We’d already spent the money. The vote was on whether or not to borrow it. We’d SPENT IT already.
Rejecting the debt limit increase would have been the rough equivalent of credit card fraud. I’m gonna buy me a whole bunch of stuff…and then simply refuse to pay the bank back.
Because of this, the bank reduced our credit rating. You do NOT play chicken with creditors. Many of us supported the notion that the administration could unilaterally increase the debt limit – and would even be constitutionally required to.
Your idea that it is just some “at will” fancy of the Democrats is beyond inane; it is ignorance of the most grievous sort. The Democrats were simply acknowledging the blunt truth: we had already spent the money! The Republicans were willing to hurt the country rather than accept this fact.
Hint: after you’ve spent the money is no time to practice austerity!
No, shut up. You have no idea what the fuck you are talking about, and I’m not explaining the debt ceiling to yet another person who does not understand how it works. I’m just not going to. Jesus dude, please learn what the fuck you are talking about, then you are qualified to come back to the discussion. Until then, you’re like a kid who doesn’t understand that ATMs don’t just spout free money who feels that his parents were wrong in spanking him for stealing their ATM card and draining it. If you want to have any shred of respectability in this conversation, you will stop acting like you have no understanding of anything. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is disasterous.
Yes. Let me explain how misguided that may have been. Do you know how Kent Hovind claims that there are 6 types of evolution, only one of which has ever been demonstrated? Do you know how he also claims that the grand canyon was carved out by floodwater from Noah’s flood because it starts above ground level? The entire republican caucus would have to be full of Kent Hovind-level idiots to think that buying a bunch of shit on the credit card, then refusing the pay the bill was a good idea. There is no two ways about this: either the republican party is insanely stupid, like to the point of clinical retardation, or they’re fucking evil. I think I’m not giving them too much credit in claiming that they are smart enough to put a goddamn pair of pants on the right way.
And if I sound a little exasperated, it’s because I am. The debt ceiling debacle was the kind of one-of-a-kind telling fiascos that show just how fucked-up a political party is, and how backwards their priorities are. It isn’t hard to understand – in fact, it’s about as straightforward as it gets. The debt ceiling has been raised without a single peep dozens of times. This is rote politics – congress has already allotted the spending it will be doing in other bills. All the debt ceiling does is say, “You can’t borrow money to pay for the spending you have already done”. Obviously, this is really stupid. So every few years, congress votes to raise this. This is a rote procedure, and has been tied to policy exactly once before, in the Nixon era, and I will agree that however much I like the legislature there, that was a really, really bad idea. Why? Because negotiating over whether or not one can pay one’s credit card bill, with one side that must say yes saying “No, not until you do completely unreasonable things that aren’t in your own best interest” in full view of your creditors is a good way to make your creditors stop trusting you.
And let’s be perfectly clear here: nobody wanted the default. What the republicans did was akin to someone kidnapping their own wife to get the neighbors to comply to their demands. Complete government shutdown wouldn’t just have been a disaster for the democrats, it would have been a disaster for everybody. And again, I reject the notion that the republicans are collectively stupid enough to actually want that.
I agree with the logic: once you’ve agreed to appropriate a certain amount of money, it’s insane to then turn around and not let the money actually be raised. The responsible thing to do would be to always raise enough money to cover what you’re spending without having to borrow. Instead, we put revenue and spending on two completely independent tracks, which shows that the political system in general defies common sense.
However, the debt ceiling fight is not proof that the GOP is extreme. They saw an opportunity to extract spending cuts, spending cuts that were needed, and they took that opportunity. They even tried to pass a bill that would have prevented default, but Democrats wouldn’t go for it because they called it the “pay China first” bill. Which I think is actually a lot more revealing, because it says that Democrats don’t consider our debts to be our top priority, despite what the Constitution says.
Default is actually unconstitutional, IMO, and neither party should be under an illusions that we can just default when it gets really bad. We can’t. If it comes down to sullying our national honor and making seniors eat dog food, then tough cookies. Seniors eat dog food. Providing for seniors isn’t in the Constitution. The integrity of our debt is.
adaher, you’re not making sense. If paying the debt is paramount, then your guys shouldn’t have balked at paying the debt. They certainly should not have made us appear so untrustworthy that they made the cost of the debt even higher. But they did.
If they had a problem with the budget, the *responsible *time to address that would have been in the budget process. Once it’s passed, and the money is committed, so is the debt.
So what was the result of that particular tantrum? They continued it by refusing to negotiate in the “Supercongress” discussions. We are now looking at a crude, chainsaw-amputation-like budget sequestration in the Defense Department, the one department your guys profess to hold sacred and even insist on expanding.
You have quite a remarkable view of the meanings of responsibility and rationality if you find them in that story.
You’re right about most of that, but they did submit a bill that would have paid our debts as a priority. But I also agreed with the general point that you don’t threaten default as a general principle if you respect our Constitution.
The bill didn’t go anywhere, but Democrats’ reactions were revealing. THey pretty much directly said that if push comes to shove, we will default:
They believe that our creditors need to go to the back of the line. If that’s true, our creditors have every right to take that into account when deciding whether to lend to us.
Ah, more silly posturing. As you note, the House *GOP *didn’t even take it up.
I thought you might have meant they had a serious, responsible policy proposal that the Democrats shot down out of pure bloodyminded partisanship, that somehow missed making the outside-the-righty-bubble media out of their own partisanship. Unfortunately, you have just provided additional evidence that they’ve done *nothing *responsible with the deficit.
They held spending growth down to nearly nothing. That’s pretty responsible. Imagine what the deficit would be if Democrats had been allowed to grow spending another 5-8%?
Now they only have to follow through on their sequestration deal and I’ll agree with you that the GOP House was pretty effective at keeping spending in check.
When you’ve got nothing, attack spelling. This kind of post really paints your “but why won’t the Democrats argue in good faith” posts in a pretty disingenuous light.
Fuck off. Seriously, you’re a bad troll and need to either post something both intelligent and relevant or go away, preferably to SomethingAwful or 4Chan or some similarly horrible forum.
This amounts to no more than a restatement of your original gainsayinig of the assertion.
I’ll concede that the assertion could be stated more narrowly, so as to rope off the specific issues that Budget Player Cadet was talking about when he submitted the evidence in favor of the assertion.
BPC, take note: when you want to keep an assertion such as yours defensible, it is strategically important to keep it narrow enough that it can’t be refuted with no more than a wave in the direction of an inconsequential and trivial exception (remember, exceptions don’t prove rules; they disprove them).
I suppose the takeaway on this exchange is that, in your opinion, it is NOT possible to have a reasonable dialog over whether the assertion is true. :dubious:
In general, it’s nice to be able to say that your opponent is not a Nazi, and voting for him will not be a disaster. But it depends on the situation. Sometimes your opponent really is a disaster waiting to get a mandate.
I stipulate that Dole and Clinton were both basically decent, reasonable candidates in 1996. And presumably some state-level elections are between two candidates who are both corrupt and horrid, so neither is that great.
But in point of fact, W Bush was a disaster. So was Newt Gingrich as Speaker. The whole Grand Old Party–the party I grew up in–really is a dangerous-to-the-planet mess these days. I’m not helping if I pretend that it doesn’t matter what we do about global warming or the Endangered Species Act. I have an obligation not to vote for stupid, purblind, incorrigible evil, unless as a necessary lesser evil to stop an even worse evil. And the GOP, lately, is significantly more evil, more recklessly, stupidly, destructive than they used to be.
I’m sorry to say that. But I won’t be the guy saying, “Well, Hitler’s a little bombastic, but it’s not that big a deal to make him Chancellor.”