I apologize in advance for what will be a rant about the debt ceiling. But such a rant is necessary. For weeks now, there have been lots of newspapers articles and lots of people quoted about the mess that debt-ceiling legislation has become. Here is New York Times reporter Jim Tankersley writing about a potential breach of the debt limit:
That could prevent Congress from doing the basic tasks of keeping the government open, paying the country’s bills and avoiding default on America’s trillions of dollars in debt.
Here is the Department of Treasury:
Failing to increase the debt limit would have catastrophic economic consequences. It would cause the government to default on its legal obligations – an unprecedented event in American history. That would precipitate another financial crisis and threaten the jobs and savings of everyday Americans – putting the United States right back in a deep economic hole, just as the country is recovering from the recent recession.
Check out John Cochrane on what is right and what is wrong with these statements.
Then you have all those who think that a debt-ceiling fight is so awful that they want the debt ceiling abolished altogether. Here is Jamie Dimon:
“I just think this whole thing is mistaken and one day we should just have a bipartisan bill and get rid of the debt ceiling. It’s all politics . . . it’s a potentially catastrophic event,” Dimon said at the time.
Dimon isn’t alone.
The implicit or explicit message in all these comments is that legislators who try to use the debt ceiling to slow America’s march toward a fiscal crisis (whatever form it might take) are irresponsible. Crazy even.
As you probably know, though, we will only default on the debt ceiling if Treasury doesn’t prioritize paying interest and principal on the Treasury debt before any other payments. Obviously, a default would be terrible, and prioritizing payments will come with some pain. And there’s a part of me that thinks that past Congresses, by voting to spend trillions of additional borrowed dollars, implicitly agreed to raising the debt ceiling whenever the debt nears the limit.
But these considerations don’t imply that the debt ceiling should be raised without a commitment to alter, at least a little, our currently unsustainable fiscal course. And they certainly don’t mean the debt ceiling should be abolished.
But my more fundamental gripe is this: Where were these people who are upset about the debt-ceiling fight on the countless occasions when Congress ignored its own budgetary rules? Where was the indignation over irresponsible members of Congress keeping the government financed with awful omnibus bills or continuing resolutions?
Where were the outraged commentaries when Congress failed repeatedly, year after year, to operate under regular order? A few years ago, Brookings Institution economist William Gale published a book in which he wrote that “Congress designed (the current budget) process in 1974. Since then, in only four years has it passed all the appropriations bills for discretionary spending on time.” In other words, for decades congressional Republicans and Democrats failed to do their most basic job: passing a budget on time, according to the rules, and via annual appropriations approved by majorities of the House and the Senate.
These elected officials should be too embarrassed to show their faces in public, yet in fact almost no one cares. Newspapers should be full of stories about how Congress repeatedly fails to do its job, yet we almost never read such stories.
Adding insult to injury, close to 90 percent of the increase in U.S. government spending between 2008 and 2032 will be going to pay interest on the debt, as well as obligations under Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. With all of that spending now on autopilot, Congress can ignore the problem.
The bottom line is that the federal budget is a horrible mess, and Congress is to blame for it. Congress has behaved irresponsibly for years, but the only “irresponsibility” that reporters and commentators raise their voices (and keyboards) against are attempts to hold Congress to the debt-ceiling limit. These people are upset about the symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.
So to all those who are upset about the debt-ceiling drama, I say, “You know what will end debt-ceiling drama? Congress finally doing its job, following its own rules, while also refusing to spend an enormous amount of money they don’t have.”
So yeah, I am annoyed. You, too, should be annoyed.