Administration Seeks To Raise Debt Limit For Fourth Time In Five Years

Treasury Secretary John Snow, in a letter to lawmakers, said Thursday that the Bush Administration will soon ask Congress to raise the government's debt ceiling, now capped at $8.18 trillion.

It will be the fourth time in five years that the administration will seek to increase the debt limit. Failure to do so would likely cause a federal default by March -- an unimaginable crisis that would rattle bond markets, force interest rates higher and shake the economy.

Congress is likely to raise the limit by next month.

***

President Bush doesn't talk much about the federal deficit, which has grown by more than $2 trillion under his watch.

Officially, the White House lists as one of Bush's "accomplishments" that the administration remains "on track to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009." The budget deficit for the current fiscal year -- $333 billion -- was trumpeted by Bush as a sign Bush-onomics was "working."

But the $333 billion figure was phony -- under-representing the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and not factoring in additional expenditures to fix the alternative minimum tax.

When he's not patting himself on the back for the $333 billion annual deficit, Bush has been thanking the Republican-led Congress for its deficit reduction skills. The Bush-onomics math? Entitlements were cut ($39.7 billion) to offset Bush's latest planned tax cut for the wealthy ($100 billion). No wonder the deficit is growing.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan -- no dummy when it comes to economics -- paints a different picture when discussing Bush-onomics.

Here's what he said before the Senate Budget Committee in April: "(T)he federal budget is on an unsustainable path, in which large deficits result in rising interest rates and ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years. ... Unless that trend is reversed, at some point these deficits would cause the economy to stagnate or worse."

The Republican-led Congress will rubber-stamp Snow's request and raise the debt ceiling next month. But perhaps the Bush Administration should spend less time spinning the deficit, and more time reducing it.

***

This item first appeared at Journalists Against Bush's B.S.

unless you want the economy to collapse overnight.

Instead, we should tell the GOP to get rid of some of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, and to remove the pork from the highway, energy and defense spending legislation. That would slice a couple hundred billion off the top ...

:(

Debt when Shrub took office: $5,727,776,738,304.64
% increase: 41.2%

Estimated debt, January 2009: $11,425,614,948,417.40
% increase: 99%

For comparison, under Clinton:
4 year growth in the debt: $1,029,212,651,712.31 (24%)
8 year growth in the debt: $1,539,684,631,121.04 (36.7%)

That's very helpful, and helps prove that if you want fiscal conservatism, hire a Democrat.

"What does it do about the deficits? If you believe Putnam, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and other Republicans, this budget "reduces the deficit in half over four years."

But if you read the fine print, here's what you find: The budget envisages the national debt increasing by $683 billion next year; by $639 billion the second year; by $606 billion the third year; by $610 billion the fourth year; and by $605 billion the fifth year.


What does the budget do for Social Security? It transfers the roughly $150 billion "surplus" in Social Security taxes over this year's Social Security payments to help pay the bills for this year's government spending and to finance the additional $106 billion in tax cuts the president wants to hand out.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050402051.html?sub=AR

Also, people need to know WHAT is being cut. Of course, the mentally challenged won't know what's about to be done to them, so it must be okay then. :eyes:

The credit cards are maxxed out. They have bounced checks. So many that the bank has closed the checking account. Friends and family have been tapped out. The community is losing patience with this bunch.

Disaster is about 1 week away.

Now, multiply this by 288 million, and you've got the U.S. We're going to suck the entire world into our whirlpool.

:shrug:

I sometimes think its deliberate and part of the neocons' playbook: run up the debt to insane levels (they've already done that) and ruin the economy to the point that the market eventually crashes and our foreign creditors start redeeming their chits. If we then have domestic economic panic (hyper-inflation, bank closures, bread lines and all the rest), they can declare martial law and stay in power. Our insane national debt is like a tsunami. It builds and builds and builds until sooner or later it has to crash against the shoreline. I always thought Republicans were supposedly the party of tight spending and spartan fiscal policy. No more, it seems. One thing is for sure: you can bet Poppy, Babs and all their kids won't starve.

is to create an aristocracy. the tax benefits are for those who inherit their wealth, rather than for those who are trying to climb the ladder.

best example is the estate tax (or as Frank Luntz labeled it, the "death tax.") Republicans wouldn't allow an exemption for estates over $2 million in value -- they would only accept no taxation on estates, no matter the size (even as they claimed they were looking out for the small businessman or family farmer).

On the House floor, the former Olympian turned Republican from Kansas, Jim Ryun, talked about all the family farms that would have to be sold if the estate tax wasn't repealed. It was a moving speech, but devoid of facts -- an Iowa State University study found that from 1955-2000, not a single family farm went into bankruptcy or had to be sold at auction because of taxes owed by heirs.

After these sorry so and so's raised minimum payment percentages on unsecured credit, and added new restrictions on bankruptcies, they expect us to let them skate on their debt responsibilities? Maybe they need to get some fiscal discipline like the average American is dealing with.
:thumbsdown:

how any economy can be good when it's up to it's eyeballs in debt.
I should have paid more attention in school instead of lookin' up the teacher's dress.

But at least with Reagan, he realized that his tax cuts of 1981 went too far, and actually raised taxes in 1982 to compensate.

Bush the elder, reneging on his "no new taxes" pledge, raised taxes to try to decrease the deficit.

Clinton, of course, raised taxes modestly for the wealthy, and watched an economic boom (which Republicans falsely take credit for).

And Bush the younger ...

Is that when low income families get trickled down on?

to listen to Dorgan explain it. They stold every dime out of the social security surplus, 224 years worth of presidents combined borrowed less from foreign countries than this moron did in five years. We owe Japan 700 billion, China 250, Germany 100, Taiwan 75, Korea 69. That's only some of them. We even owe Canada 50 billion.

And all the baby boomers are just about to retire. We're heading for the second great depression with this dickwad.

seems like a pretty dumb thing to do

That's not a rhetorical question.

Any credibility Congress gets by putting a debt limit in place is more than wiped out when they have to raise it. So why do they have it in the first place?

congress shouldn't have to face the question of raising the debt limit, especially with a "fiscally conservative" president in place.

I smell pork ...