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No fear mongering at all. Nothing to see here. I wonder why August wasnt mentioned before.
Mayhem, Crisis, Turmoil, and Mass starvation!!!!!
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...SDi6yIf1TrHtaP
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, in particular, is playing the "dire warning" game. Back in April, he wrote Congress: "If the debt limit is not increased by May 16," Treasury will have to take "extraordinary measures . . . to temporarily postpone the date the United States would other wise default on its obligations."
Well, here we are on May 17, with no sign that the sky has fallen.
Now what am I going to do with all those canned goods and bottled water I stocked up on.
No fear mongering at all. Nothing to see here. I wonder why August wasnt mentioned before.
Mayhem, Crisis, Turmoil, and Mass starvation!!!!!
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...SDi6yIf1TrHtaP
Now what am I going to do with all those canned goods and bottled water I stocked up on.
Um, they are using money from the retirement funds of federal employees to keep things going for a while. I think (and I am sure that most if not all federal employees would agree) that these are "extraordinary measures" that has the effect of temporarily postponing default.
Is that not clear to the two of you?
*yawn*
They have done it before and they will do it again. Soon as the debt ceiling gets raised they pay the funds back. No big deal.
Be that as it may, everything in the OP is true, but since the sky hasn't fallen, I guess we can go back to just ignoring the problem until about 3 days before the funds run out.
I like this pressure of fiscal responsibility i play right now. Hopefully, the conservatives do not cave on this. Even if we have a temporary government shutdown, we need to stop the ever increasing debt.
You expect politicians in Washington to sit down at the table and work out a reasonable, rational, bi-partisan solution to the debt crisis?
Both political parties suck.
WC, taking ANY tax increases off the table as a precondition to negotiation is irresponsible and reprehensible. We may have gotten into this mess because of irresponsible spending but it is going to take spending cuts AND increased revenue to reverse this cluster .
agreed...You expect politicians in Washington to sit down at the table and work out a reasonable, rational, bi-partisan solution to the debt crisis?
Both political parties suck.
Maybe I am missing the point of this thread since it seems that we don't have a whole of a big difference of opinion on this issue. The OP posted what seemed to be an attempt at an attack on the urgency displayed by geithner by posting a snippet of an article which had geithners quotes which are true. It's like if someone told me yesterday that today would be tuesday and I started attacking them today for saying it would be tuesday. Makes no sense, but then again maybe they weren't attacking him, perhaps the purpose of this thread was to let people know how correct he was.
Wow.....
um..
Agreed again.
Has any qualified person chimed in and said that default is not a big deal?
"irresponsible spending"
2 Repug botched wars financed with debt rather than tax, first time in US history.
Repug tax cuts.
runaway spending? A VRWC lie. Govt spending as percentage of GDP is now about 1977 level.
The debt limit is charade, pure politics, it's NEVER been NOT raised.
broken record
it's all the republicans fault.
Damn, boutons, you are such a ing tool.
If conservatives were truly interested in "fiscal responsibility" they would acknowledge that some level of tax increases are going to be required. A conservative truly interested in "fiscal responsibility" would refer back to Obama's recent speech where he specifically mentioned a 3:1 ratio of cuts to tax increases. In the interests of fiscal responsibility, that conservative would then propose $X worth of tax increases and then challenge Obama and the democrats to come up with $3X worth of cuts.
Sadly though, conservatives aren't really interested in "fiscal responsibility". They're just interested in using the term as a stick to poke their political foes with.
Default could be a big deal. Problem is not raising the debt ceiling does not mean default.
Government would have to cut current period spending in order to pay it's debt service (probably meaning job cuts, salary freezes, etc, the typical cost cutting moves), but it's not likely that refusing to raise the debt ceiling would cause the government to default on it's debts.
Saying that the government needs to raise the debt ceiling to avoid default means the government is continually borrowing money to meet it's already accrued expenses. It's like taking out a signature loan every month to pay the mortgage. Yeah, you can do that short term, but over a long term it really jacks you up.
Honestly, I'd almost rather the debt ceiling not be raised at this point. At the very least, raising it should come with spending cuts and revenue enhancements attached.
Crystal clear.
I can't believe your buying into this whole "They're raiding pensions funds" drama even after the "debt ceiling hype". I think you need to read Geitner's version of what he is doing and compare it to your news source. There's a big difference in not putting money we don't have into a fund and "raiding it". My hope is that when they do choose to raise the debt ceiling(unnecessary IMO) and if pension funds have truly been borrowed from they will make these funds whole via reformation not from other borrowed money.
Agreed again.
I am sure that is exactly what will be discussed starting around the second week in August when there is only time for posturing and none for any action other than raising it.
My initial news source was NPR yesterday, but I know that generally doesn't fly so I am posting a link. However, since everytime someone posts a link for proof, others generally get all over them saying "of course THAT site would tell you that", I am just going to post search results.
link
Considering my original article was from the New York Post. You won't get any flack from me about credible news sources.
Yep. Raising the debt ceiling used to be pretty procedural, but that was when the ceiling was half what it is now. It's getting to be a pretty dangerous level, so now when it comes up you get bickering over it, but it doesn't get any thought until it absolutely has to.
Then again, modern politics is bickering.
How would this differ from a default? What your basically saying is that the US government can go into the equivilant of bankruptcy in order to pay off its debts. Thats fine and all, but aside from the direct impact of the cuts you laid out (if implimenting such cuts is even feasible) the results are the exact same as a default.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41633.pdf
Get a handle on the scope of cuts that would be needed. If the public really knew what was being brandied about here they would realize how bad this would be. I promise you that Americans would want to default on the debt before this happend.
I can't tell if boutons is a dem, rep or troll.
I do liken this a lot to the financial at ude before Lehman Brothers went under. It was no big deal and it would be a good thing that they went under. Yeah well, it nearly collapsed the financial system.
The financial system was supposed to collapse; it still might, under the right cir stances. I wish I had your confidence that disaster was averted, rather than just postponed.
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