Posted on 07/28/2011 5:00:51 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
President Obama has categorically ruled out a constitutional challenge to the US debt ceiling since I wrote yesterday’s blog.
Spokesman Jay Carney said the White House cannot invoke the 14th Amendment, which stipulates that US federal debt “shall not be questioned”.
“It’s not available. The Constitution makes clear that Congress has the authority, not the president, to borrow money and only Congress can increase the statutory debt ceiling. That is just a reality,” he said.
Obama had previously been vague about this, saying White House lawyers were “not persuaded that is a winning argument”. It is a revealing turn of phrase. This is indeed about winning arguments, not abiding by constitutional law.
It is understandable why he should wish to avoid to an end-run around Congress in this violently polarized atmosphere, though it would not have stopped have FDR. However, the 14th Amendment still binds the nation. The US cannot miss a coupon payment on past debt without breaching the nation’s highest law, and without defiling the honour of the United States.
So this shifts the balance of probabilities a little further towards a brutal fiscal shock as spending is cut to meet the debt ceiling, if Congressional leaders fail to marshal their troops over coming days.
Mr Obama might conceivably calculate that mass furloughs or Social Security cuts or whatever shape austerity might take would do more damage to the Republicans than to the White House. It seems an unlikely hypothesis to me. Both parties have brought America to this unhappy pass over the last 50 years. A plague on both their houses.
Should America embark on such fiscal contraction when economic growth has already slipped to stall speed, and debt deleveraging continues with a vengeance, I would like to flee to Mars for safety.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
It’s gonna get cut one way or the other. WE. ARE. OUT. OF. MONEY!
Start fleeing then you folks in the EU.
We are not going to bail you out yet again.
Each US tax payer is CRUSHED under a $92,000 dollar mountain of debt.
And that figure doesn’t not include any increase or our annual tax obligations!
You lost me right there.
Circus clowns, street beggars and bloggers all lack credibility.
And strangely, the contemplation is cutting social security - again, another thing that makes little to no sense. After all, we've been assured by the Present, the Congress and the Nightly news that social security takes in more money today than it spends out. But that's not supposed to go on for very much longer... I would expect that the federal government would at the very least fund social security to the amount that it collects from payroll taxes.
Defense spending, SSI, food stamps, medicare - these things become far more slippery, but likely would be at the top of the funding list for a lot of congress, the Present in the White House, and likely the people as well. That the Departments of Labor, State, Housing, etc might have some furlough days (and really, Republicans? Nail it here, don't pay the federal employees for days they didn't work when everything’s settled?)
But most of all, if the debt ceiling isn't extended by 2.5 trillion dollars for less than 18 months worth of outrageous excessive spending that is over a quarter of the GDP of the United States... Well, Obama’s birthday is August 3rd, and you wouldn't want to make the Present miss a party, now would you?
Cutting SSI payments is a great place to start! Pay out the Social Security disability, survivor, and “retirement” payments, but cut out the other.
Thousands of people have applied for and received SSI benefits for their ADHD children. Remember the furor about Ritalin and ADD in the 1990s? I wonder if that’s what the controversy was all about. Anyway it’s criminal what people who don’t want to work (or have no marketable skills) will do when welfare is cut off.
What about all the govt pensions from the local level on up?
I have not heard one thing about those
Meanwhile they talk about stopping social security... a system people put 15% of their lifetime income into.
The pension parasites didn’t
You sound like a nice person ~ but what is it you really get out of kicking people who ride around in wheelchairs?
We had a guy at work who lived in a wheelchair. One day his wife got POd at him and pushed him down the stairs in his home.
They got divorced. He never did figure what her thrill was but he wasn't going to stay around for more of it.
I don’t know what planet you live on. The interest is going to kill us for sure. Right now the interest rate is artificially low. When we double the debt in the next few years and the interest rate spikes to where it should be, the entire country is going to collapse. People will be demanding payment in canadian dollars or precious metals
We’d all be better off if they moved to Mars.
Circus clowns, street beggars and bloggers all lack credibility.
The article was from the blog that the poster linked to, not the poster's blog.........
...and FWIW, Mr. Ambrose Evans Pritchard has credibility...........
In the nature of my work, I have dealt with dozens of young men in their 20s and 30s, with all their limbs, perfectly capable of communication, otherwise apparently healthy, who have gotten onto SSI, and never have to be accountable for raising their children, or finding work, or otherwise being responsible.
Then there are the countless children also drawing such benefits.
How many people in wheelchairs today never worked enough to contribute to Social Security (sufficient to earn Social Security disability benefits)? Of that number, how many receive VA benefits instead? The tiny number remaining collect SSI.
SSI and Social Security disability may both come from the Social Security Administration, but they are not a single program.
There’s a big difference between a “program administered by Social Security” and a “program financed from Social Security funds”.
Still, as long as Social Security has brought in enough funds to pay every Social Security outlay IT IS NOT the big problem with the federal debt.
Did you notice that Birmingham Alabama is trying to go bankrupt so it can evade repayment for $3 billion worth of sewers?
Folks are all hung up over the bankruptcy, but how was it Birmingham ended up with $3 billion in debts for sewers?
The federal government has been offering "matching funds" to cities, states and their municipal authorities for years for the purpose of building tertiary sewer treatment facilities and modern storm and sanitary sewer management systems.
Birmingham has $3 billion in debts "matching the feds", and the feds got the other $3 billion by dipping into Social Security!~
It was easy money for the Congress.
I haven't read the whole deal with Birmingham, but I'm sure they were stupid ~ and they thought "Hey, those matching funds are good. We can't miss that." The problem in Birmingham was it didn't have the wealth necessary to support a fancy-dan modern sewage system!
Referring back to Birminham ~ they got where they are when they lost a lawsuit in a federal court over an environmental issue. Check this out: http://www.leftinalabama.com/diary/6629/al07-the-jefferson-county-sewer-mess-and-why-it-matters
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