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Pieter that is just hand waving dreaming. That’s not how appropriation bills are structured.

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

Go back and look at the precise layout of dollars. The barest of bare essentials are not covered by tax revenue. That’s just the way it is. There is no fix for that other than to kill people, which likely will eventually happen.

This is what people on the right and the left don’t grasp. There Isn’t Enough Tax Revenue For Even The Barest Of Bare Essentials. Go back to my first post and do the additions.

DoD, Interest, Soc Sec and Medicare exhaust all of tax revenue. All of it. Not a penny left. If you shut down airlines because the FAA isn’t funded to land them at airports, then economic activity is smashed (FedEx uses the FAA and if they can’t ship, sales don’t occur). If you smash economic activity, the few tax revs you have don’t arrive and you have to cut even more.

There is no fix for this. No one is going to freeze the ceiling and Obama can just go on vacation and refuse to discuss the matter. It’s not Boehner caving. The most rabid far right Tea Party guy would be shown these numbers and realize the same thing. There is no leverage.

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As obligating legislation is repealed and authorizations are cut back, combine that with legislation to add a few more weeks to the debt ceiling.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