Senate Republicans raise US debt ceiling to $9 trillion

[intcvlcphlga]

Today the Senate voted 52-48 (every Democrat and 3 Republicans voted against it) to raise the debt limit to nearly $9 trillion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/politics...artner=homepage

Do you ever feel like you've been hung out to dry by the current leadership in Washington? This debt will come due, but it won't be the current DC delegation that will be responsible for it but rather their children and their children's children. What are your thoughts?

[Recchia]

What was the ceiling before, how much is the debt as it stands now?

[intcvlcphlga]

What was the ceiling before, how much is the debt as it stands now?

The debt ceiling was just over $8 trillion prior to today's action. If the ceiling hadn't been raised, the U.S. government would have gone into default on its debt this week. This is the fourth time since Bush took office that the ceiling has been raised. As of yesterday (according to the Treasury Dept), the debt stood at $8,270,134,498,375.29. That equals about $1270 per person on the planet or $27,700 per American. In a related note, we are spending in excess of $175,000,000 per day on the war in Iraq.

[hood]

I am not suprised, this administration continues to dig us into a deeper and deeper hole, I will porbably be old or dead by the time all these problems being created now are finally cleared up.

[ironchapman]

This creates an interesting problem. First of all, we are faced with the obvious one that is just the sheer size of the debt.

Let's dig deeper...

The United States has had a national debt of any size since it's creation. The lowest it has ever gotten was while Andrew Jackson was in office. In 1835, we had a debt of $33,733.05 and it has increased ever since.

It should also be noted that every year or period that we've had a surplus has ended in a depression or recession.

In 1817-21 the federal debt was reduced 29% A depression began in 1819

In 1823-36 the federal debt was reduced 99.7% A depression began in 1837

In 1852-56 the federal debt was reduced 59% A depression began in 1857

In 1867-73 the federal debt was reduced 27% A depression began in 1873

In 1880-93 the federal debt was reduced 57% A depression began in 1893

In 1920-30 the federal debt was reduced 36% The

[monsoon]

First wikipedia can't be considered a source on this since anyone with an agenda can edit these documents.

The recession in 2000 was not caused by a reduction in the debt because that never occured. What changed was the amount that we were going into debt. i.e. it was stopped. That very mild recession was caused by the dot com crash in the stock market when 100s of billions of stock value disappeared. I am amazed that anyone would even suggest this.

Now for the other dates, the next entry was the 1929 depression, known by many as the great depression. The causes of that depression again were called by the crash of the stock market that was driven up by speculation, bad business decisions, pyramid schemes, and numerous other questionable financial schemes that are now illegal. This is not open for debate as the causes of The Great Depression were well known. It should be pointed out that since the law changed in 1929 there have been numerous booms and recessions that were unrelated to the public debt. Anyone who has studied history knows this unless they government is re-writing the history books these days and I would not put this past this administration.

If you go back and look at the causes of the other recessions listed in that article, you will find that it had nothing to do with the government borrowing money. And every state in the union has a constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget each year. If deficit spending was such a good thing, then this wouldn't exist. We keep hearing rethoric "Tax and Spend Liberals" but I think far worse than that is "Borrow and Spend Conservatives and let your children pay" which is a hallmark of the current administration.

Now it's very interesting that you choose to ignore this statement in the very article that you cited.

"U.S. Treasury statistics indicate that, at the end of 2004, foreigners held 44% of federal debt held by the public. [2] About 64% of that 44% was held by the central banks of other countries. A large portion was held by the central banks of Japan and China. This exposes the United States to potential financial or political risk that either bank will stop buying Treasury securities or start selling them heavily. In fact, the debt held by Japan reached a maximum in August of 2004 and has fallen nearly 3% since then."

What exactly do you think would happen if China decided to sell the bonds it owns? It would crash our economy. China is financing Bush's wars of aggression which is why we no longer care about human rights in that country. Its a shame not to mention the biggest danger danger of public borrowing.

If you are really going to "dig deeper" then please be open minded enough to present the entire story instead of cherry picking the parts that support your effort to make Bush look like he knows what he is doing. I agree this is how the President does business, but that doesn't mean this is a behavior to be emulated.

[Snowguy716]

We'll end up footing the bill. The younger generations. The ones fighting the wars. We need more fiscal responsibility!

First, we should raise income taxes to pre-2001 levels plus some to cover most of the hole. Then we should cut the bloated defense budget to make up for the rest. I'm not talking pay for troops or veterans benefits like Bush seems to support, but cuts in weapons programs. The pentagon budget.

We should also have a measure in place that states that we must show how we'll pay for our budgets before we can pass them into law. The Pay-go system. Republicans oppose this right now because basically, they want to keep spending and want to keep tax cuts for their rich friends.

This will ultimately be better for our country.

Or... we could simply keep spending and spending. And then when today's current politicians reach retirement age, we'll axe social security for 15 years to pay for the deficit. And close the nursing homes. They want such a "free-market" system.. then let them fend for themselves.

Then, with a good chunk of hte debt paid off, we can re-start the Social security program for younger generations and move on. Sounds like a good idea to me.

[intcvlcphlga]

Spending on Iraq has now reached $400 billion with yesterday's passage of the spending bill.

And, keep in mind when referring to pork in the federal budget, earmarks have increased exponentially since the Republicans took control of Congress.