Schmuck Republicans: Chris Christie and Peter King

If the debt ceiling were frozen, lawsuits would be immediately filed to ensure each spending authorization is ordered by the courts.

Pass a bill repealing Dept of Ed creation, authorizations, etc. Congress could pass a bill that would eliminate the Dept of Ed. Then the funding would not only be not required, it would be illegal. The Dept of Ed is not cast in stone.

Same thing for Foreign aid, aid to States. Legislation would have to repeal a whole slew of other legislation. The language can be crafted, the same way obamacare's thousands of pages was crafted, seemingly overnight.

Of course, planes will continue to land and take off; it's amazing how fast things can be fixed when they have to be fixed. Regarding that, look at how fast Reagan fixed the striking air traffic controllers.

All talk of the "essential" nature of what the government does is somehow amazingly always followed by absolutely not cuts to any Federal staff, and most of them are non-essential. How essential is the Dept of Ed ? Give me this one answer, please - if it shut down Friday, would anyone notice on Monday morning ? Answer: no.

As obligating legislation is repealed and authorizations are cut back, combine that with legislation to add a few more weeks to the debt ceiling.

The time in between debt ceiling lifts is getting shorter and shorter anyway. That's why bammy is asking for unlimited increase power, because it's going to cause House, Senate and President to be in a constant state of debating this very issue - they will be doing nothing else within a couple years, and the number on unemployment or working for the government will continue to grow and taxpayer rolls will shrink.

However..... if the Congress adopted that radical downsizing that I'm talking about, as they stuck to the plan and kept cutting, it creates an key situation - we would be working our way out of the ponzi scheme, albeit slowly. That is a huge point to make - our debt would be slowly redeemed and reduced, i.e., paid off and not rolled over. If - if - Congress had the discipline to stick to the plan, the debt would actually then be "legacy" debt, an asset that was very solid, and actually being permamently retired, so it would actually be steadily becoming more rare. That would actually justify very low interest rates, as it would be a very low risk asset. The economy would turn on the afterburners due to the future prospect of taxes. Instead of future taxes needing to be ever-increasing to pay off a ponzi (impossible), future tax requirements on the distant horizon would be extremely low, because once the debt was paid off, there would be a large drop in taxes to look forward to. Also, the cost of government would be slashed in half permanently. Also, people, businesses and States would have been forced to learn how to fend for themselves, which would have introduced more private sector economic activity as the private sector took over any tasks that government used to do that were actually deemed either necessary or desireable.

Yes, given the fact that Congress is controlled by largely unseen elites (think tanks, consultants, lobbyists, etc.), there won't be much of a change until things get very, very bad, so it's almost a fantasy to expect this correction to happen now.

One key event will be when foreign banks and other foreign owners of Treasury debt stop buying it at face value.

Democrat leadership (being leftis) undoubtedly think that they will start the final transformation to statism when the ponzi pops and the financial sector starts seeing waves of bankruptcies, and start barking all sorts of crazy orders to control society and use force to implement them. IMHO, this will not work out well for them and there will be corresponding waves of departures from Congress and the Executive branch in sweeping elections and public outcry to make legislative corrections such as those above-mentioned drastic cuts.

Pieter, you’re trying to make it a political problem.

It’s not. It’s a math problem.

We have 2.5 Trillion in revenue. You spend more than that and you increase debt. DoD, Soc. Sec., Medicare and Interest ADD UP TO 2.5T. That’s all you get.

You’re talking about insignificant numbers. Dept of Ed. will spend 47 Billion in 2013. Another 22B are in Pell Grants, which you may or may not hate. This is peanuts. The deficit is 1200 Billion. Taking 69B off that doesn’t even dent it.

You hate foreign aid? Okay. That’s also peanuts. $53 Billion. Note that some of that secures cheap oil out of Nigeria, but you want it cut, go ahead. These are your two big ticket items. Your deficit remains $1088 billion.

The FAA is $15 B. But you don’t get to fund that. You exhausted all the tax revs with those handful of items above. You get no FAA. Period. No wriggling on this. You said cut it all. Okay, it’s cut. No more airplanes land. Period.

What about highway repair? That’s another $10 B, but you don’t get to spend that. You cut it. Trucks won’t be delivering food to your grocery store.

You have to update your perspective to a 310 million person US with an enormous % of that total too old to work. There isn’t going to be any growth that magically solves this problem with enormous tax revenues. That’s the Old Normal. It’s never coming back.

You want to see some injustice? Look at Social Security. Minority workers pay into it. White workers pay into it. But whites live longer. Those minorities are funding white retirements that they aren’t going to collect for themselves — because they’ll be dead. Don’t imagine this will be ignored much longer.

You need to sit down and look at the numbers and not imagine miracles are going to solve them. Miracles are nice, but betting your kids’ lives on them is not a winning maneuver.

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