Debt Ceiling: Is Our Legislators Learnin’?
I know, I know, bit I still couldn’t resist quoting G-Dub, especially given that it is looking more and more as if the decision makers on Capitol Hill have know idea why the debt ceiling must get raised. Over at Crooks and Liars, Nicole Belle quotes Texas Senator Tom Coburn, who made this comment on yesterday’s edition of Meet the Press…
I think the debt ceiling is a misnomer. We’ve never not increased it, and the first thing you do when you’re addicted to something is to present the reality to yourself that you’re addicted. And we didn’t do anything except create a big mess in Washington, and I’m not so inclined to think it was the tea party as much as it was outside interest groups and a few individuals within our party that took advantage of that situation. Look, the real problems are we’re continuing to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, there is tremendous amounts of waste and fraud. We have to protect the promises made to the American people, and we can do that, but we can do that spending a whole lot less money than we’re doing today.
Yuppers, Coburn is adamant in his belief that raising that ignominious debt ceiling will lead us to continue spending more.
But the debt ceiling has nothing to do with future spending, as Nicole explains in terms so easy a Republican legislator can understand!
[R]aising the debt ceiling is to balance the books on PAST SPENDING. So to go back to that credit card analogy, what Coburn is suggesting is telling the credit card company that you’re not going to pay your balance because part of what you’ve already spent money on was irresponsible and wasteful, so you don’t want to pay for that. Ridiculous, right? The credit card company isn’t going to be sympathetic to that and neither should we any time a Republican says it. It doesn’t work that way.
