THE DEBT CEILING DANCE

 President Joe Biden negotiating and then signing the debt ceiling today after it was passed by congress gives credence to his 2016 campaign's assertion that  Biden was going to be a good deal maker with congress, given his decades of experience in the Senate.  And while I'm glad that the deal was passed and the government can go back to its usual gridlock without the global economy being threatened, the whole debt ceiling drama is a manufactured, absurd dance.  

The debt ceiling is, basically, the amount of money that the country can borrow to pay off its debts; without it, government bonds, salaries, and payments to contractors would not be honored, with dire consequences for both the nation's economy and the world's.  The national debt really began to grow in the late '80's, after years of massive defense spending and tax cuts for the rich under Ronald Reagan found the nation falling into debt.  The number really climbed during the early part of the 20th century, as then President George W Bush fought two wars and created the Department of Homeland Security without raising taxes or cutting enough other spending to cover those costs. 

At the time congress passed the debt ceiling with little to no serious discussion.  But then when the Tea Party movement saw Republicans win the majority of The House of Representatives in 2010, they seized on it as a political issue, threatening then President Barack Obama with economic calamity if he didn't overturn his signature piece of legislation, The Affordable Care Act. Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, gave interviews in which they claimed that they were only concerned about reducing the deficit calling it an existential threat. The essential dishonestly of that stand was shown a few years later when Republicans not only voted to pass the debt ceiling when Donald Trump was President, they also, led by Ryan himself, eagerly passed Trump's massive corporate tax cut that added more to the same deficit they were so worried about when Obama was President.

While the debt ceiling that was just signed was passed by a congressional bi partisan vote, with both right and left wing politicians disappointed in it, the only reason it was a problem in the first place was Republican obstinacy; you would think that a party that only bare won the House and lost seats in the Senate in the midterms would not have been so brazen, but that's what happened.  And if they really supported lowering the deficit, they would at least consider raising taxes on the rich or lowering defense spending, but of course those possibilities were never even discussed by them.   

Now that this manufactured crisis is behind us, the question arises as to how to handle the debt ceiling in the future. Many pundits have said that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned", could be interpreted to mean that Congress cannot actually suspend the debt limit. But if Biden had tried that approach and basically done nothing about the debt, the validity of that argument would have inevitably been settled by a conservative Supreme Court who very well may have ruled against Biden, even if economic chaos was the result.  So, in the name of avoiding an unnecessary economic crash, Biden negotiated a deal, with the debt ceiling issue put off until 2025 and who knows what congress and The White House will be like by then?  Either way, the debt has been kicked down the road again, and that's mostly a good thing, although the country still needs to get serious about raising taxes on the rich in my opinion.