January 18 – On paper tomorrow the federal government will reach its debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling is the total amount of money the US government is authorized to borrow in order to meet its legal obligations, such as Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments.
If the debt ceiling remains static, the government won’t be able to make the payment on the obligations and send our economy, and quite frankly, the world economy into chaos.
Over the years, we’ve seen back-and-forth fighting over the debt ceiling and a potential shut down of the US government, but the ceiling has continued to climb.
Right now, there will be some workarounds in the way the treasury pays bills, so it will be managed for probably the next four or five months, but what will happen after that is anybody’s guess.
Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “You saw a lot of talk yesterday from Congressional leaders, Senate leaders and even the White House that we need to start working on this now, get together to figure out how we’re going to avoid this possible crisis.”
Pat Ryan of NewsTalk 103.7FM asked, “Why wouldn’t we put the brakes on this completely and really show some fiscal responsibility at this point? All I hear is let’s spend more, let’s spend more in the Pudding in Chief here. There’s no appetite to stop spending and there’s waste. So much waste everywhere. It would be great to see somebody sit down and go you know what? How do we untangle this mess with $31.4 trillion in debt? That’s not healthy for any of us here.”
That number just continues to rise.
Barkdoll said, “I don’t know what the leadership in Congress, Senate, White House are going to do. This is just a never-ending problem and as I’ve said repeatedly over the years, it doesn’t matter if the Democrats or Republicans are in charge, it’s funny to me, I hear these Congressman come out, how alarmed they are about this, yet they rubber stamped all these spending packages for years and suddenly, they have found that it’s a problem. They’re going to have to make some cuts.”
The debt ceiling can’t keep climbing.
Barkdoll said, “It’s going to put the credit rating at risk. The budget keeps getting absorbed just by debt service on the debt.”
The other question is can they even get any cuts voted on with the splintered Congress we have right now?
Barkdoll said, “Some of these economists are warning that if they don’t get this figured out, we’re looking at major problems, major type economic crisis come May or June when this ceiling would expire.”
It’s been compared to defaulting on a mortgage. If you would stop paying your mortgage, what would happen? Yeah. That’s what the US economy may be looking at.
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM pointed out, “They don’t seem to have any sense of just basic economics. It’s terrifying to me because they have such great intentions and all that matters is our great intentions. Outcomes don’t matter at all. We see this over and over again from policy to policy that that seems to be the case. Years ago we passed the exits for the economy, but yet at this point, just stop the bleeding. Stop the spending and they won’t even do that.”
Ryan noted, “They won’t do that because the American people just don’t care. You’ve got a handful of people, God bless you for listening right now, going yeah, this is bad. We should do something about that.”
Jansen said, “It’s as long as I get what I want, then I don’t even care what happens.”
“I don’t even think it gets to that point,” Ryan contended. “It’s just a disengage on a whole bunch of different fronts here.”
Jansen said, “They only care about when their thing might be threatened. Medicare, all the people come out and raise heck at a certain age or over if anything is going to touch Medicare. Medicare is going to go broke. At this rate, it is going to go broke. That’s just the reality. It has nothing to do with Republicans want to take away blah, blah, blah. It’s going to be taken away from you, regardless, unless we get this stuff under control.”
Ryan asked, “Actually, will it be? We just continue to print money.”
“Eventually,” Jansen predicted.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are huge portions of the federal budget and any time a cut is suggested, all you-know-what breaks loose.
Barkdoll said, “Something’s going to have to be done at some point with these programs or they really will run out of money.”
Remember former president Donald Trump passed tax cuts and they are set to expire in two years. What will happen then?
Barkdoll wondered, “Do they extend those tax cut packages for another several years? If not, they will reset to what was in place pre-2016. Again, economists are kind of alarmed about this because this all interplays with this debt and the budget situation. So there’s a lot of complicating factors here.”
because she worked in the south tower.
Nope. Didn’t happen. In fact, she died five years after 9/11 and there’s no evidence that she worked there.
It also looks like his work history is even worse than he advertised.
