What really chafes me is that the GOP/TPers are intentionally deceiving the public into thinking the debt ceiling is in any way related to new spending ~ Congress is mandated to control the purse strings ~ raising the debt ceiling is necessary to pay for the expenditures Congress already approved ~ that the GOP/TPers are willing to again play games with the US credit rating and the specter of default is shameful and depraved ~ and in my view, flirts with sedition if not full-blown treason ~ ~ Sooz

At the intersection of recklessness and stupidity
By Steve Benen - Fri Jan 4, 2013 10:44 AM EST

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle today, explaining why he believes it's responsible to hold the debt ceiling hostage until President Obama "puts forward a plan" that makes Republicans happy. The piece is filled with errors of fact and judgment, but there was one truly bizarre claim that stood out for me.

"The coming deadlines will be the next flashpoints in our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington," the Texas Republican wrote. "It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country."

Just at a surface level, this is ridiculous -- to prevent possible trouble in the future, Cornyn intends to cause deliberate trouble now? But even putting that aside, I'm not sure if the senator understands the nature of the controversy. Failing to raise the debt limit -- that is, choosing not to pay the bills for money that's already been spent -- doesn't just "partially shut down the government," it pushes the nation into default and trashes the full faith and credit of the United States.

Does Cornyn, a member of the Finance and Budget committees, not understand this? Just as importantly, is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) equally confused?


At the risk of being impolite, McConnell's comments are plainly dumb. As a policy matter, it's just gibberish, and the fact that the Senate Minority Leader doesn't seem to know what the debt ceiling even is, after already having threatened default in 2011 and planning an identical scheme in 2013, raises serious questions about how policymakers can expect to resolve a problem they don't seem to understand at a basic level.

For the record, Congress, by constitutional mandate, has the power of the purse. Unless you're Ronald Reagan illegally selling weapons to Iran to finance a secret and illegal war in Nicaragua, the executive branch can't spend money that hasn't already been authorized by the legislative branch.

If the president had the authority to raise the debt ceiling on his or her own, it would not give the White House the authority to "spend taxpayer dollars without any limit," since any administration would still be dependent on Congress for expenditures. The debt limit has nothing to do with this -- spending authority would be unchanged no matter which branch had the power over raising the limit, and whether the ceiling existed or not.

It's really not that complicated. Congress approves federal spending, the executive branch follows through accordingly. When the legislative branch spends more than it takes in, the executive branch has to borrow the difference.

In the 1930s, Congress came up with the debt ceiling, mandating the White House to get permission to borrow the money that Congress has already spent. If McConnell, Cornyn, and their hostage-taking friends refuse to raise the ceiling, the administration can't pay the nation's bills. It's that simple.

Either GOP lawmakers like McConnell and Cornyn haven't yet grasped these basic details, or they're cynically hoping the public is easily misled by bogus rhetoric. Either way, there's little hope of a sensible public debate if Senate Republican leaders repeat nonsense about a looming national crisis.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/04/16349652-at-the-intersection-of-recklessness-and-stupidity?lite

Here's the nitty gritty ~ the "this piece" link below is to another TPM article on the irrational GOP/TPer rationale that not raising the debt limit "might not be so bad" ~ I'll post that next ~ the only explanation is that either the GOP/TPers are truly stupid or con men extraordinare ~ ~ Sooz

TPM Editor’s Blog
Masked Desperation?
Brian Beutler January 4, 2013, 7:30 PM

The jumping off point for this piece is an observation that the GOP is articulating two equally wrong, though directionally opposite arguments to advance its debt limit strategy.

The first is that raising the debt limit is some huge cession of power to President Obama, rather than a perfunctory exercise in authorizing payment on bills Congress has already racked up. The second is that not raising the debt limit might not be so bad.

These arguments interact elegantly.

Start by claiming that raising the debt limit is a big ask to create a rationale for demanding a price. Then downplay the consequences of failing to act, so that Republicans keep their nerve, and the administration looks petulant for not agreeing to horse trade.

But both arguments are so unmoored from reality, you wonder why the GOP would bother making them if they didn’t recognize that their real play here is so politically noxious. “Cut Medicare benefits or we’ll gratuitously destroy the economy” isn’t a big winner.

But as much as they’d like to pretend otherwise, even the best-case-scenario post-debt limit breach would be hugely damaging to the economy.

If February comes and goes and the debt ceiling issue isn’t resolved the government won’t necessarily default right away. It almost certainly won’t, actually. But even if Treasury makes every effort to prioritize paying bondholders over other obligations, we’ll suddenly be facing a situation in which we can’t finance a huge amount of government spending — about 40 percent of it — overnight.

Or look at it another way. If this year’s deficit is a trillion dollars, and suddenly the administration can’t finance deficit spending with borrowed money, it will have to cut expenditures in some way by $80 billion or so a month. That’s $80 billion a month out of the economy. Perhaps six percent of GDP. By comparison, the sequester’s automatic spending cuts amount to about $120 billion over the course of a year.

This is all back of the envelope math. But it illustrates the fact that the best case scenario if we breach the debt limit is still highly recessionary. The numbers are actually mind boggling. Not a few furloughs and long grass on the national mall. Republicans like Pat Toomey and John Cornyn know this. But if they explained it plainly, the public, and maybe even some rank and file members, would recognize the unsustainable nature of the threat, and the whole strategy would fall apart.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/01/masked_desperation.php?ref=fpblg

If this unfolds as I suspect it will, I would fully support Obama annihilating the repeated bogus "crisis" via the 14th Amendment ~ Sooz

GOP Senators: Not Raising The Debt Limit Might Not Be So Bad
Brian Beutler January 4, 2013, 4:23 PM

Republicans are accelerating toward another debt limit fight with President Obama, aware that the political and economic consequences of not raising it will be dire.

And so they’re deploying dual rhetorical strategies to sway the public and lock in a dynamic where the only way around the debt limit impasse is the one they’ve charted: describing a debt limit increase as a huge concession while downplaying the risk of breaching it.

During the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, and continuing through today, Republicans have attempted to falsely portray President Obama’s insistence that Congress increase the debt limit as a demand for unlimited power to spend money.

Now that the tax issues at stake in the fiscal cliff negotiations have been addressed, the GOP is once again contemplating not raising the debt limit. And just as they misleadingly describe the nature of borrowing authority, they’re now also suggesting that not raising the debt limit might not be such a bad thing.

“We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown--which is what that could mean,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) on MSNBC Wednesday. “A temporary disruption because we have to furlough the workers at the Department of Education, or close down some national parks, or not cut the grass on the Mall, that’s not optimal, it’s disruptive, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the path that we’re on.”

In a Friday Houston Chronicle op-ed, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a member of GOP leadership, used the same language.

“It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country,” he wrote.

The goal is to present to both the public, and perhaps rank and file Republicans who don’t fully understand the nature of the debt limit threat, that the consequences would be fairly modest — to foster a climate in which raising the debt limit without legislative concessions from Democrats will be impossible.

But for two years now, experts — from academia to the Treasury Department to the Congressional Budget Office — have warned in plain terms that the actual consequences would be much worse: a recessionary drop in spending at best and a calamitous debt default at worse.

A government shutdown, like the ones Republicans precipitated in 1995, occurs when Congress fails or refuses to appropriate funds for government operations. Because the executive branch lacks the power to raise and spend money on its own, government functions cease until the political pressure builds on Congress to pass appropriations and then those operations resume.

Not raising the debt limit, by contrast, leaves the government far short of the money it needs to execute the spending Congress has told it to undertake. That would be unprecedented, and put the executive branch in legally uncharted territory: unable legally to borrow the money needed to pay all of its bills, but still required by law to pay them. It would impact services in a chaotic and unpredictable fashion, while removing tens of billions of dollars a month from the economy — many times the contractionary effect of the fiscal cliff’s sequestration provisions.

It’s likely that the government would eventually fail to service all of its debt, damaging U.S. credit and touching off a major financial catastrophe.

Toomey, along with Reps. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, played a similar role in 2011 debt limit fight, arguing that breaching the debt limit for a brief amount of time would be relatively harmless.

History’s repeating itself.

The dynamic is dangerous enough that pundits, experts, and members of the general public are pressing President Obama to take advantage of an absurd-sounding legal loophole that allows the Treasury Secretary to order the minting of platinum coins of any value and to use the funds available upon deposit of those coins to meet federal obligations.

The Obama administration has ruled out another outside-the-box option — the legally dubious idea of circumventing the debt limit statute by citing the 14th amendment — and is generally hesitant to approach the fight outside normal legislative channels.

But Democratic leaders are concerned enough about the GOP’s ability to raise the debt limit, that they’re asking the president to reconsider.

“I would do it in a second, but I’m not the President of the United States,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press briefing on Friday, referring to invoking the 14th Amendment. “Sometimes, I think the Administration hears you more clearly when you say it publicly than when you say it privately.”

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/gop-senators-not-raising-the-debt-limit-might-not-be-so-bad.php?ref=fpb

These boneheads are deliberately trying to turn the US into a deadbeat nation.
The first thing to be sacrificed on the austerity altar is 75% of the war budget followed by all those Congress freebies.

I think the debt will be raised in spite of the GOP and Teaterds.

Excellent, informative commentary ~ emphasis/bolding below is mine ~ there are a few "live links" to more/corroborating info in original ~ Sooz

The Debt Ceiling Pays Off Money That Republicans Already Spent
By: Sarah Jones Jan. 5th, 2013

Federal law requires Congress to authorize the government to borrow the money needed to pay for the programs that Congress has passed. In other words, Republicans in Congress are threatening to refuse to pay off their own bills by raising the debt ceiling.

President Obama warned Saturday morning, “If Congress refuses to give the United States the ability to pay its bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy could be catastrophic. Our families and our businesses cannot afford that dangerous game again.”

Apparently Republicans are so offended by their own votes/programs/policies that they think downgrading our credit again might be the best thing they can do for America.

In 2001, Bush inherited a surplus from Clinton; However, in every year starting in 2002 we were operating at a deficit. Each year’s deficit goes into the pot and becomes part of our debt. So for each year that we fail to collect enough revenue to pay off our spending, we contribute to our debt and it keeps growing.

Public debt rose under Bush as a combined result of the Bush tax cuts (less revenue) providing less money to pay for spending, while they increased spending with two unfunded wars (borrowed money for the wars was left off of the budget by the Bush administration until the Obama administration put it on the budget — no more creative accounting, please) and Medicare Part D, an unfunded “entitlement program” initiated under the Bush administration. These are facts, not spin. When you spend more money while you earn less, you end up in debt.

Conservatives like to blame non-defense discretionary spending, but “In fact, such spending, accounting for only 15 percent of the budget, has been basically flat as a share of the economy for decades. Cutting it simply will not fill the deficit hole.” Much of that debt is war debt and we all know how we got that. The fact is that public debt as a share of GDP goes up when we are at war.

We also spent a lot of money in order to bail out too-big-to-fail banks under Bush after the global financial crisis. This program was called Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Contrary to conservatives’ understanding, TARP was Bush’s baby.

The CBO estimated at the time that TARP would cost around $189 billion. So, in 2009 when Obama took office, the CBO was saying we had a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009 (2009′s budget was based on Bush policies) and they predicted future deficits due to continuing Bush’s policies (by policies they mean the Bush tax cuts- yes, the very cut Republicans have been demanding for the rich ever since Obama wanted to raise some revenue to address our debt) and the recession. Recessions cost money.

We spent more money trying to recover from the crisis under Obama. We refer to that spending as the “stimulus” – something conservatives mocked when Obama did it but something they supported when Bush did it. Stimulating the economy was never a bad thing before, but suddenly conservatives don’t want it stimulated. They want the economy to stagnate or recess even further, as evinced by their many votes to obstruct the things the economists agree we need in order to stimulate the economy.

You aren’t likely to hear a conservative admit that the stimulus was a temporary program, unlike a “policy” of a permanent tax cut for the rich. In other words, Bush’s policies got us into debt. Obama’s stimulus increased the debt, but is not a policy. It was only temporary.

Now our debt is very large. Before we concern troll over how large it is, we need to take responsibility for how it got here. It wasn’t the American people paying into Social Security who were borrowing money they couldn’t/wouldn’t pay back.

The folks whose votes contributed in large ways to the debt now want the American citizens to pay for the failure of this ideology, while refusing to admit that it does not work as they believed it would.

Republicans are doubling down by trying to use the deficit their policies created in order to push more of their policies onto the people. This time they’re using their failed policies to justify killing social programs they never liked to begin with, but are unrelated to our current deficit problem. (Yes, some of these programs will need to be reformed in the future, but they are not the cause of the current debt problem.)

Republicans are also telling Americans who have paid into the Social Security Trust Fund their entire working lives that they do not want to make good on that promissory note. As Reagan explained, this money is in its own trust and has nothing to do with the deficit.

The debt ceiling has been raised under previous administrations as part of the unpleasant course of business. It was unthinkable when Republicans used it to destroy our credit in 2011, earning America our first credit downgrading. Your credit tends to go down when you signal to lenders that you may not pay them back (raising the debt ceiling can be seen as the promise to pay back what we already spent).

Conservatives seem to believe that raising the debt ceiling is about new debt, when in fact, it is a promise to pay off existing debt. Try telling the credit card company that you MIGHT pay off your debt if only they will first give you some things you’ve been wanting for a long time. That’s what Republicans are doing.

So what we really have here are alleged fiscal conservatives trying to break America’s contract with lenders, as if you ran up your credit cards and then just told the bank that you refused to pay it back because you are philosophically against the idea borrowing (but obviously not against the idea of stealing). Then you suggest the banks go dip into your neighbor’s contributions to their retirement fund in order to pay off your debt.

The time for Republicans to fight over the budget is in the budget fight, not the agreement to pay off our debt. Republicans keep fear-mongering that they have to threaten our credit rating because of the debt they don’t want to hand down. They should have thought of that when they were actually voting yes on the policies that created the debt, not later, after the money has already been spent.

No one disputes that we have a debt problem. The dispute derives from the fact that Republicans refuse to admit how we got here, which suggests that their solutions are just as dishonest. Yes, Democrats passed legislation that cost money as well, but they aren’t pretending they aren’t responsible for authorizing the government to borrow the money they spent. Furthermore, Democrats didn’t refuse to raise the debt ceiling under Bush just because they disagreed with the wars. And that’s basically what Republicans are using the debt ceiling showdown for — it’s just another way to attack social programs they don’t like.

http://www.politicususa.com/debt-ceiling-money-borrowed.html