When Congress votes on raising the debt ceiling, do they negotiate the new ceiling, or does it get raised, by statute, a certain % each time?
Raising the debt ceiling requires passing a new statute, so an existing statute can not dictate what the new one must say. In other words, the amount is negotiated each time.
Basically, the overspending is at a fairly constant rate (barring a major meltdown like happened at the end of the Bush presidency). So everyone can do the calculations and say “if we raise the ceiling by $X billion, we wont have to do this again until date Y.”
One side may decide it’s advantageous to have date Y fall before the next election, another group might think after is better. Actually, since either it has to be done or the government stops working and stops giving out money to everyone, after the election worked good for almost everyone. Ah, politics…
Other posts on this board indicate that, at one time, the debt ceiling did automatically increase, so a new statute isn’t always required.
Well, the older statutes simply gave the decision-making authority to the Bureau of the Public Debt, so the bureaucrats could argue about it instead of Congressmen. Newer legislation has taken that authority away and enshrined the ceiling into law. The net result is that the inevitable ceiling-raising decision must now take place in Congress rather than an executive office at Treasury.