Let’s all hope that by now our nation’s leaders have brought an end to the debt crisis.
As I write, the White House is negotiating with House Republicans in an attempt to stave off a default on our nation’s debt for the first time ever. Both sides insist it’ll never happen, but the clock keeps ticking toward what most folks agree would be a fiscal calamity.
Should our nation default, government workers would stop getting paychecks. Social Security payments would come to a halt.
America’s bills would stop getting paid.
Financial markets would begin to panic. Loans would become harder to get, and businesses would tighten their belts. Millions of Americans would lose their jobs. But let’s hope common sense will prevail, and the two sides will find a way to compromise before driving our economy over a cliff.
As the president and his adversaries searched for common ground, the House Freedom Caucus sent House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a letter suggesting that Republicans pass a short-term agreement with limited cuts to extend the debt ceiling through the end of June.
Let’s hope they didn’t end up doing that. Americans have had more than enough of this manufactured crisis. In many instances, increasing the debt ceiling has been little more than a formality.
USA Today reported that in the last 82 years, Congress had raised the debt ceiling at least 100 times.
The ceiling had gone up 56 times under Republican administrations and 44 times under Democratic ones.
In 1941, during the Franklin D.Roosevelt administration, the debt limit was $49 billion. Now, it’s more than $31 trillion.
That’s trillion. With 12 zeroes.
It took two parties to run up this debt.
Under the two terms of Republican President Ronald Reagan, Democrats joined with Republicans to increase the debt ceiling 18 times. They did it nine times under Republican President George H.W. Bush.
Under Democrat Bill Clinton, though, a Republican-controlled Congress suddenly remembered its dislike for deficits, and that led to government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996.
But then Republican George W. Bush entered the White House, and Congress forgot all about balanced budgets, raising the debt ceiling eight times. Even after Democrats took control, Congress increased the limit three more times.
Republicans took a different approach when they returned to the majority.
In 2011, when Democrat Barack Obama was president and Republicans had control of Congress, the debt became an issue again, and all of the talk of default led to a fiscal crisis that produced a credit downgrade and a 2,000-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The Government Accountability Office estimated the delay in raising the debt ceiling had increased borrowing costs for the government by $1.3 billion in that year alone. The Bipartisan Policy Center extended those estimates to place the cost over 10 years at $18.9 billion.
The pattern is clear.
With Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans were a lot more focused on tax cuts than a balanced budget, and Congress suspended the ceiling three times with no preconditions or significant spending cuts.
Now, with Joe Biden in the Oval Office, Republicans have rediscovered their role as guardians of the federal purse strings, models of fiscal restraint.
Don’t get me wrong. Deficit spending is an important issue.
Congress needs to bring revenues in line with spending and start paying down the national debt.
But it’s way past time to put an end to this partisan posturing. For the sake of our country, Republicans simply have to stop taking our economy hostage just because a Democrat occupies the White House.
Constitutional scholars believe the 14th Amendment might actually override the debt limit, making these periodic games of chicken a thing of the past. Biden would be doing our nation a favor if he tested that theory.
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