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Raise it already!

Are you as sick of hearing about the debt ceiling as I am?  I mean, it is not like the debt ceiling is anything new.  We've been dealing with it for years and years.  Every year Congress puts a budget in place and then, when they inevitably realize there isn't money to cover the budget they've installed, they raise the debt ceiling so that the country can borrow money to meet its obligations.  And that is the cogent point here:  Raising the debt ceiling allows us to meet our obligations, i.e., debts we've already incurred.  It doesn't allow us to spend more money.  Only Congress, which controls the country's purse strings, can do that with a new budget.

In the past, when there were fewer crazy people in Congress, raising the debt ceiling was simply a matter of housekeeping.  It was accomplished as needed with a minimum of fuss.  But nothing with this Congress gets accomplished with a minimum of fuss.  (In fact, very little gets accomplished period because the Speaker of the House is an incompetent, but that's a rant for another day.)  No, everything must be made a political litmus test, and everything must be designed to embarrass and hamstring the President and to make it less likely that he will win a second term.  The needs of the country be damned!  The only thing that matters is the needs of the tea partiers who control the Republican Party.

And so we have the situation that has dragged on interminably of the tea partiers insisting that they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling.  In other words, the tea partiers refuse to do anything to pay the country's bills which they have run up.  What was that they said about "personal responsibility?" Well, they lied in that as they have in so many things.  In fact, the truth is not in these people.  They learned their ethics at the knee of Rupert Murdoch. They will say or do anything that advances their cause.

The President, politician that he is, continues to strive for bipartisanship and continues to insist that there is cause for optimism.  I don't see it.  I think the people in charge of Congress don't give two beans about this country and that they are fully capable of letting it go down the tubes, just as long as they can achieve their political agenda.
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Comments

  1. Susan July 22, 2011 at 8:06 AM

    This seems like common sense to me, but you're right, it's all about making the President look bad. These people make me sick!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dorothy/The Nature of ThingsJuly 22, 2011 at 10:01 AM

    It's appalling that the tea party led Republicans care so little for their country that they would bring it to the brink of financial disaster in order to promote their political beliefs, Susan. There's really no way to negotiate with such people.

    ReplyDelete

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