Quote Originally Posted by Blademaster View Post
Allow me to clarify.

The country used to have the financial credibility of the AAA - that is, the American Automobile Association, a federation of over 50 million members who know how to handle their money well in the event of an automobile emergency or an environmental crisis.

Now we have the financial credibility of AA - that is, Alcoholics Anonymous. Needless to say, members of AA usually have histories of handling their money poorly and/or having little of it TO handle due to their own personal vices.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle!
Blademaster, that's the hardest I've laughed at a post in a very long time.

DZ, think of the debt ceiling like a credit card limit and the national debt like the amount of money we owe on that card. When you use a credit card, you can spend money until the point at which you reach your limit. (Of course, you have to pay interest on whatever you owe, and eventually you'll want to pay back that money, or else you'll just be paying interest and draining your own assets forever.)

The difference between the Visa card that you might own and the government's debt ceiling is that we can't choose to raise our credit limit at will to give ourselves more room to spend. But the debt ceiling is the self-imposed limit by the government on how much it is willing to owe, and it can be raised at any time (as long as Congress and the President agree to do so). In the past, any time that we've needed to raise the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting as a country, we've done so. The reason we had such a battle here is that many members of congress said that recent government spending has been too reckless, so they wanted to see significant changes before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (and some didn't really want to raise it at all).

In any case, I agree with the people who have said that $16T is a completely absurd amount of debt. Who can blame credit rating agencies for the downgrade? Giving ourselves the ability to go even further into the red doesn't improve our ability to actually pay back the debt we currently hold (to get back into the black).

I think the worst part about this whole issue is that many of our fiscal policies over the past five years or so have been geared toward stalling away a true "depression" until after the next election. (Both parties are guilty of this, but the easiest example is the current one: just look at when the Treasury's borrowing needs will no longer be "satisfied.") In the meantime, the unemployment rate is still as high as it's been since the Great Depression, so all these little temporary projects that the government keeps undertaking and the one-year temp jobs that those projects have created (many of which expired quite some time ago) have made it so that neither the people nor the government can pay their bills in the long term.

For now, the debt's only growing larger, and the stalling can't continue forever. Once our nation's leaders lose the ability (or the desire) to continue this irresponsible stalling, a depression is almost inevitable. And the deeper we are in debt at that point -- in other words, the longer we've been stalling -- the worse that depression will be.