The Debt Ceiling, AGAIN? The Deuce You Say!

How extraordinary!

Did you feel a little "thump" yesterday as the United States bumped up against its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling? If so, maybe you should have yourself tested for synesthesia, since the debt limit is not a physical thing . But we hit it all the same, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy noting that starting Thursday, Treasury would be implementing "extraordinary measures" to keep the country from crashing right through the limit.

For starters, Yellen said, Treasury will have to suspend payments into the Civil Service retirement fund, and also payments to the Postal Service's Retiree Health Benefits Fund, from now through June 5. So please, Kev, if you don't mind, could you please give some thought to not fucking up the US and world economies by allowing the US to default on its debts, please? Jerk.

Fine, in reality Yellen wrote, "I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States, you slimy neutered fuckweasel." We're pretty sure we copied that much correctly.

So here we are at the debt ceiling, but we haven't actually blown through it yet because money is entirely imaginary anyway but if you stretch its imaginary nature too much it will snap back and ruin you and everyone you know, but somehow never Kevin McCarthy or Donald Trump, how even IS that?

Here's how the magic hocuspocus works: By one set of numbers, we're at the debt ceiling, just floating up there like the weird bubbly uncle in Mary Poppins trying desperately to fart on Dick Van Dyke so they can both descend. Fortunately, as the AP explains, Yellen can get help from her League of Extraordinary Measures and hold off a real default on the debt for a few more months via "accounting tweaks" like holding off on new payments into retirement funds and the like. (As far as we know, it does not include measures like taking the nation's inventory of nuclear missiles to Pawn-4-Cash for a temporary loan, either.)

DEBT CEILIN' ON MY MIND: Government Shutdown Season Is Different From Debt Ceiling Season: A Handy Wonkette Guide 

Normally, a word no one should be allowed to use anymore, Congress would just shrug its shoulders and pass a bill to increase or suspend the debt ceiling, as Congress did as needed from 1917 until 2011, since it's an artificial limit to the amount the US can borrow to cover its debts, and authorizing it is just a thing Congress does, like naming post offices and making speeches about how terrible Congress is. We explain it in excruciating detail here.

The thing to keep in mind is that since the US is Big King Fuck of Global Economics Mountain, our debt is the most desired investment in the world, the place to keep your money safe because the US has never, not once, defaulted on its debt. If the US defaults, our bond ratings would tank, and the US would go into a recession, with the world being dragged along like that Buzz Gunderson kid in Rebel Without a Cause whose leather jacket got caught in the door handle of the car, only it's everyone going off the cliff not just one teenager who barely showed up in the credits (it was Corey Allen, we'll save you the time). Chickie Run, indeed.

You'd think nobody would want to risk that, but Republicans during the Obama administration decided it would be "fun" to withhold their votes for a debt ceiling increase unless Barack Obama agreed to a clusterfuck called "sequestration" that cut 2.5 percent of federal spending across the board during the last six months of each fiscal year. Those cuts substantially hurt the economy and slowed the recovery from the Great Recession, and probably helped elect Donald Trump as a result.

So you can see why Republicans think it's a fun game. But Joe Biden has already refused to play it, saying he will not allow any of the cuts to Social Security and Medicare that Republicans want, to say nothing of racing for the title slip to his beloved '67 Corvette.

When Democrats held the House in 2021, Biden also refused to stand for any Senate Republican shenanigans, and the debt ceiling got extended without any conditions, right up through yesterday, but actually sometime in May or June. But Republicans are super mad that Mitch McConnell didn't crash the world economy even a little bit. Biden still insists on a "clean" debt limit increase, while Kevin McCarthy said that Congress needs to cut spending and live within its means exactly like it never did during the Trump administration.

And also on Wednesday, President Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she "will not sign a clean bill raising the debt limit," and everyone laughed at her because members of Congress vote on stuff, they don't sign anything except for when they are Kevin McCarthy making a deal with Satan to become Speaker of the House. Silly Kevin — he didn't even ask Satan to throw in some blues guitar lessons! Yeah, just as well.

Now, remember, the Debt Limit has to be increased to prevent an economic meltdown. It's permission to borrow to keep servicing the debt the US already has, so if we blow through it, that doesn't make the debt go away. And because it's the debt on all government spending going back decades, that debt keeps growing even without new spending, because interest.

Also too, CNN is full of hacks now, framing Biden's insistence on a clean debt ceiling billas if Joe Biden were some sort of crazy hostage-taker, because look at how much that's upsetting ... Republicans who want to cut Social Security and Medicare. The headline is bad enough: "House GOP’s swing votes demand talks on debt ceiling and push back on White House’s hard-line stance"

Oh, that wild, inflexible Joe Biden! He won't even negotiate (to cut Social Security). The lede paragraph is just as weird, resorting to some truly weird gymnastics to portray Biden as the extremist:

House Republicans from swing districts are flatly rejecting the White House’s position that there be no negotiations with Congress over raising the national debt ceiling , insisting that they won’t bend to the Democrats’ take-it-or-leave-it approach to avoid the first-ever debt default with no conditions attached.

Yeah, that Joe Biden, with his my way or the highway to ... not defaulting on the debt. You maniac! You won't blow it up! Ahh...damn you! God damn you all to Hell! 

So is there a deal in the offing? Heck, June is like a million years from now. That cliff isn't anywhere near us. Still plenty of time to fix this.

[ AP / CNBC ]

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