Remember how the House Republicans voted to increase the debt limit “just one more time” a few months ago? Well, I’m sure you’re as surprised as I am that Congress managed to burn through the additional debt and needs more already:
The White House plans to ask Congress by the end of the week for an increase in the government’s debt ceiling to allow the United States to pay its bills on time, according to a senior Treasury Department official on Tuesday. The approval is expected to go through without a challenge, given that Congress is in recess until later in January and the request is in line with an agreement to keep the U.S. government funded into 2013.
I note that this request for additional debt was obvious simply by observing the federal sector’s return to 4+ percent quarterly growth in the third quarter Z1 outstanding credit report.
I have been beating this drum for more than 10 years now, so if you still can’t figure out that the Republican Party is a significant part of the fiscal problem, not the potential solution they present themselves as being, you really have a severe problem with accepting reality. This isn’t to say that Obama and the Senate Democrats are any better, as they are not. But then, they don’t pretend to be the financially responsible party either.
Either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney would be an unmitigated disaster as president. Both of them signed a pledge not to increase the debt limit, and yet it’s clear they will do so using the “just one more time” gambit; Newt didn’t even oppose raising the debt last time so long as the deal didn’t include tax increases.
No Tax Increase in the Debt-Ceiling Deal by Newt Gingrich
“Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has said he would agree to increasing the debt limit only if a deal was “accompanied by a major effort to restructure and reduce the size of government.”
A major effort such as, for example, the one that supposedly cut $100 billion ten years from now… that was in the last deal.