By Robert Romano – Don’t play politics with the debt ceiling. That’s what the so-called experts have said. Just give the Obama Administration a clean vote increasing the $14.294 trillion borrowing limit. “I don’t see why anybody’s playing chicken with the debt ceiling,” chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee commented on ABC’s “This Week” program in January.
He warned that failing to pass the debt ceiling would cause the “first default in history caused purely by insanity.” Well, Obama got what he asked for, a “clean” vote on a $2.4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling.
And it was crushed. There was hardly any support at all, with only 97 voting yes. 318 representative stood firm against the “clean” approach to giving Barack Obama yet more borrowing authority.
We didn’t default either, with all due respect to Mr. Goolsbee. The sky did not fall, and the world did not end, even with the overwhelming verdict by the House.
Instead, it appears that House members do not wish to speed along the process of bankrupting future generations with a mountain of debt that cannot possibly be repaid. The votes simply are not there. Members want a clear plan to deal with the debt, an alternative to growing the debt to over $26 trillion by 2021 under the Obama plan.
“We couldn’t pass it even if we wanted to,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said of a “clean” debt ceiling increase to Fox News. “You’ve got to cut spending.”
Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson agreed. Now that simply raising the ceiling without preconditions is off the table, he said “the serious discussion must begin on how to cut trillions of dollars out the budget as House Speaker John Boehner has promised in exchange for any increase in the nation’s borrowing limit,” urging members to “hold firm” in their stand.
Wilson warned that the White House would “likely hold out until the eleventh hour in this high stakes game of chicken on the debt ceiling,” but said the American people could not “afford for House Republicans to flinch.”
He concluded, “Increasing the debt ceiling without trillions of cuts would make it clear that Washington does not take the sovereign debt crisis here seriously, and does not care if it endangers the future prosperity of our children and grandchildren. Now is the time to rein in the explosion of borrowing and spending in Washington, before the $14.3 trillion debt gets so large that it cannot be refinanced, let alone repaid.”
This is about what kind of future we as a nation shall bequeath to future generations. Will it be one of hope, normalcy, opportunity, and sustainability?
Or will it be one of perpetual debt, higher taxes, rampant inflation, escalating interest rates, and eventually, catastrophic default? One where the dollar collapses as the world’s reserve currency?
That is a future lawmakers must not allow to come to pass. Not while we still have a choice. After all, this is not about playing political games of chicken. This is about restoring order to the nation’s fiscal house and averting bankruptcy — before it is too late and nothing can be done about it.
The nation cannot afford to write another blank check to the Obama Administration.
Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.
