6 Responses

1. 1. Continuing to increase the debt builds up a situation where eventually the debt will require massive interest payments, which will crowd out all other spending, public and private.

   2. The debt isn’t financed by true borrowing, but rather by selling the bonds, through intermediaries, to the Federal Reserve, which prints the money. This will eventually cause serious inflation.

   3. A default would be technical. Anyone who “bets” (as Wall Street calls it) on interest rates shooting up due to a technical default will probably end up losing money. A real default is based on ability to fund the debt, which won’t be at issue immediately, though might be in the forseeable future (see #1 and #2) above.

   4. The Republicans (“Fiscal/Deficit hawks”) prefer the short term discomfort of a technical default to the long term pain of high interests and hyperinflation.

2. Here let me say it…. STUFF IT!!!!!

   When Oblamo was in the Senate for those few weeks, he gave a long speech about how the debt ceiling shouldnt be raised. When he was running in 2008, he was harping over and over about how Bush wanting to raise the debt limit was unpatriotic, irresponsible, how we are borrowing from the bank of china. Well now as his Rev Jerry Bulkfrog Wright said in one of his anti USA sermons, the chickens are coming home to roost. Obama the heck with you.

3. What happens if the debt ceiling is not raised? The Treasury loses the ability to sell bonds. That is what we are really talking about. If Treasury cannot sell more bonds, it will not be able to use that income to pay the debts as they come due. Admittedly, much of this debt is interest on bonds that have already been sold. However, if this interest is not paid when due, the result is that the country has defaulted on those bonds. That will mean that the government will not be able to sell more bonds at any reasonable interest rate. That will freeze up the entire economy. Nobody will trust dollars, which are backed not by gold or silver, but by the full faith and credit of the U.S., which will no longer exist. THIS IS A MAJOR THING, contrary to what the previous posters said. I also believe the debt has gotten out of hand, but that the way to solve this is to balance the budget, and to gradually pay down the debt, not to default, effectively declaring bankruptcy. Anybody know anyone who declared bankruptcy and later tried to buy a house? You can’t get credit, so no bank will give you a mortgage. GOOD LUCK!

4. Better a little discomfort now than no food on your table later. Don’t raise the deficit; the government need to live within in its means and rein in the deficit spending.

5. Raising the debt limit pays for bills we have already incurred, much of which are for a war in Iraq which Bush lied us into and a war in Afghanistan which he wouldn’t pay for by raising the revenues needed to pay the troops. Instead, the Republicans just said to borrow more money to pay for their wars. Well, too bad, the time has come to pay for your phony wars which have got us nowhere. We’ve lost thousands of American lives and paid nearly a trillion dollars for two wars and both countries will be no better off within a few years. Bush’s buddies in Iraq have already become Iran’s best friends and the same with Karzai once we leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

6. Is that his real hair??