Congressional Republicans are vowing that before they will agree to raise the current $14.25 trillion federal debt ceiling — a step that will become necessary in as little as five weeks — President Obama and Senate Democrats will have to agree to far deeper spending cuts for next year and beyond than those contained in the six-month budget deal agreed to late Friday night that cut $38 billion and averted a government shutdown.
Republicans have also signaled that they will again demand fundamental changes in policy on health care, the environment, abortion rights and more, as the price of their support for raising the debt ceiling.
Stop women from getting pap smears, or this time we crash the economy.
Given the short time frame for action and the prospect of an intractable political clash, leaders in both government and business are already moving to avert a crisis that most likely would be “a recovery-ending event,” as Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, testified recently in the Senate. He described a sequence of events that “would cascade through the financial markets,” provoking another credit crisis like that in 2008 and causing interest rates to jump.
This is how it's going to work, see... you're going to throw all your party supporters and every single policy that you ever fought for in your entire life in nice little pile and you're going to set it all on fire... and then we are still going to blame you for the debt anyway. For starters.
“We want to see real structural, cultural-type changes tied to this debt ceiling. We’re not interested in a one-off kind of savings, or anything small,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, a first-term Republican from South Carolina. “There has got to be game-changing kinds of changes to get us to vote for it.”
He dismissed warnings about default as “just posturing,” and said Democrats should bear the responsibility for passing any measure to increase the borrowing limit.
“It’s their debt,” he said. “Make them do it. That’s my attitude.”
If this keeps up, by the time we hit election 2012, the Republicans will have gotten the Democrats to pass all of their extremist fiscal and social policy for them.
If anyone has an answer for this, I'm all ears...