You can’t hand wave away 17 trillion dollars of debt. We don’t have to be in the top 30 countries in terms of debt by GDP for it to matter. The world turns on our financial strength and if we continue increasing our debt then we will collapse taking everybody with us.
It matters greatly that we pay our debt off and not raise it. It’s our financial responsibility to the generations that follow.
Actually, I really like this. No budget? In thirty days, there’s a full election. Would you make it house-only, or house and senate both?
The latter might be difficult due to the rotational nature of Senate seats–maybe what’d happen is that people would fill a senate seat for the remainder of its term, not for a full six-year term.
Even then, I wonder whether, absent the Hats, most of Congress would just get re-elected and the problem would continue.
The principal driver of long-term debt is Medicare and parts of Medicaid. Potential changes to our spending and borrowing rules fall into two categories: ones that are easier to pass than reform of Medicare/Medicaid and ones that are harder to pass than that reform.
If it’s easier to pass than reform of Medicare/Medicaid, then it will be ignored or amended once Medicare/Medicaid spending requires it to be ignored or amended.
If it’s harder to pass than reform of Medicare/Medicaid, then we should just reform Medicare/Medicaid.
Under Left Hand of Dorkness’s proposed amendment, we will start cutting back for care of seniors rather soon (since it will be limited to last year’s budget while the number of old people and medical costs both increase) and both parties will start inventing very stylish hat-holders.
Given the difficulty of passing a constitutional amendment, we should just reform the thing actually driving these (incorrectly perceived) short-term crises and actual long-term problems, ideally in a way that tracks medical costs so that the reforms never need to go into place if Obamacare is successful at bending the cost curve (as it seems to have been lately).
Nah. The Hats are key: nobody wants to wear the Hat in a debate or fundraiser. There might be one year of not passing a budget, but it’s gonna be lots easier to upset an incumbent in the Hat.
Are they, like, bowlers? Or does the legislator get to choose the type of hat?
There is a fairly simple fix. Pass the legislation that says that the budget (CR, whatever) bill HAS to include in it, explicitly, authorization to borrow enough to fund the budget (CR) if such borrowing is needed, with the exact amount of such authorized borrowing specified.
No other country needs one. It serves no obvious purpose. Get rid.
The utility of the debt ceiling is that appropriations bills are not directly connected to debt. Revenues are only estimates at the time the appropriations are made, and revenues vary from month to month anyway. The Treasury (Executive branch) issues the debt, but needs authorization from Congress (Legislative branch) to do it.
How many cities in the United States are close to defaulting? Can’t they just raise their debt ceiling and borrow their way out of the problem?
Sure, as soon as they become sovereign states.
How is any of this different from the House refusing to pass any appropriations bill that includes Obamacare?
The debt ceiling is not the problem. The problem is that a minority of one party is willing to throw out the baby with the bath water. If you deny them mechanism A, they’ll use mechanism B. As long as the US Constitution says the House must originate spending and that the Executive branch can only spend what is authorized by the Legislative branch, all you can change is the name of the problem, not the problem itself.
That’s a bug, not a feature. The President is bound by law to spend the money appropriated by Congress, without regard to revenue. If Congress wants to limit borrowing, let them balance the budget. It is not the perogative of the executive branch to decline to carry out the will of Congress just because appropriations exceed revenue.
From the esteemed economic think-tank, the UsefulNotes section of TVTropes.org:
Correction: The debt ceiling is not the only problem. It is, however, a problem, and it’s the problem this thread is addressing. A minority of idiots keeping Congress from functioning at all is a different problem, and one that requires a more complex solution, but removing this one problem would at least mitigate their ability to ruin the entire global economy.
Perhaps their problem was with Mr. Bush’s recession?
States and cities have balanced budget requirements. These clearly don’t do much good. Not to mention that states and cities don’t get to print money.
First if debt is a constant or shrinking percentage of GNP, we are fine. Find us a legitimate economist who says otherwise. The deficit, by the way, has shrunk significantly, so you should be dancing in the streets. Of course Bush blowing up the budget to support an unfunded war was fine, but to help us recover from his recession was terrible.
Second, if you don’t like the deficit don’t spend as much or tax more or do some combination of the two. The debt ceiling is like trying to stop eating cookies by putting the tin on a high shelf. Frog and Toad learned this lesson, why not Republicans?
The irrelevance of Detroit has already been mentioned.
You mean our budget surplus? Which we got to more or less the moment the voters made the Republican party totally irrelevant in state government. If we can do the same in Washington we’ll be in good shape.
It’s hard to avoid the feeling that dismissing one wouldn’t solve the problem when the fighting and brinksmanship could just move to the House/Senate split. Both. They can produce a budget in conference, as they’re planning to do now.
I question the premise. Passing a law that says you can’t pass a law usually fails. That’s what the Budger Control Act of 2011 did. It set up a situation where Congress (and everyone else in the country) is penalized unless the parties agree on a long term plan to control deficits. And we are paying the penalty.
It appears to me that, of the two parties, the GOP is less fiscally responsible because of unwillingness to raise taxes and predilection for lower taxes. And they are almost as bad as the Democrats when it comes to unfunded mandates, such as the proposed Obamacare repeal, and paying government workers, idled over the past three weeks, for doing nothing. So I would say that the more effective way would be to elect Democrats for a while. I’m not saying this is a perfect solution, and ten years from now I might decide to give a modernized GOP another chance. But for now, electing Democrats is the most realistic plan for fiscal sanity.
The President spends at his behest? I don’t get this. Does the President just throw money around willy-nilly at whatever catches his eye, or does the executive branch spend money appropriated by the legislative branch? Or are you saying Congress writes up spending bills in a general fashion, and the executive decides who gets paid what?
Personally, I don’t want Congress involved in deciding the day-to-day bookkeeping of the government, thank you.
Aren’t school levies decided by a public vote? They are in my district … is yours different? If the voters were convinced the levies were worthwhile, why are you blaming the superintendent?
The bill passed tonight, Oct 16th, allows the President to increase the debt limit unless Congess passes a bill objecting to the increase within 22 days. It can be vetoed.
This plan was proposed by McConnell during the last crisis and added to the current bill.