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That won’t work because you’ve spent the principle already. This is what it means to be a deficit economy. You don’t have the money to pay the principle. You have ZERO dollars in you bank. How do you pay the note? You can’t. The USA is BROKE. We live on debt. We have no money in our bank account. You are suggesting we can use check kiting to cover our debts. That’s absurd. Our creditors are not morons. They are very smart German, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese people. They are not going to take rubber checks.

All the people calling for not increasing the debt limits are completely warped and stupid. We will be viewed as the equivelent of Argentina. And we will deserve it.

Mitch McConnell is the only person with a brain in the GOP. Thank god he is the head of the Senate.

I love Michele Bachmann, but she and all the other Tea Party Patriots are DEAD WRONG on this issue. We must raise the debt ceiling.

What does being a Conservative mean if not that you pay your debts?

Uh... please explain to me how increasing the debt limit is NOT check kiting, but this is...?

(I’ll help you - you can’t. They’re both forms of check kiting except at the end of the day my form results in no net increase to debt and yours does.)

seems simple to me. Credit card limit is 1000 bucks. Interest is 10 bucks. I make the min payment of 50 dollars (this would be retiring old debt AND paying interest) this would leave 40 dollars open for NEW debt to be taken on.

It’s not a zero game. The debt ceiling is no different than the limit on a credit card. If they pay off a bond at it’s maturity date. They can simply sell a NEW bond because the debt was lowered by the bond the just paid off (less any interest paid at the time of pay off) and still remain under the debt ceiling.

There is a TON of departments that could be closed that no one would miss and many more that SHOULD be closed that only environmental nut jobs and socialists would miss.

Start cutting or crash it. Just get it over with so we can move on.

You don’t have the money to pay the principle. You have ZERO dollars in you bank. How do you pay the note? You can’t... You are suggesting we can use check kiting to cover our debts.

How is rolling over the debt "check kiting"? If it is, then we have been kiting checks for a very long time. This is merely a question of the debt ceiling, not whether we pay off our debts.

And, as I stated earlier, if the debt is even reasonably staggered, we don't even run into the issue of temporarily exceeding the debt ceiling due to the non-instantaneous nature of the transfers.

And where do you get "rubber checks" from? The money we pay back the principle with is no different whatsoever from money we have been paying back the principle with, for years. We have been borrowing money to repay principle for a long time. Are you seriously meaning that our checks will bounce? That is what a rubber check is, after all. I see no reason at all that they would, any more than any of our previous checks have bounced.

The debt ceiling is an arbitrary number that has no bearing on rolling over our debt. If people view us as AAA one day, and Argentina the next, because we are imposing some kind of fiscal discipline, then they are morons. But they aren't, and they will recognize that the US is no closer to default than before, and may actually be further, simply because we are at least starting to impose this fiscal discipline.

It is the McConnells of the world (if he is not playing some kind of rope-a-dope), that will lead us to Argentina-ville. We must NOT raise the debt ceiling, if we want to avoid that fate.

You issue a new bond to retire the maturing bond. Thus, there is no net change in the outstanding debt total.

A higher debt limit is only needed if spending on programs is going to be more than incoming revenue. We have the option of cutting spending so it doesn’t exceed revenue. The debt ceiling would, if left unchanged, become a defacto “balanced budget” requirement.

Default on our debt would only occur if the Administration chooses not to pay interest as it comes due.