Debt Ceiling
Apr12
By John Feehery
It was Alexander Hamilton who first took on public debt as a political issue. Hamilton understood that if the federal government assumed the debts of the states, it would not only take on great responsibility, it would also seize great power. He was opposed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but Hamilton struck a deal with them by agreeing to move the nation’s Capitol from the Northeast closer to the Virginians’ home on the Potomac River.
Washington and the nation’s federal debt have been forever thus entwined. Our debt is different from our deficit, and the two should not be confused, but often are. Balanced budgets don’t make a dent in our debt, but these days, Washington can’t even offer the voters a balanced budget because the political pain is so excruciating for our national politicians.
The reason we have such a situation is because of entitlement spending, more specifically, Medicare and Medicaid. If you track the history of the debt ceiling, the numbers go up astronomically the longer those programs are in place.
One of the basic responsibilities of the Congress is to pay the bills. But it can’t pay the bills unless it passes a law authorizing debt. It doesn’t like to do that because authorizing more debt doesn’t sound very good. It sounds vaguely irresponsible.
One famous politician put it this way several years ago: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”
That politician was Senator Barack Obama. Now he is the President, and guess what? He wants the Congress to raise the debt ceiling.
Wars used to be the thing that caused the most debt in America. The War of 1812 caused the big debt crisis. The Civil War plunged America from a debt of $65 million in 1860 to a debt of $2.7 billion following the war. The debt following the first World War was around $26 billion, and following the Second World War, it was $260 billion.
Lyndon Johnson thought he could pay for both guns and butter, and from the 1960’s to today, our debt ceiling has steadily increased, to somewhere close to $11 trillion.
Some Republicans want to take a firm stand against increasing the debt ceiling, while some others want to get something out of their vote.
This vote differentiates the show horses from the work horses.
Obama was a show horse in the Senate. He didn’t want to get his fingers dirty, so he voted against raising the debt limit, knowing that other, more responsible members of the Senate would do the dirty work.
Republicans who decide that they are too pristine to raise the debt limit make it harder for John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to get concessions from the Democrats. If Michelle Bachman says that she isn’t going to vote to increase the debt limit, that is fine, but Boehner has got to find the votes somewhere.
Medicare is driving us off the financial cliff, and getting Medicare reform seems to me to be a pretty good tradeoff for raising the debt ceiling. That would be better than a balanced budget amendment vote, which will go nowhere.
But for Republicans to get something substantial in exchange for a vote on the debt ceiling, they need to stick together. Each Tea Party member who decides to be a show horse rather than a work horse gives more power to the Democrats and makes it harder for John Boehner to get a better deal for the taxpayer.
Please be kind enough to show me where entitlement spending is driving the deficit to the point where they, entitlements, needs to be cut – your opinion is acceptable, but it has not truth! Entitlement spending is less than fifteen percent of the budget.
We just added a few months ago… 1.4 trillion over the next two years to the deficit with gifts to the rich via an extension of the Bush Tax Cuts. Entitlement spending is in the millions per year.
When you consider that those tax cuts to be legitimate – cumulatively adding them over a ten year period, we will have added 7 trillion dollars to the deficit using the supposition that these taxes cuts will generate jobs – which they have not!
The other area of contestability lies is the tax cuts given to big business and the oil industry. Lobbyists have made it possible for big business to effectively use aggressive tax strategies to avoid paying their fair share of the tax burden. The aggravation comes when ‘some’ individuals falsely believe that these strategies should be allowed to continue at the expense of entitlements for the disenfranchised lower income and destitute, by removing entitlements as a direct cause of the deficit! That is a bald-faced lie!
I noticed that you conveniently forgot to make the point that the war in Iraq alone cost nine billion per day as estimated by the CBO – http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aairaqwarcost.htm. That war, based on lies – a well-thought of strategy, I might add – created far more to the deficit than any other factor in the era of misguided spending, but you don’t mention it because it would disrupt context of your entire point…
The first and only thing that will truly reduce spending and reduce the deficit is the telling of the truth by all parties – all of them, because the Tea Partied Republican Party is still being less than truth. Seniors and the disenfranchised don’t have a lobbyist to speak for them on Capitol Hill and that is unfortunate.