Before House Republicans narrowly passed a bill Wednesday that would include raising the debt ceiling in exchange for a new round of shredding America’s social safety net, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., offered up a folksy summation of the issue: President Joe Biden, he said, has “maxed out the nation’s credit card.”
Though I’ve used similar language with a different framing, it’s not the best analogy. The better comparison to our debt ceiling situation would be a bank providing a credit card with literally no limit, but the credit card holder insisting that there be a limit — and pitching a fit when that limit approaches.
The difference between those two illustrations matters because Republicans know well that the debt ceiling itself is arbitrary. It’s not a stretch to say the amount of debt that the U.S. can take on is entirely made up. Any increase to the debt ceiling itself — currently set at $31.4 trillion — has historically been based on nothing more than what will suffice politically until the next time it needs to be raised. Tucked inside a CNN article on how House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., pulled off Wednesday’s vote was this eye-opener:
In a private meeting in the Capitol, GOP leaders debated how high of a debt limit increase they should seek. Some had floated odd numbers because it sounded more intentional than an even number. One member suggested $1.69 trillion, but that was rejected because of the innuendos associated with such a figure, according to three GOP sources. Ultimately, a $1.5 trillion increase was the number they settled on.
CNN
For the record, the $1.5 trillion amount they landed on is expected to carry the country through less than a year, at which point Republicans would be holding us hostage again — and in the middle of a presidential election season. I’m no economist, and I can’t predict how much longer it would take to reach a debt ceiling $190,000,000,000 higher. But the House GOP…
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