President Barack Obama and his…colleagues…in the Senate keep threatening national default if those Evil, Anarchist, Terrorist Jihadi Republicans don’t promptly shape up and pass a budget, raise the debt ceiling, and otherwise give him a blank check.  One of his more recent threats is this:

…if Republicans aren’t willing to set aside their partisan concerns in order to do what’s right for the country, we stand a good chance of defaulting.

Let’s look at some numbers:

• Federal revenues for 2013 total some $2.7 trillion
• Payments due on our national debt for 2013 total some $223 billion

So much for default.  Federal revenues exceed debt payments by roughly 12:1.  There’s a double potful of money left over, too, even by DC standards—nearly $2.5 trillion.

What other major expenses are there?

• Social Security and Medicare payouts in 2012 (close enough to 2013 outlays for this discussion) were a combined $1.4 trillion.
• Medicaid and CHIP transfers to the states in 2012 ran to $260 billion.

(Incidentally, the various Social Security System trust funds had some $2.6 trillion on hand as of 2012.  Although payroll tax revenues aren’t enough to cover outlays, so that pile is being drawn down, there’s plenty to last through quite a long delay in raising the debt ceiling.  Let’s assume for the sake of this illustration, though, that the SS/Medicare outlays are being paid out of the general revenues.)

Our debt payments are easily covered (so no default) and so are our entitlement payments (so our seniors and our poor are taken care of), and we have $840 billion in annual Federal revenues left to spend on such minor matters as national defense, Federal payroll, scheduled payments to government contractors, and so on.

Certainly, those Federal revenues come in in fits and starts, but that’s the environment any private sector business faces all the time.  They plan ahead so they can deal with those uneven flows.  The Federal government can do such planning, also.

The only way a default will happen will be if Obama decides not to make the debt payments.  The only way our seniors and poor will be hurt will be if Obama decides to withhold payments to them.  His only purpose for doing such shameful things is to make a political point, to heap blame on Republicans for his own failures.

One last thing: it’s interesting to note that he’s threatened to veto a House proposal to mandate prioritizing Federal outlays.

Supposedly, they’re under way.  Or not, depending on the credibility of major players: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, UT), Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and President Barack Obama.

In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Lew had a number of things to say.  Some might call them threats:

[H]e will be unable to guarantee payments to any group—whether Social Security recipients or US bondholders—unless Congress approves an increase in the federal debt limit.

But of course, he can.  It’s his job, for one thing, to make exactly this kind of prioritizing decision.  Further, Social Security payments have nothing to do with this.  The Social Security Trust Fund is phat with Treasury Notes in IOU for the various Federal government borrowings that have raided the Trust Fund over the years.  These can be sold on the open market to raise the necessary payment monies….

Moreover, the government’s revenue collections cover the scheduled debt payments by a factor of 10:1 or 11:1.

And

…in an unprecedented situation in which he would be relying entirely on the erratic flow of incoming revenue, the economy would suffer and there would not even be certainty that the government could make all interest payments.

Also not correct.  As just noted, there’s plenty of money coming in to cover the payments, regardless of the cash flow from time to time.  The uncertainty in the markets is almost entirely generated by misleading statements from government officials who surely know better.  The rest of the uncertainty flows from the Democrats’ flat refusal to negotiate.

Lew also trotted out the usual excuses, including, for instance:

[T]he administration will face a series of difficult decisions even if Treasury can avoid what the credit-rating firms consider a default.  In a scenario where federal spending will far exceed revenue, he…say[s] that the administration would have only imperfect options in deciding whom to pay.  [He pushed] Republicans to decide whom they wouldn’t pay—Social Security recipients or veterans.

Far from the apocalypse that such cynically false choices imply, this rather puts a premium on bringing spending down to within existing revenues.   We’ve seen, though, how anxious the Democrats are to bring spending under control.  They’re addicted to it, and they demonstrate this with their omnipresent mantra of a “need” for continued high spending with its continued borrowing.  Never mind that, were spending reduced below revenues, continued borrowing wouldn’t be necessary.

Finally, coming out of Thursday afternoon’s meeting between Obama, et al., and 18 senior members of the House Republican caucus concerning the possibility of an increase in the debt ceiling that would be good for six weeks more of borrowing, Obama indicated through his Press Secretary, Jay Carney, that he would sign such a bill and enter into negotiations over borrowing, spending, taxation, entitlement programs, and so on, even though the debt ceiling bill would not contain funding to reopen the government from the Democrats’ shutdown.  Sounds like progress, yes?

Reid, coming out of the same meeting answered a reporter’s question on that: would the Senate pass the House bill and send it to the President, with its lack of funding for reopening the government, and the negotiation stipulation?

Not going to happen.

And there we are.  The Democrats in the Senate won’t negotiate, and they’re willing to force a default on our debt if they can’t get their way.  And they’ve overruled the President to get there.

Update: Now it appears that Obama has obeyed Reid’s instruction.  Fox News is reporting this morning that Obama now is echoing Reid’s “Not going to happen” and is rejecting the kind of deal he’d said yesterday, through Carney, that he would accept.

The Democrats really are bent on keeping our government closed and on threatening the blowup of our credit rating and with it our economy if they can’t get everything they demand.