Right Wing Lunatic Fringe Says Default Might Be Good

[Rohirrim]

“It really is irresponsible of the president to try to scare the markets,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. “If you don’t raise your debt ceiling, all you’re saying is, ‘We’re going to be balancing our budget.’ So if you put it in those terms, all these scary terms of, ‘Oh my goodness, the world’s going to end’ — if we balance the budget, the world’s going to end? Why don’t we spend what comes in?”

“If you propose it that way,” he said of not raising the debt limit, “the American public will say that sounds like a pretty reasonable idea.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/us...-bad.html?_r=0

[Rohirrim]

I rarely agree with Friedman, but I have to agree with this paragraph:

President Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail, because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted — and, if legally challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor — the majority decision holds sway. A minority of a minority, which has lost every democratic means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if its demands are not met. If we do not preserve this system, nothing will ever be settled again in American politics. There would be nothing to prevent a future Democratic Congress from using the exact same blackmail to try to overturn a law enacted by their Republican rivals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/op....html?src=recg

The Republicans have to clean their own house. They have allowed their lunatic fringe to set up a situation which no president could ever surrender to. The minority wants to unpin a fundamental strut of our government and kick it loose. If the president allows them to do it, he'll be excoriated by all future presidents. For the good of our way of government, he cannot not allow the lunatic fringe to succeed.

[Rohirrim]

Love this guy from the OP:

Representative Ted Yoho, a freshman Florida Republican who had no experience in elective office before this year, said the largest economy on earth should learn from his large-animal veterinary practice.

“Everybody talks about how destabilizing doing this will be on the markets,” he said. “And you’ll see that initially, but heck, I’ve seen that in my business. When you go through that, and you address the problem and you address your creditors and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to pay you. We’re just not going to pay you today, but we’re going to pay you with interest, and we will pay everybody that’s due money’ — if you did that, the world would say America is finally addressing their problem.”

We got some real Einsteins here.

[Meck77]

Let's compare this to maybe a real life example. A young college student has a credit card. This student has maxed out their first card. In order to keep up with financial obligations, rent, car pmt, etc the student gets a second card and gets cash advances so they can "pay" the first card. Rather than cutting costs, paying down the credit card, the student is raising their own debt ceiling. Stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!

What the United States is doing is not much different.

Speaking of LUNACY. If we don't pull another credit card Social Security is on the chopping block. http://blogs.marketwatch.com/encore/...iling-warning/

Ro...Please explain to me what we are doing now isn't TOTALLY INSANE?


How can we possibly raise a little more money without taxing the American people to death? Just so happens the United States has 650,000,000 acres of public land. Most of that is out west. Just so happens much of this land is sitting over oil and gas.........Even if it's not over gas and oil surely there are people willing to buy some from US. Ah but it doesn't really work that way. The credit card machine is gobbling up more land. Nice to own your own printing press!

Meanwhile our government is scaring old people into believing they are going to lose their social security checks if we don't plunge ourselves into more debt.

Come on Ro....

[peacepipe]

Let's compare this to maybe a real life example. A young college student has a credit card. This student has maxed out their first card. In order to keep up with financial obligations, rent, car pmt, etc the student gets a second card and gets cash advances so they can "pay" the first card. Rather than cutting costs, paying down the credit card, the student is raising their own debt ceiling. Stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!

What the United States is doing is not much different.

Speaking of LUNACY. If we don't pull another credit card Social Security is on the chopping block. http://blogs.marketwatch.com/encore/...iling-warning/

Ro...Please explain to me what we are doing now isn't TOTALLY INSANE?


How can we possibly raise a little more money without taxing the American people to death? Just so happens the United States has 650,000,000 acres of public land. Most of that is out west. Just so happens much of this land is sitting over oil and gas.........Even if it's not over gas and oil surely there are people willing to buy some from US. Ah but it doesn't really work that way. The credit card machine is gobbling up more land. Nice to own your own printing press!

Meanwhile our government is scaring old people into believing they are going to lose their social security checks if we don't plunge ourselves into more debt.

Come on Ro....

you are obviously to much of a simpleton to understand the debt limit. its about paying the bills we have already built.

[W*GS]

Let's compare this to maybe a real life example. A young college student has a credit card.

The government isn't a private individual. It's not a business, either.

What is it with some people that they think government is one or both? It is not.

[TonyR]

Wells Fargo Bank economist Scott Anderson has said of a default, “It would be an earth-shattering event. It’s taken as given that U.S. Treasuries are a safe asset. Once you question that assumption, it shakes the foundations of global finance and the way it’s been established over the last 50 years.”

University of California, Berkeley, economist Barry Eichengreen, a world-renowned expert on the international monetary system, warned that a debt default could lead to a run on the dollar if foreigners come to feel that the U.S. is being run by irresponsible leaders. As he put it:

“If there is a threat to the dollar, it stems not from monetary policy, but from the fiscal side. What is most likely to precipitate a dollar crash is evidence that U.S. budgets are not being made by responsible adults. A U.S. Congress engaged in political grandstanding might fail to raise the debt ceiling, triggering a technical default. Evidence that the inmates were running the asylum would almost certainly precipitate the wholesale liquidation of U.S. Treasury bonds by foreign investors.”

http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog...ett-debt-limit

[TonyR]

Another good read on the subject.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...hinks_the.html

[TonyR]

If you look at members’ actions and votes instead of their statements, the number of Republicans in the House who favor a clean CR and oppose the Cruz-driven strategy of shutdown and hostage-taking is not 21. It’s 0. The entire House Republican caucus is responsible for its shutdown-based legislative strategy. The only difference among the members is that Tea Party conservatives have the decency to admit what they’re up to.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-m...licans-2013-10

^ There are effectively no moderates left in the party.

Sullivan states it better than I can:

The purge has worked, hasn’t it? There is effectively no Republican party any more. There is a radical movement to destroy the modern American state and eviscerate its institutions in favor of restoring a mythical, elysian, majority-white, nineteenth-century past. This crisis is proving that more powerfully than even watching Fox. We need to see what is in front of our nose: a cold civil war has broken out between those properly called conservatives, defending the credit of the government, empirical reality, and adjustments to modern life and those properly called radical reactionaries declaring our current elected president and Senate as illegitimate actors, bent on the destruction of America, and therefore necessitating total political warfare, even to the point of threatening to destroy the global economy.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/...e-republicans/

[Meck77]

you are obviously to much of a simpleton to understand the debt limit. its about paying the bills we have already built.

Projecting much?

debt ceil·ing
noun
1.
an upper limit set on the amount of money that a government may borrow.
"on Friday, Congress raised the debt ceiling by $800 million"

[BroncoBeavis]

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-m...licans-2013-10

^ There are effectively no moderates left in the party.

Sullivan states it better than I can:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/...e-republicans/

What's funny (not really) is that Sully would've been (probably was) saying exactly the opposite 7 years ago, when it was Bush in the big boy chair, and not a single Democratic 'moderate' existed in the Senate.

The end result will be the same. Default isn't on the table. But nobody's going to sign up for President O's South Park Rochambeau gambit either.

[Blart]

Meck:

The debt ceiling is not like your family's credit card. Whoever is telling you this is either ignorant or trying to deceive you.

When Congress passes a budget, it is voting to spend more than it takes in. It’s been doing so (with one brief exception in the 1830s) since the earliest days of our republic.

It makes up the difference by issuing debt. People enthusiastically purchase this debt (treasury bonds) because it's the safest investment in the world. Or at least it was.

[BroncoBeavis]

The left's dream is to remove all economic restraint on their dreams and ambitions.

Enlightened Progressives should be free to vote for all the good stuff the United Trial Lawyers can imagineer without being distracted by all the petty annoyances of "unintended consequences" or "how to pay for it"

[W*GS]

The left's dream is to remove all economic restraint on their dreams and ambitions.

The right's dream is to let the wealthy and corporate interests **** us and the planet.

A couple of Kochs right up the chute.

[BroncoBeavis]

The right's dream is to let the wealthy and corporate interests **** us and the planet.

A couple of Kochs right up the chute.

Next you'll tell me it can all be fixed by the Obama Administration turning its technical acumen towards setting up the "Expedia of Carbon Taxes"