The Progressive-Democratic Party says they’ll refuse to negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. Not at all. Those politicians are looking to hold our nation’s weal and our national security hostage against their demand to spend, spend, spend.
Republican Party politicians—at least those in the House and some of them in the Senate—insist that the debt ceiling can’t be raised without agreement on spending cuts in the next and subsequent budgets: not agreement to talk about cuts, but actual, specific cuts.
These Leftist politicians insist that the debt ceiling is solely about current bills that must be paid and that future spending questions—cuts or otherwise—are separate questions and must be negotiated separately. This is badly mistaken.
Today’s debt ceiling problem is the result of past failures to cut spending: failures to agree to do more than just talk about cuts and, where cuts actually were agreed, failures to honor those agreements. The next budget’s spending will impact the next debt ceiling and create pressure to raise the ceiling again. Failure to accept, or even to recognize, the relationship between a debt ceiling and budgeting just leads to functionally automatic debt ceiling raises and so functionally automatic debt increases.
Current debt ceilings and future spendings are inextricably intertwined. The Republicans in the House need to stand tall and not allow any debt ceiling increase without agreement to specific, measurable cuts (not reductions in increases) in future budgets’ spending on specific programs. Senate Republicans need to find backbone and stand tall on this pairing, also.
Progressive-Democrat refusal to negotiate on this puts our nation’s debt crisis squarely on their backs, and no place else. Their refusal to negotiate is just their demand to continue spending us average Americans‘ money in ever increasing amounts, their demand to drive our nation ever more deeply into debt—demands born of the irrational concept that money can be created out of the æther with no economic consequence.