that any agreement “remove the possibility of a default from the politically heated presidential campaign season.”
    * As Majority Leader Cantor said yesterday, the president’s stance is purely political, and indefensible. “He cannot sustain or defend putting politics above the country’s interests in this situation,” Leader Cantor added.

    Granting the president’s request would amount to giving the president a $2.4 trillion blank check he can use to continue the spending binge that has driven our nation to the brink of a job-destroying downgrade and default.

    * The president has made it pretty clear he sees this debate as inconvenient compared to his desire to create more ‘stimulus’ programs. “I’d rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes – like new programs,” he said at a recent press conference.
    * He is trying to set up a no-win situation for taxpayers: either he gets his $2.4 trillion blank check, or America defaults.

    Speaker Boehner and Congressional Republicans have been clear that to pass the House, any debt limit increase must be accompanied by spending cuts that exceed the amount of the debt limit hike.

    http://www.speaker.gov/Blog/?postid=253461

  5. kderosa,

    Nope … 66 years old and no meds yet … which is a really good thing considering all the bat-shit crazy politicians I have to deal with on a monthly basis.

  6. First, I wasn’t arguing, simply noting – but you just demonstrated my point again…oh well.

    It’s culheath, as in Ferlinghetti, by the by.

  7. At least the hated blue dogs believed in Social Security and Medicare unlike the tea party members that replaced them.

  8. What is it over 700 days with no proposed Deomocratic budget? Yeah, that’s how you govern. It’s also why we have this little debt ceiling fiasco.

  9. It is worth it, Blouise. The seniors that are living off $1100 dollars a month need protection. Just reading in the NYT about the Florida kids whose parents fly them to camp in Maine on rented jets. The rules favor the ultra rich. The tea party is demanding no revenue increases just cuts. Boehner would make a deal but the tea party won’t let him. I remember all the rhetoric on here last fall about not voting so things would get better.

  10. Culheath, your attempt at an argument is not only off the wall but part of your intellectual problem. How’s that for equivalence?

  11. As Karl Rove has said…The National Debt does not matter…if the party of obstruction and obstructionism keeps going it won’t really matter….FYI no continuing national debt until Nixon….Then RWR made sure it did not matter….why the party marionettes played in the garden….

    Thanks mike…

  12. The article is entirely too sensible and comprehensible to be entered into this debate. The President indeed negotiates peculiarly, like a buyer offering more than the list price for a house and then raising his bid before the homeowners response. Republican are hemmed in by three considerations and responding to the two least sensible.

    1. There is the Grover Norquist plan to shrink the government away.
    2. There is the Teabagger opposition to ever raising taxes, even though
    many of them rely on government programs like SS and Medicare and
    don’t.want them touched.
    3. There is a desire from their main money backers to maintain the financial
    status quo, these backers represent Wall Street and major
    Corporations..

    Every concession The President has made has signaled the Congressional Republicans that their remaining intransigence will be successful, thereby pleasing all of their constituency. Either The President, who is highly intelligent and/or his backers (also intelligent) are incompetent in the art of negotiation, or they are so beholden to the monied interests that they would gut two highly successful and needed programs. The other alternative to this which keeps rising to my consciousness, only to be forced down by my unwarranted optimism, is that we have lost all semblance of democracy and are not the rulers, but the ruled.

  14. kderosa,
    Your attempt at equivalence is not only off the wall, it’s also part of the problem represented by the new republican mask of tortured conservative reasoning.

  15. Blousie, this the first comment of yours where you’ve made a lick of sense. Did you skip your meds today?

  16. The rhetoric from both sides is so ridiculous, I’ve stopped listening. In my opinion it’s all purposeful bull-shit aimed at taking our attention away from what’s going on at the state level and what’s happening overseas.

    I refuse to be distracted and will spend a couple days next week on the road attending petition signing events. (People are getting very angry at republicans over the social security/medicare issue …)

    Every time I wonder if all this travel and speaking is a waste of my time all have to do is read one of the diatribes from the trolls who creep around this blog … yep, it damn well is worth every minute I spend on the road combating that crap.

  17. Do you mean to tell me that politicians are playing politics with the issue du jour? Who would have very suspected that. Can’t we go back to the salad days of the Bush administartion when good Democrat politicians never played political games?

  18. I copied this piece to my blog because it is as I titled it:

    “The Most Sane Debt Ceiling Conversation Yet”.

    Thank you.

  19. The real agenda is not hard to figure out. The radical Republican leadership has already said their first priority is to make sure the Obama Presidency is a failed one. Their second priority is to make sure he is a one-term President.

    Only one problem with that agenda. The Republican primary field is filled with a combination of political lightweights, crazy people, and unelectable wannabes.

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