Ah, lovely. Another stupid debt ceiling fight.  The dumbest and most transparently foolish thing Congress does when we have divided government. I also think the perennial government shutdown crises are stupid, but at least they’re more honest — if you want to change the way Americans think about taxes and spending, fine, shut down the government and fight over the budgets until you come to a resolution… that also gives citizens some insight into how government impacts their lives (national parks closed, IRS offices not answering the phone, friends and neighbors furloughed, SEC regulatory work takes an extra month, etc.). But the reasonable time to debate budget priorities and push for tax or spending changes is when you’re passing budget legislation or making changes to the way Congress operates… it’s just that we fixate on this debt ceiling stuff because Congress apparently can’t even pretend to act like adults and operate normally anymore.  

In the case of the debt ceiling, the money was spent years ago, sometimes decades ago, and debating whether or not you’re going to keep paying the interest on that debt is stupid and dangerous (particularly because the debate is happening in the press, of course, they’re not actually debating with each other).   If the US fails to maintain its position as the world’s dominant currency, and the US Treasury Note ceases to be the basis for assessing the relative risk of every investment in the world, which is what you’re toying with when you talk about not paying your bills, then things can get VERY ugly.

Both sides of the debate know this, of course, as they have in every previous debt ceiling fight. They know that they’re playing with fire to score political points, and both sides are being stupid — the Democrats should have extended the debt ceiling or done away with the debt ceiling entirely when they had a majority, perhaps in the lame duck session after the election, but decades of political marketing has turned the debt ceiling into a hot-button issue in some districts, so they didn’t take action (the moderates don’t want to be seen as being fiscally irresponsible, so they don’t want their name attached to that vote, and the political strategists in the party know that past debt-ceiling showdowns have hurt the Republicans, not the Democrats, so they wanted an ugly showdown to be the ...