Well, it looks as though we are heading towards another artificial man-made crisis this summer with another episode of the national debt ceiling increase. Now, this may be the pinnacle of stupidity in the world of partisan politics and there really is no reason for it. The thought that a country like America would default on its debt is ludicrous, but here we are yet again.
I think there should be some clarity as to what this issue really is. The debt ceiling fight is not a fight over how much debt we should have. The debt ceiling fight is about an artificial line where we say, well, we all passed—Republicans and Democrats together— bills that mean that we systematically, year after year, bring in less revenue than we spend. I think the best analogy I ever heard of this problem was, imagine you have a house that is filling full of crap. You have two solutions, stop the crap from coming in by fixing the holes or raising the roof. For the last 25-30 years, Democrats and Republicans have just been raising the roof! The debt ceiling has been raised seventeen times from 2001 to 2020, not once has any politician, Democrat or Republican came up with a long-term solution for this lunacy!
The usual schtick is whatever party holds the presidency says, we need a clean debt limit bill, the other party stamps their feet and says no, we need cuts. Tit for tat, let’s be honest neither one of these parties has any interest in solving any of these fiscal issues, they would rather put on their performative outrage act but not really solve the problems that ail our country.
Personally, I think a debt ceiling is absurd for a country and economy of this size. If you’re worried about debt getting too high and you want some arbitrary line, well, then instead of a debt ceiling where we automatically default, we could have a revenue minimum amount, where if we hit the debt ceiling, we could automatically say taxes go up by 10 percent for everybody, then everyone will have a dog in the fight, those congressman would earn their keep then or maybe we could have an automatic wealth tax, where if we hit a certain amount of debt, anybody who has more than $50 million in wealth has to chip in 3 percent of their wealth. Those are just as sensible—in fact, probably more sensible rules than a debt ceiling where we start not sending Social Security checks to people who depend on Social Security checks to live.
Either way, this is another example of a problem that politicians really don’t want to solve, just get their airtime to pound their hands on the table and blame the other team. These are the folks we should be nominating for an Oscar every year!