 Now, this debt ceiling -- I just want to remind people in case you haven't been keeping up -- raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy. All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you've already racked up, Congress. It's a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.
And I've heard people say, well, in the past, there have been negotiations around raising the debt ceiling. It's always a tough vote because the average person thinks raising the debt ceiling must mean that we're running up our debt,
so people don't like to vote on it, and, typically, there's some gamesmanship in terms of making the President's party shoulder the burden of raising the -- taking the vote.
| ...certainly true in 2001-2008... |
And then there's some political campaign later that smacks them around for saying, Joe Smith voted to raise the debt ceiling by $2 trillion. And it sounds terrible and it's a fun talking point for politics, but it always gets done.
And if there is a budget package that includes the debt ceiling vote, it's not the debt ceiling that is driving the negotiations; it's just it's stuck into the budget negotiations, because if you're going to take a bunch of tough votes anyway, you might as well go ahead and stick that in there.
And I have responsibilities at this point not just to the current generation but to future generations, and we're not going to set up a situation where the full faith and credit of the United States is put on the table every year or every year and a half, and we go through some sort of terrifying financial brinksmanship because of some ideological arguments that people are having about some particular issue of the day. We're not going to do that.
So the good news is that we can raise the debt ceiling tomorrow just by a simple vote in each chamber, and set that aside, and then we can have a serious argument about spending all the money I want to spend the budget. And there are significant differences still between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to the budget.
| And since the Rethuglicans are eeeeeeevvvvil we have to do it Champ's way... |
I'm tired of it, and I suspect you're tired of it, too, because it's pretty hard to plan your businesses when these kinds of things are looming at any given moment.
| Remarks to the Business Roundtable (boggle) intended for the low-infos. Doesn't raise the debt? Well, okay then. |
| It's hard to plan a business when you don't know what your taxes are going to be next year, and what your health care costs are going to be, and what your disability contributions are going to be... |
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