What will happen if the debt ceiling isn't raised?

[FeelingMN 273]

If you stop paying money that you promised to pay, the effects ripple through the economy. Take Pell Grants for example. As much as it bothers me to say this, I don't mind cutting Pell Grants if it will help the budget. But if you stop funding Pell Grants now, after you promised to pay them and then don't, all these schools are counting on that money and now they're not going to get it. So you put them at risk of default.

 

If you promise Possumscrotum, Arkansas help funding a water waste sewage system then don't give them the money, they're focked with a half completed sewer system, no way to finish it and thus no way to charge consumers to cover the expense they put into building it.

 

It just goes on and on through the economy. Also Federal Securities are the most stable investment in the country. If you pull that piece out, the whole financial system breaks down. Now we just went through that a couple of years ago with the subprime bullsh*t, the Fed is totally tapped out of options now. Congress is useless, we've got to add that to the mix too.

 

And it's all totally unnecessary. Raising the debt ceiling doesn't say anything other than that we're willing to meet our past obligations and commitments.

 

The whole fight should be done over future spending not refusing to pay for past spending.

 

[Recliner Pilot 61]

 

 

 

Again, looks like Republicans are hurting the economy with their craven political games.

 

 

Vote to raise the Debt Ceiling March 16, 2006

 

Number of Democrat Senators who voted for it = 0

 

 

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00054

 

I don't recall you whining about the Dems playing "craven political games". :banana:

[gocolts 300]

Indiana has a surplus right now. Guess what, they didn't raise taxes. They cut spending. Who would have thunk it.

[penultimatestraw 473]

Here is a chart looking at polls which assess opinion on the deficit, particularly as it relates to medicare. Looks like tax hikes, reducing foreign aid and the military are more popular than changes to medicare.

My link

[Voltaire 5,318]

Indiana has a surplus right now. Guess what, they didn't raise taxes. They cut spending. Who would have thunk it.

Then cut spending, go ahead. I'd love to see it and i appreciate the enthusiasm. It's nice to see they're serious about it. I like and respect what the Tea Party has done for the GOP (mostly, mostly, I'm on board with the budget deficit stuff, not the tax-cut-aholic stuff). It's about time the GOP got back to talking about debt.

 

The thing is, raising the debt ceiling is not the time for that fight.

 

When the debate turns to spending less in the future, (November, December time) I'll almost certainly be on board. I want to see some spending cuts and the only people I feel confident the balls and conviction to do that are Republicans who came to office after the Bushtard left. Unfortunatly, this cr@p about refusing to pay for past obligations and the willingness to tank the government over it is the wrong time to wage this battle. The repercussions of following this route are too severe. The appropriations have already been made. So pay the bills this year. When Congress makes a commitment they have an obligation to follow through. The refusal to do so is why our perfect credit rating is going to go into the toilet.

 

The battle would not be over by a long shot. 2012 has not been paid for and cannot be paid for without the acquiescence of the GOP House. That's the time for the cuts. The 2012 budget is going to look a lot different than 2010 and 2011 and that will be a great benefit to the country. The GOP has extracted a lot of concessions now, take those, then come back for more later.

[Mungwater 597]

Sure the 2012 budget will look different than the 2010 and 2011, I don't think they ever submitted one

[Voltaire 5,318]

Sure the 2012 budget will look different than the 2010 and 2011, I don't think they ever submitted one

It doesn't matter what you call it. Why does everybody around here get caught up on semantics? The point is the same.

[Recliner Pilot 61]

It doesn't matter what you call it. Why does everybody around here get caught up on semantics? The point is the same.

 

Not submitting the Constitutionally required budget for 2 years is "semantics"?

[titans&bucs&bearsohmy! 2,745]

Not submitting the Constitutionally required budget for 2 years is "semantics"?

 

The President is not required to submit a budget. Sorry. You really ought to read that thing sometime.

[Recliner Pilot 61]

The President is not required to submit a budget. Sorry. You really ought to read that thing sometime.

 

 

Where did I say President? The President "Proposes" a budget. It'a the House that submits a budget. The deadline is March 4. The Republicans met that deadline this year. We are still waiting for the Dems budget for the past 2 years.

 

Dayum! Do you ever get tired of showing your a$$? :banana:

[Phurfur 70]

I thought that BHO promised his troops "transparency". I guess they don't care as long as they feel like they won. Like that big income tax cut they think got in the stimulus.

[Voltaire 5,318]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/opinion/18douthat.html?hp

 

Op-Ed Columnist

The Republican Retreat

By ROSS DOUTHAT

 

 

In the negotiations over the debt ceiling, the Republican Party had everything mapped out except the endgame.

 

For months, Republican leaders used all the tools at their disposal — the anti-spending intensity of their base, the White House’s desire for a deal, the specter of dire consequences if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised — to leverage their way into a favorable position. Despite controlling just one house of Congress, they spent the spring and summer setting the agenda for the country: not whether to cut spending, but how deeply and how fast.

 

But last week, the Republican offensive suddenly collapsed in disarray. In the space of a few days, a party that once looked capable of pressing the White House into a deal that would have left liberals fuming found itself falling back on two less-palatable options instead: either a procedural gimmick that would try to pin the responsibility for raising the ceiling on President Obama, or a stand on principle that would risk plunging the American economy back into recession.

 

What went wrong? It turns out that Republicans didn’t have a plan for transitioning from the early phase of a high-stakes political negotiation, when the goal is to draw stark lines and force the other side to move your way, to the late phase, in which the public relations battle becomes crucial and the goal is to make the other side seem unreasonable, intransigent and even a little bit insane.

 

Winning the later phase doesn’t require making enormous compromises, or giving up the ground you’ve gained. But it requires at least the appearance of conciliation, and a few examples of concessions that you’re willing to (oh-so-magnanimously) make to those unreasonable ideologues in the other party.

 

For Republicans, this would have required one of two maneuvers: either modestly scaling back the size of the spending cuts they were seeking, or finding a few places in the tax code (the ethanol tax credit? the carried-interest loophole? those corporate jets the president keeps talking about?) where they could live with raising revenue by eliminating a tax break or capping a deduction.

 

For months, I had assumed that the Republican leadership would be able to find support within its caucus for option No. 2. Based on John Boehner’s brief flirtation with a “grand bargain” that would have included tax reform, the speaker of the House thought so as well.

 

But based on how quickly he abandoned that flirtation, it appears we were both mistaken. The result was a hanging curveball for President Obama, who spent last week posing as the Last Reasonable Man in Washington, contrasting his willingness to compromise on entitlements with the House Republicans’ intransigence on taxes.

 

To conservatives, this has been a galling spectacle. A president who spent his first two years in office taking spending to a historic high is accusing them of fiscal irresponsibility? A president who spent the spring demagoguing House Republicans for their willingness to restructure Medicare is citing a much more modest set of cuts as evidence of his fiscal seriousness?

 

But this fury misses the point. Obama has been playing the reasonability card so successfully because his opponents won’t (or can’t) play one of their own.

 

It’s not that Republicans needed to tug their forelock and go along with whatever grand bargain the White House whipped up. But to win the endgame, they needed something they were willing to concede, something they could tout in public as an example of meeting the Democrats partway.

 

Their inability to make even symbolic concessions has turned a winning hand into a losing one. A majority of Americans want to close the deficit primarily with spending cuts — which is to say, they’re primed to side with conservatives in the debt-ceiling debate. But in trying to turn that “primarily” into a “completely,” the right has squandered this advantage. By 48 percent to 34 percent, a Quinnipiac poll found last week, Americans will blame Republicans if debt-ceiling gridlock precipitates an economic crisis.

 

In the end, the threat of such a backlash will probably impel Republicans to make some kind of concession anyway, if they don’t admit that’s what they’re doing. (The maneuver that Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid are working on, for instance, would reportedly cut spending by $1.5 trillion and then let the president extend the debt ceiling on his own, effectively shaving about $500 billion off the spending cuts that Republicans were originally seeking.)

 

By backing into a compromise and shrouding it in procedural gimmickry, Republican legislators may hope to throw the Tea Party’s watchdogs off the scent. But both the politics and the substance of such a deal would probably be worse for conservatives than the kind of bargain that might have been available otherwise — if more Republicans had only recognized that sometimes a well-chosen concession can be the better part of valor.

 

 

-------

"A majority of Americans want to close the deficit primarily with spending cuts — which is to say, they’re primed to side with conservatives in the debt-ceiling debate. But in trying to turn that “primarily” into a “completely,” the right has squandered this advantage. By 48 percent to 34 percent, a Quinnipiac poll found last week, Americans will blame Republicans if debt-ceiling gridlock precipitates an economic crisis."

 

This is my position exactly. I want the GOP to win this debate and I want spending cuts. And they have won, they've extracted lots of concessions, so take that and move on.

 

It's unbelievable that Barrack Obama is able to "spent last week posing as the Last Reasonable Man in Washington, contrasting his willingness to compromise on entitlements with the House Republicans’ intransigence on taxes." What we've learned from two and a half years of Barrack Obama is that he hasn't the slightest interest in balancing the budget. Why are the GOP allowing him to paint himself as the responsible guy?

[titans&bucs&bearsohmy! 2,745]

Where did I say President? The President "Proposes" a budget. It'a the House that submits a budget. The deadline is March 4. The Republicans met that deadline this year. We are still waiting for the Dems budget for the past 2 years.

 

Dayum! Do you ever get tired of showing your a$$? :banana:

 

May be custom, but it ain't constitutionally required. Sorry moron.

[KSB2424 3,148]

I just googled this topic again to get the latest and I still haven't seen any spending cuts outlined anywhere from the Democratic side, most notably the President. Can anybody help me find them? I'm curious.

[parrot 789]

I haven't read the thread; has anyone mentioned cats and dogs living together?

[Recliner Pilot 61]

May be custom, but it ain't constitutionally required. Sorry moron.

 

Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution.

 

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

[titans&bucs&bearsohmy! 2,745]

Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution.

 

And where does that say they are required to submit a budget at all, let alone a certain date?