“Will No One Rid Me Of This Turbulent Debt Ceiling?”

“Because, well, who needs one anyway? It’s just standing in the way of the Holy One, the LightBringer’s enlightened leadership!”

In the past few years, the U.S. economy has been beset by the subprime meltdown

Thanks, Barney Fwank and the entire rest of the NSDWP.

skyrocketing oil prices,

Thanks, Il Douche.

the Eurozone debt crisis, and even the Tohoku earthquake. Now it’s staring at a new problem—a failure to raise the debt ceiling, which would almost certainly throw the economy back into recession

We weren’t aware that we were even out of the one started by Il Douche, and now we’re about to be thrown back into one? Of course, His Imperial Majesty is one of those sad throwbacks to a world at least several years ago when “recovery” meant something more than GDP growth struggling to even crawl north of 2% and job growth that could at least outpace population growth, as opposed to a clownshoe who wouldn’t recognize a textbook in Macroeconomics if it fell and flattened his jugears reading the word aloud from a teleprompter.

It’s interesting, though. We mean, after all Il Douche might have some insight into the workings of an actual economy (as opposed to the fantasy ones that Marxism is based on), but we’ll never know, will we? His college transcripts, along with every single other detail about his alleged accomplishments and life, are more closely guarded than our nuclear launch codes. We guess we’ll just have to take his and the Make Believe Media’s word for it, but we repeat ourself.

At least the Roman Empire demanded some documentation proving that the next Emperor was actually connected to the line of succession before they moved him into the palace.

Now, all we have is the assurances of such scholars as Chris Tingles that Il Douche is, indeed, the Messiah and, with the help of the establishment GOP, any questions asked are “unhelpful”, “uncivilized”, “ridiculous”, “distracting” and, in a display of supreme irony while we’re talking about the Roman Empire and the fall thereof, positively “Visigothic.”

The economy prior to Il Douche’s catastrophic reign, on the other hand, was, by the same “conventional wisdom” (conventional wisdom isn’t, just as friendly fire isn’t), the worst one since Hoover.

How we find ourselves wishing that we still lived in George W Bush’s “worst economy since Hoover.” What, with GDP growth steadily above 4%, unemployment rates flittering between 4% and 5%, negligible inflation and gas prices that would let you fill up your tank without taking out a second mortgage on your firstborn’s kidney. In our opinion, if the Mainly Liberal Media’s narrative is to believed, Hoover didn’t get nearly the credit he deserved.

Unlike those other problems, however, this one would be wholly of our own making. If the economy suffers as a result, it’ll be what a soccer fan might call the biggest own goal in history.

We already have that. We, those of us with brains and even a basic comprehension of math, refer to it as “the election of Il Douche.”

The truth is that the United States doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.

Actually, Denmark does exceedingly well with one, at least compared to the other countries who “don’t need one”, such as the economic powerhouses of Ireland and Greece.

There’s no debt limit in the Constitution. And, if Congress really wants to hold down government debt, it already has a way to do so that doesn’t risk economic chaos—namely, the annual budgeting process.

Very true. How helpful it would be if the NSDWP would bother to actually propose, much less pass one, a duty that they have utterly neglected since the fiddy2ers, in a fit of Make Believe Media-induced pique, decided to take a momentous bowel movement in their own nest.

Sadly, they were too busy running up the nation’s debt to truly astronomical levels in order to WTF?, er, Win The Future, passing bills that nobody ought to read since we’d have to pass them to find out what was in them.

The only reason we need to lift the debt ceiling, after all, is to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized.

Not to mention the spending that hasn’t been authorized as such, since it has never been included in any budget for the very simple reason that the NSDWP couldn’t be arsed to pass one even when they were controlling all three houses of power.

If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we’ll face an absurd scenario in which Congress will have ordered the President to execute two laws that are flatly at odds with each other. If he obeys the debt ceiling, he cannot spend the money that Congress has told him to spend, which is why most government functions will be shut down. Yet if he spends the money as Congress has authorized him to he’ll end up violating the debt ceiling.

Which is why we have a debt ceiling. It was a, vain we know, attempt to keep idiot national socialists like the NSDWP from authorizing spending we could not pay for.

Unfortunately, nobody apparently had the brains to foresee that we’d have to deal with voters with an IQ that would embarrass one of the First Wookie’s orders of french fries, extra fat please.

As it happens, the debt ceiling, which was adopted in 1917, did have a purpose once—it was a way for Congress to keep the President accountable.

And it failed, as we now know, thanks to a party that considers the law of the land nothing more than a tiresome impediment to their mission of doing whatever they please, and an “opposition” party whose main concern is not what they promise their voters in order to get elected, but what the editorials written by people who hate their guts might write about them and an electorate so dumb that had they evolved sooner, paramecia would be the dominant life form on earth now.

Congress used to exercise only loose control over the government budget,

And now, apparently, their main mission in life is to make sure that they exercise even less.

and the President was able to borrow money and spend money with little legislative oversight.

As any good dictator, by right, ought to be able to do.

But this hasn’t been the case since 1974; Congress now passes comprehensive budget resolutions that detail exactly how the government will tax and spend,

Until the NSDWP decided that they didn’t have time to do even that, making you wonder what the Hades they’re hired to do at all.

and the Treasury Department borrows only the money that Congress allows it to.

How is a Sun King supposed to rule that way?

(It’s why TARP, for instance, required Congress to pass a law authorizing the Treasury to act.)

Insisting that the representatives of the taxpayers have to authorize what taxes may be spent on? How bloody RUDE!

This makes the debt ceiling an anachronism.

No. What made it an anachronism is that the new and improved Narrative was decided, by the Make Marx Media, to be “spend like there’s no tomorrow!”

These days, the debt limit actually makes the President less accountable to Congress, not more: if the ceiling isn’t raised, it’s President Obama who will be deciding which bills get paid and which don’t, with no say from Congress.

And we’ve already learned, coming from the Jugeared Horse’s Mouth itself, that the bills not getting paid will be payments to service the debt, which we have ample funds for, to pay granny’s Social Security check, which we have ample funds for, to pay her medical treatments, which we have ample funds for, and to pay for the nation’s defense, which we have ample funds for.

Way to go, Party of the Little People and Our Nation’s Security!

One argument you hear for having a debt ceiling is that it’s useful as what the political theorist Jon Elster calls a “precommitment device”—a way of keeping ourselves from acting recklessly in the future, like Ulysses protecting himself from the Sirens by having himself bound to the mast.

Or like the First Wookie protecting herself from the Siren Song of the McDonald’s drive-through by disabling the switches for the power-windows in her limo.

As precommitment devices go, however, the debt limit is both too weak and too strong. It’s too weak because Congress can simply vote to lift it, as it has done more than seventy times in the past fifty years.

And oh boy how well that turned out! So why is it suddenly so onerous a task to do the same now? What? The people, the ones actually paying the bills aren’t hip on the idea anymore? BLOODY PLEBES!

But it’s too strong because its negative consequences (default, higher interest rates, financial turmoil)

First, there isn’t and never was a legitimate threat of “default”, since “default” means “inability to service your current debts.” We have more than enough funds to service our current debt IF, and only IF Il Douche chooses to service it. If it’s not serviced, it’s entirely the choice of Il Douche and his NSDWP, something we wish that Weepy Boner and the other clowns of the Party of Stupid would bother to point out at least once but, again, that would be “unhelpful.”

Second, higher interest rates would come from a downgrade in our credit rating. Such a downgrade would inevitably result from a default, which won’t happen unless Il Douche decides to let it happen, or from an utter lack of faith that we’re taking our debt issues seriously which would, equally inevitably, result from anybody deciding to go with the retarded NSDWP notion of the writer of this load of freeze-dried bullshit column that we should just raise our own credit limit as we bloody well please without showing any signs that we’re actually going to work on our issues.

You see, Mr. Surowiecki who doesn’t know what the everloving fuck his primate brain is trying to talk about, our credit rating is based on our creditors’ expectations that we’ll ever get to a point where we might actually pay back the principal on our debt. They, unlike you, don’t really give a flying horsefly’s fuck how “historic” and “transformative” your naked Messiah is, all they care about is the likelihood that they’ll get the dough that they advanced to us back.

Yes, this is too difficult for you, so let’s bring it down to a level that you might, might understand:

You go max out all your credit cards and then, when you’ve done that and the bills start pouring in, go see your bank and say that, whereas you have no intentions, real intentions that is, of living within your means, taking on an extra job so you can help paying off the principals, you just want your fucking credit limit increased or you won’t keep paying your minimums.

Then tell us whether they had security throw you out or whether they were too busy laughing their butts off. One thing we can assure you is that your credit rating will fucking plummet immediately.

Our credit rating as a nation can go down the toilet in two ways: 1) Il Douche decides to stop paying the minimum payments or 2) we tell the world that we know we have a problem, but we’re not going to do fuck all about it, but we promise you that we’ll pay you next week for a hamburger today.

The debt ceiling is our way of telling the world that we take this seriously. If we abolish it, we’re telling them that they shouldn’t take us seriously at all.

are disastrously out of proportion to the behavior it’s trying to regulate. For the U.S. to default now, when investors are happily lending it money at exceedingly reasonable rates, would be akin to shooting yourself in the head for failing to follow your diet.

Because, obviously, they’re going to keep on endlessly lending us money at “exceedingly reasonable rates” no matter how the fuck seriously we take our current obligations.

You try fucking tell that too a bookie once he sees that you won’t even be able to pay the vig on what you already owe him, much less what you’re insisting that he should allow you to owe him on top.

No fucking wonder that the NSDWP is the party of addicts in this nation.

Thatisall.