Bill Wilson writes in the National Examiner:

>Left-wing pundits and their cronies in Congress delivered a well-timed second punch to the Obama news conference on the continuing fight over an increase in the U.S. debt limit today. While Obama tried to show he was “involved” in the negotiations, his henchmen announced that it might not matter; that Congress really had no saying in the debt limit. The thrust of their argument is that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution requires the President to do whatever he wants in order to ensure, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned.”

The Constitution? Just because we paste the Constitution on everything, wear revolutionary hats, and can’t shut up about the Constitution doesn’t mean we actually care what it says.

>Overlooking the entire context of the section of the Amendment – ensuring debts incurred to battle the Confederacy were honored and barring the government or any state from assuming the debts of the rebel government

Yeah, keep it in context. Just because they ammended the Constitution doesn’t mean they thought people would still be following it after a couple of years. And only a liberal would interpret “public debt” to mean military and non-military debt. But when the Constitution says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” THAT’S different. That means all firearms, explosives, grenade launchers, bazookas, and portable nuclear devices should never be banned or even regulated, regardless of whether there’s a war or even a “well regulated Militia.”

>the apologists for the Administration assert that it is a universal mandate.

Yeah, who ever said the Constitution is a universal mandate?

>From this they claim the President has the power to ignore Congress and issue as much new debt as he deems appropriate.

Bush issued debt for the entire Iraq War without congressional approval but Obama has to get congress to okay the money he spends saving the economy not once but twice. Hey, Democrats didn’t want the Iraq War to happen. If you get to blow off the debt just because you lost the 2008 election, does that mean we can blow off paying the $3 trillion for the Iraq War?

>Were Congress to truly represent the People who by large margins oppose an increase in the debt limit

Bullshit as usual. It’s not even a Republican majority, which is saying a lot for a group of authoritarians so retarded that polls show they overwhelmingly believe ACORN will steal the 2012 election despite being non-existent and that Fannie and Freddie caused a banking crisis in nations they weren’t even in because Fox News said so. A Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 55 percent of Democrats and half of Republicans and independents support a debt-limit deal that includes a steep reduction in the size of government. But 37 percent of Republicans, a third of independents and nearly a fifth of Democrats say they are against raising the debt limit, under any circumstances. That so many Democrats are against raising the debt limit makes me wonder if people taking the poll even know that this is for raising the limit for money that is already spent. It’s basically like someone deciding to take money out of the bank because he doesn’t agree with the check his wife already wrote.

>What the Administration could not do is incur new debt, additional debt. They could not spend trillions of dollars more than they take in. An instant balanced budget would result

Republicans have been using this “Starve the Beast” bullshit for 30 years, and it’s never worked once, and Republicans still believe it.

>There is enough money for that. Everything else would then become a political decision. Does he pay Social Security claims and deny our armed forces their pay? Does he play the time honored game of past hucksters and charlatans by looking to blocki funding with the aim of hurting the public in order to get the legislative branch to give in? Or, is there a statesman inside that otherwise apparent empty suit?

What part of this paragraph am I supposed to like? Tax cuts for billionaires who blew up the world are mandatory, but forcing Obama to choose between paying people their rightfully earned SS or cutting funding for the troops is a humorous game. He sounds like a fucking psycho.

>Obama could shut down all the wasteful and needless departments and agencies of the government – HUD, Commerce, Labor, etc.

“First by inflation, then by deflation…”

>The list of things Obama could do is near endless, things that would save money so he could meet the constitutional mandate of the 14th Amendment while pairing back the monstrous federal government.

Yes, the list is endless. Never mind the fact that it would mean either Social Security and Medicare would immediately have to be cut by a third or everything else would have to be cut in half. Obama will have to go through 80 million bills and figure out which ones to pay. Factcheck says: “The path urged by Bachmann and DeMint has little support among budget experts and economists. ‘The notion of paying interest first is dumb,’ said Rudolph Penner, a Republican former CBO director who is now with the liberal-leaning Urban Institute.”

Although it’s true that Obama was against raising the debt limit when Bush was president, what typically goes unsaid is that every politican in the party out of power has been “hypocritical” in using the debt to push their side’s agenda, but every year a deal was made early on which is why we never heard about it. There was a time when the debt limit vote was taken away by Democrats to stop this political hostage taking, but it was the Republicans who brought it back. The debt limit was raised 7 times during Bush without anyone knowing about it, but now that it’s on the news, even a lot of Democrats are acting like this is something new that needs to be dealt with now. It reminds me of Obama’s all new dreaded czars that needs the be dealt with now now now when FDR had 11 czars 80 years ago and it was Bush who tripled the number of czars. I have a hard time understanding how 50 year olds didn’t know we had czars before Obama when I can remember Reagan’s drug czar from when I was 8, and I wasn’t exactly interested in news back then.

One wonders why Republicans don’t demand these things when they are in power. Maybe because we’re “broke.” But if we’re “broke,” and Europe is “broke,” and the world is “broke,” where did all the money go? Our shared historical conception of the Depression is that everyone is broke leaves out the crucial other half of the equation, that the richest people always profit when the market contracts like this: they are the recipients of all the money that contemporary society perceives as “disappearing into thin air.” This is still different from the conservative alternate history that the stock market crash had little to do with the Depression and that FDR got all the credit for pulling us out from Hitler starting WWII.

Obama has now put cuts to Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table to lure Republicans back to the table, but so far they’re refusing even this.

Krugman wries:

“So the goal may be to paint the G.O.P. into a corner, making Republicans look like intransigent extremists — which they are.

But let’s be frank. It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it…..

People have asked me why the president’s economic advisers aren’t telling him not to believe in the confidence fairy — that is, not to believe the assertion, popular on the right but overwhelmingly refuted by the evidence, that slashing spending in the face of a depressed economy will magically create jobs. My answer is, what economic advisers? Almost all the high-profile economists who joined the Obama administration early on have either left or are leaving.

Nor have they been replaced. As The Wall Street Journal recently noted, there are a “stunning” number of vacancies in important economic posts. So who’s defining the administration’s economic views?….

Mr. Obama’s people will no doubt argue that their fellow party members should trust him, that whatever deal emerges was the best he could get. But it’s hard to see why a president who has gone out of his way to echo Republican rhetoric and endorse false conservative views deserves that kind of trust.”

“Because failure to raise the debt ceiling would be so nasty, that very possibility could cause serious economic damage even if the odds of an actual default never approach 50%.”
–The Economist

“Top economist: Raise the debt ceiling or blow the recovery ‘out of the water'”
–Yahoo

“The chance of Congress not increasing the debt limit, however, is next to none.”
–ABC

“It would be a disaster if we defaulted on our debt. It would be a disaster if we were hit by an asteroid. I think being hit by an asteroid is a more likely scenario,”
— J.D. Foster, an expert on fiscal policy with the conservative Heritage Foundation.