Limits Have Always Been Dumb, Winston!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Why Obama Administration Treasury Secretary Geithner says there shouldn’t be a debt limit for the federal government.

On the other hand, we can be certain most of that $23,000,000,000,000.00 is Bush’s fault. Must be. Somehow. So I suppose that’s okay, then.

I still haven’t figured out The Plan. We can run up unlimited debt without any consequences because, why, exactly?

We don’t have enough money to fund day-to-day operations so we take an operating loan. Fine, but doesn’t that loan eventually get repaid meaning someday you expect not only to have enough money to fund day-to-day operations, but also surplus money to pay down the principal? How many rich people do we have and can we possibly tax them enough to pay off that kind of debt? If now, what’s the plan for retiring the debt?

Alternatively, if the plan is not to repay it but to keep printing money, doesn’t that result in Weimar or Zimbabwe inflation and economic ruin?

I don’t understand it. Fine, I’m ignorant, explain it. But the politicians can’t explain it in a way that I can understand it. So either I’m ignorant AND stupid, or they’re bullshitting me and have no solution but won’t admit it. I concede the possibility of the former but I suspect the latter.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’m trying to figure out what the Dem’s campaign to make unlmited debt seem normal, even good – because that’s what they’ve done for every perversion of reality they’ve inveigled the American people into accepting – is going to look like.

I’m going to guess:

  • Steven Colbert starts sarcastically referring to things he thinks are dumb (and the audience, via his neo-Skinnerian satire training, therefore thinks are smart) as “Debt-y”.
  • Have that dumpy-looking hYpStR chick from the “your first time” video do a cutesy video about “your twenty trillionth time”.

More?

7 thoughts on “Limits Have Always Been Dumb, Winston!

  1. We clearly have too much federal debt. The average interest rate for U.S. government debt over time is about 5%. If we hit 4%, which is well below average, we are completely screwed.

    Since 1971 combined public and private debt has increased at a rate faster than GDP. Far, far, too much of that figure has gone into housing, which isn’t productive and is only a so-so investment, and consumption: Medicare, Social Security (remember they spent it in the 80s), cars (arguably this is a productive asset), consumption of consumer goods, wars, and largely stupid non-public goods created by the government.

    Now we will pay.

    If the economy heals that will force interest rates up because of borrowing. If it doesn’t heal, they will go up because there aren’t enough tax receipts.

    We are going to get a Ron Paul world the hard way.

    Romney / Ryan might have been able to navigate the situation. Obama will be a disaster.

  2. Have you noticed that, since we began to approach the ‘fiscal cliff’, the “the Bush tax cuts for the rich” have become simply “the Bush tax cuts”?

  3. Yea, Terry. That’s kinda like that moving target of what income classifies people as “rich!” It started at $250K, but I have heard key DemocRATs slip and say $150K is the low threshold.

  4. A “Life Of Julia” style slide show explaining how increasing debt is a good thing, and a good way to stick it to those “suckers from the future”.

    Otherwise known as “your children”.

  5. An “Underpants Gnome” style seven point plan to get America out of debt, complete with multiple “…” bullet points and “$$$ PROFIT $$$” at the end.

  6. It’s the curse of the second order solution. We can’t negotiate a modest budget cut, so we’ll fight over something related the resolution of which we might be able to accomplish. It’s like 535 gas station attendants who don’t feel like lifting the nozzle spinning a pinwheel and cogitating about green energy.

    It is distressing how much of our political theater is farce.

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