The "debt ceiling" thing which Republicans are planning to use to crash a season of strong economy and thus hurt Joe Biden is one of those nonsense accretions in which our creaky government structure abounds. More directly, this is bullshit. And beyond stupid.
The U.S. Constitution of 1787 gave the country lots of structures, but not much of a blueprint for funding a significant size, active federal government. Such a thing wasn't on the Founders menu. Maybe the government could be funded by tariff receipts?
Vast steps toward a developed finance capital system were forced by the demands of funding the Union army and federal state during the Civil War. Out of that necessity, we got paper money and lots and lots of government bonds sold to investors.
But each of those Treasury bond sales required an act of Congress. Another war -- the Great War of 1917 -- convinced Congress to make it easier for the government to borrow: why not just set a high ceiling so federal bond sales didn't take up Congressional time? The debt ceiling was invented to make federal financing easier!
And so it remained until modern conservatism transformed the Republic Party from a recalcitrant participant in (bad) government into a random wrecking ball.
Under the Constitution, the national House of Representatives proposes a budget; that House and the Senate and the President haggle and eventually compromise over that budget and a law gets passed; and the executive branch spends money based on that legally authorized budget. The Treasury collects taxes and sells bonds to enable the government to do what its lawful institutions have ordered in the budget process.
Where does the "debt ceiling" come in? Nowhere in a sane universe. Congress has told the government to make various expenditures -- like more aircraft carriers, veterans benefits, and Social Security payments -- and thereby take on debts to creditors small and large. And the budget authorizes the feds to pay its bills. Over time, the United States has been highly reliable about paying its bills, so the country has a lot of credit and uses that earned trust to grease the financial wheels by selling bonds. Yes, those bonds create a "debt," but so does your credit card bill and your mortgage. Most of us most of the time just keep paying off past debt and taking on future debt, and so does the U.S. government.
So the strange requirement that Congress periodically enact a "debt ceiling" is a ridiculous artifact of an obsolete funding process that ended a century ago. It serves no purpose except to enable Republican obstructionism. GOPers know this; they voted happily three times during the Trump years to raise the limit.
There are all sorts of permutations and possible work-arounds through which the administration might get through this Republicans tantrum. I'm offended that we are supposed to waste brain cells on these bypasses and I am not going to go into them here. One of the truly offensive realities of the Republican debt ceiling clown show is that, but because the whole thing is bullshit, there's very little space for citizen activism to engage with it, aside from calling out Republican Congresscritters as assholes. But we already knew that. And perhaps bucking up Biden and Dems who show spines.
Here's how from Brian Beutler:
... we need Democrats who will stop treating the Republicans' serial default threat as a prompt to outmaneuver them, and instead simply overturn the game board; who will say it doesn’t matter if they pass an extortionate debt-limit bill or not, because there’s nothing to negotiate. They are the minority, trying to impose their will on the whole country by threat of mass harm, and that isn’t compatible with freedom or self-government. It isn’t hard bargaining, it’s terrorism. ...
The country can’t survive in the long run if one shameless faction wields power in a consequence-free realm, while the other quietly acclimates itself to the mounting extremism. Eventually the trespasses will be incompatible with self-rule, and it will bring the whole republic down.
Most of us are not willing to acquiesce in the Republican attempt to trash the country. How many times do we have to prove this?
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