To those Conservative/Republican friends of mine (yes, I have a few) who say that we can't keep raising the debt ceiling because doing so only encourages us to keep spending money we don't have let me remind them that we only need to borrow money to pay our bills when we are running a deficit. On January 20th, 2001; the final day of Democratic President Bill Clinton's presidency, America did not have a deficit; it had a surplus. We did not need to borrow money to pay our bills because our government was bringing in more money than it was spending.
So what happened over the next eight years? Why Republican President George W. Bush, with the support & encouragement of those very Republicans in Congress who are now screaming about the dangers of deficits and deficit spending gave tax cuts to the wealthy and funded two wars and a prescription drug plan without raising taxes in order to meet the added expense of these three things. As a result our surplus disappeared, we again had a deficit, and Congress again had to go back to borrowing money in order to acquire the funds needed to pay the bills it wracked up.
Had it not been for the deficit spending of President Bush and the Republicans in Congress we would by this time have been so far ahead in terms of bringing in revenue that exceeded our expenses that we would no longer need to raise the debt ceiling today; in fact we wouldn't need the debt ceiling period because our nation's coffers would be growing exponentially by the day; providing more than enough money to fund Social Security & Medicare to infinity; rebuild our roads & infrastructure, build high speed rail, and eventually lower unemployment to the point where we could conceivably eradicate poverty itself, and reduce the number of economic classes in the United States to two; the wealthy and the middle class.
This is the sane fiscal path President Clinton and the Democrats in Congress set us on. It was a Republican President and Republicans in Congress alone who screwed this up. No one else bears any responsibility for the resulting economic calamity for it was of course the Republicans who held both the presidency and the House of Representatives in the first six years of the Bush Administration when these destructive economic policies took root. In fact, it was Republican Vice President Dick Cheney who said in 2004 that "deficits do not matter." Well of course he was wrong but as anyone who has ever worked with a budget will tell you; once you are in a deficit situation you must first momentarily increase that deficit and spend more money and spend that money wisely in order to eventually get out of it.
That's what President Clinton did in the 1990's when he reordered our national fiscal priorities in order to undo the damage done to our economy caused by exploding deficits under the Republican presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. That's what President Obama has been doing since he took office in 2009 and as a result our national debt has been dropping at a faster rate than it ever has in our history and but for Republican obstructionism in Congress we may very well have been operating at a surplus already with no need to even worry about the debt ceiling because we'd be bringing in more than enough money to pay our bills like we were doing at the end of the Clinton Administration.
So to my Conservative/Republican friends who keep complaining about runaway spending & deficits, don't be pointing your fingers at this president and those of us on the Left because we didn't vote for the fiscal idiots who put this country in this fix; you did! This disaster was caused by one party and one party alone; the Republican Party and so if there is any blame to be had; if you really wish to know who is actually responsible for this, then all you have to do is point to that mirror. The person looking back at you will be the person who bears ultimate responsibility for our national debt and our need to raise the debt ceiling for it is the person looking back at you who voted for those people who turned a national deficit back into a deficit.
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