(In my ongoing effort to prove that nothing really changes, here is a column from 2011 that explains the debt ceiling, which today is nearing $32 TRILLION.)
It is, as Yogi Berra once said, much adieu about nothing.
For weeks now, I, like most red-blood Americans, have been totally ignoring the so called “debt-ceiling debate.”
I, for one, didn’t even know we had a debt ceiling.
My guess is that 99.999 percent of Americans didn’t know we had a debt ceiling, either.
In fact, I didn’t even know what a debt ceiling was until I realized it was Thursday morning and my 401k was sinking again and I desperately needed an idea for a column.
So I looked it up. Googled it, as we say in the biz.
“Also known as the debt limit, the debt ceiling is the amount of gross debt the federal government can have. The current debt limit is $14.3 trillion, which the government surpassed on May 16, causing Treasury officials to scramble to buy time. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has set an Aug. 2 deadline for lifting the debt ceiling. Failure to pass a bill could result in the first default in U.S. history.”
The government has done just that 74 times since 1962, most recently in 2010 when it raised it’s limit by $1.9 TRILLION.
The U.S. Government can, if they want, raise the limit of how much debt it can accrue.
With no ramifications.
Wow.
How convenient for us.
So why is there such a big debate over this?
Because members of Congress and the White House are a bunch of morons.
They know they are going to pass a bill to raise the limit. It’s a simple one-sentence resolution that any local town board would pass in a heartbeat.
“We resolve to raise the debt limit by $5.9 trillion.”
All in favor? Opposed? Motion carried.
Then we go on as we have since July 4, 1776. We spend to our hearts content.
See, the government can spend as much as it wants and borrow as much as it wants without the stomach-churning realization that it has to pay the money back.
Much like most Americans with a wallet full of credit cards.
“Oh, Mr. Smith, don’t you worry about that $74,500 you owe on your Visa card, with 30 percent interest. We’ll just issue you a new card with a higher debt limit.”
And so it goes until Mr. Smith dies and his debt lives on.
America has yet to die, though it’s got one foot in, so the credit card company, Congress, just keeps raising the line of credit.
Right now it’s at $14.3 TRILLION.
That’s one, four followed by 12 zeroes.
I looked that up, too.
Just to give you an idea of how much that is, I did a little calculating. No, really. Don’t laugh.
Let’s say we suspend the yearly salary of every member of Congress, as well as the president and vice president’s salary.
The total base salary of all those people is $85 million a year.
“Why not just put their salaries toward the debt and pay off the debt?” you heathens might say.
Sure and it might take how long to do that?
It would take nearly 165,000 YEARS.
I, for one, don’t have that much time.
Even if we took all of the yearly salaries paid to all 2 million or so federal employees it would take 62 years to pay off our debt.
That would be a start.
Anyway, I have wasted enough time and have now written enough words for a column and it took me only an hour to do it.
That’s all Congress needs to pass a bill that would once again raise the debt ceiling.
Instead they continue to call each other names and grandstand and act childish and pretend they know what they are talking about.
And I will go back to what I was doing before Thursday morning: Completely ignoring the morons.
Scott DeSmit is a general assignment reporter whose column runs every Saturday. You can contact him at desmitmail@ yahoo.com.