What do you all think of the debt ceiling and the 14th amendment?

iamprivate · 10 months

Here's an option, use whatever revenues you have to service the debt first (and thus honor the 14th amendment...we easily have enough revenues to do this) and then whatever is left over to pay your other invoices. You can pay some and not others or make the same percentage partial payment on all of them. They simply don't like either of those options and as far as I know there's nothing unconstitutional about the congress appropriating more funds than there are revenues to pay them. So, it must not be unconstitutional for the executive branch to determine who and what to pay when there aren't sufficient revenues to pay everything.

Terr_ · 10 months

IMO the debt ceiling is Constitutional. The 14th amendment says we'll repay the debts we have... That's different from choosing whether to borrow more or not at a given time, and Congress is the branch with funding authority...

The only time they might conflict is if a debt must be repaid but Congress is completely and utterly incapable of drawing from any other funding source or selling off any more assets. Only in that case would the 14th amendment compel Congress to borrow from elsewhere... and we really are not in that situation.

Side gripe:

The debt ceiling was designed designed by Congress in such a way that it will always need raising, because it isn't indexed for inflation nor for GDP growth. Almost everything going on in Congress about it is a big piece of theater or a "give us what we want or we'll smash it" game of chicken. And frankly I'm considering including Ron Paul, nominal Republican, in that "theater" category.

matts2 · 10 months

Was this just a circle jerk post?

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