Outrageous bits!

At 16 trillion in debt . Our  nation is held hostage .

Our nation is being held hostage again by failing elected leaders  again! This is the outrageous twist to the debt ceiling .  ** Who is going to get PAID first.  1st. Paying China . 2nd. Social Security recipients. 3rd. Withholding Tax refunds. The White House flatly rejected Saturday the proposal for President Obama to bypass Congress in raising the nation’s borrowing limit, a day after the Senate’s top Democrats urged Mr. Obama to take that step.“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.” The debt ceiling was introduced back in World War I as a convenience. The constitution, that fusty bedrock of American politics, gives Congress the right to tax and spend. So the debt represents the accumulated difference between those two things. We incur national debt because Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided at some point in the past to spend money it wasn’t raising through taxes. Rather than have Congress run around and authorize borrowing regularly the debt ceiling was a way of handing the Treasury Department a kind ofcredit card. It could keep up with Congressional spending without having to seek authorization for new debt, and Congress could spend away happily without having to worry about actually raising the cash it needed for those programs.  Some Democrats are reprising their call for President Obama to resolve the looming standoff on the debt ceiling all by himself by invoking an obscure provision in the U.S. Constitution.

Read more here: http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/2013/01/white-house-pans-raising-the-debt-ceiling-itself-.html#storylink=cpy

We were all in this situation back in 2011, it's  a repeat of the same old same old gridlock congress.The US has to borrow money to meet it's obligations. They always have and always will. They had to raise the debt limit EIGHTEEN times during the Reagan years, yes to pay the bills.Nothing has worked (please, let's not get into Bush vs. Obama deficits, etc). The President claims he has "cut a trillion dollars" in 2011, yet spending has increased above the rate of inflation in the 2011 and 2012 budgets.The debt ceiling was raised seven times during the George W. Bush administration, with no great battles and no threats of economic chaos. But now that we have a Democratic president, the Republicans have chosen to exploit the debt ceiling as a means of blackmailing the American people in order to impose their extreme and regressive agenda. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, and other Democratic lawmakers wrote to Mr. Obama Friday urging that the president perform an end-run around Congress on the debt ceiling . If the Debt Ceiling negotiations fail, the U.S. will run out of ways to pay its creditors and Social Security recipients by mid-February.One of the first casualties of the government not being able to pay its bills is likely to be income-tax refund checks, which would be delayed as Washington pays essential bills first and until warring political factions settle their differences.The debt limit, or ceiling, is the total amount of money that the United States government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments.Without a new debt ceiling, the government lacks the ability to borrow in order to pay the debt it already has incurred and owes. It could be forced to decide an order on who gets paid first, China or the elderly, in the event no deal is reached.In a renewed attempt to force President Barack Obama's hand on the debt limit, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is pushing legislation that would ban federal spending on anything but interest payments on the national debt, Social Security checks, and military salaries. But wait… there is a clever way to avoid this crisis: the U.S. Mint could mint a single platinum coin, with a face value of one trillion dollars. I kid you not. The idea has been floated by business commentators and several legislators. Then, at a recent press conference (9 Jan 2013), Whitehouse spokesperson Jay Carney was asked about the idea. Most observers expected him to rule out the idea. He did not. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

 ** Here is another outrageous bit . The Rich are getting richer after all. Would be Meg Whitman could get more than $15 million for her first year as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, according to company filings.It's a bigpayday even by the lofty standards of big-time CEOs. The chief executives of major public companies made a median of $9.6 million in 2011, the most recent year available, according to executive pay research firm Equilar.