The NRPS Crowd Are Going To Do It
Via Steve Bates, Paul Krugman on the The Boehner Bunglers. At the CBC Neil Macdonald offers Republicans twerking for the cameras like Miley Cyrus.
The ‘lemmings’ are going over the cliff, and if they survive they will set off their ‘suicide vests’.
Congresscritters like Joe Barton (R-TX) talk about prioritizing payments and paying the interest on bonds. He says it’s like paying your mortgage and putting off other bills if you are short. He obviously has never been in that position or he would know that if a family does that, they have defaulted on their obligations and are in a world of financial hurt. Just paying something late can reduce your credit rating and cause credit card companies to increase your interest rate and minimum payment. Depending on the terms of your mortgage, making the payment may not prevent default. If you have your homeowners’ insurance policy cancelled for non-payment, or you don’t pay your property taxes, the mortgage is usually considered in default.
If the US government doesn’t pay all of its bills when they are due, the government is in default. The world markets will tank, the US economy will tank – we will be facing full-blown Depression, probably worse than 2008, because no one will buy US bonds to finance a recovery.
2 comments
If Joe Barton had ever defaulted on his payments he’d know better. His house would be foreclosed upon by the bank and any equity wiped out by bullshit fees the banks add if you’re even 1 cent short on a payment, he wouldn’t be able to rent an apartment unless he was willing to pay 4 months rent in cash *in advance* (yes, that’s legal in Texas, yes, they do that if you have a lousy credit rating), the only car he would be able to buy would be a $500 clunker that he could buy with cash, the only loans he would be able to get would be at pawn shops or those odious “payday loans” at extortionary interest rates… given that he’s in Texas his paycheck wouldn’t be garnished (that is illegal in Texas except for debts owed to the Federal government where they can’t stop it), but anywhere else he wouldn’t even get to *see* his paycheck. His debtors would seize it at work before he got any of it, and then dole him out a miserable poverty-level “living allowance” that his family would be expected to survive on.
Not to mention that the whole “we’re broke!” thing is bullshit anyhow. We could raise taxes enough to eliminate the deficit *and* enough to pay off the entire accumulated debt over the next 30 years and still be less taxed than the average OECD country. We’re not broke. We’re just deadbeats. Sigh.
When you are ‘special’, like the NRPS, you don’t have to concern yourself with the problems of the ‘little people’. Donald Trump can go bankrupt multiple times and never worry about getting a loan. Normal people see their debt balloon if they are a day late or a penny short.
This whole debt limit is a vestige of the gold standard, and should just be eliminated. The House creates the real budget. If they want to balance it, they are the ones with the power and responsibility to do it. They spend the money in appropriations bills and refuse to cover their bills with a decent tax rate. Then they wander around acting like they had nothing to do with it.
These people really don’t understand what a fiat currency is, and would rather use ‘the Greek solution’ of paying bond interest, than getting down to creating a budget – their main function as a legislature.