The formal request gives both chambers 15 days to vote on whether to approve of the $1.2 trillion hike. The House plans to vote on this request on Jan. 18, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said.

In a letter to House and Senate leaders sent Thursday, the president informed the Congress that the federal government had come within $100 billion of the existing limit and that another increase is “required to meet existing commitments.” The boost will be the third and final increase to the ceiling under the debt-limit deal struck in August, and is intended to cover the government’s borrowing through the 2012 elections.

The United States reached the $15.194 trillion debt limit on Jan. 4, according to Treasury statements. Since that time, Treasury has employed the “extraordinary measure” of tapping into its Exchange Stabilization Fund to avoid exceeding the limit.

Read more at The Hill.

Communicating and visualizing a “trillion” of anything is difficult.  So let’s put a “trillion” in perspective.  According to CNBC.com:

This stack of cash - in $1 bills - would measure 67,866 miles, stretching approximately 2.72 times around the Earth’s equator.

If denominated in $100 bills, $1 trillion would be enough to fill 4.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, with a total volume of 398,000 cubic feet. For comparison, there is only about $625 billion worth of $100 bills currently in circulation, according to the US Treasury bulletin, which would fill about 2.8 Olympic swimming pools.

With Occupy Wall Street’s “redistribution” rhetoric running rampant, perhaps another way to illustrate the enormity of America’s trillions of new debt is this: even if the government were to confiscate the net worth of the entire Forbes 400 list of richest Americans–people who create hundreds of thousands of jobs, as well as spin-off jobs and businesses–their combined $1.5 trillion of wealth would barely cover the forthcoming $1.2 trillion debt-ceiling increase.

Still, despite the vastness of the nation’s debt crisis, as recently as this morning, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman dismissed “debt worriers” as being unduly influenced by “people who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation.”

In his piece titled “Nobody Understands Debt” (except, presumably, Mr. Krugman), Mr. Krugman explains that “the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit” reveals a level of economic ignorance and “misplaced focus.”   At the close of his article, Mr. Krugman begrudgingly acknowledges that the nation’s trillions in debt matter.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Perhaps Mr. Krugman would do well to walk around planet Earth 44.6 times (the length of our national debt in $1 bills) or go rustle up another 10 lists worth of Forbes 400 wealth creators (the equivalent of $15 trillion) to get a better sense of what all those patriotic “debt worriers” are so concerned about.

Here is a five-video playlist of the most watched videos of the the past year, including Remy’s Debt-Ceiling Rap, Peter Schiff at Occupy Wall Street, Anti-Semitic Protestor at Occupy LA, NYPD Cop Punches OWS protester, and Matt Damon Going Ballistic at DC’s Save Our Schools Rally.

The US government will hit its debt limit in the first week of January, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday, as it pointed to an imminent request for $1.2 trillion increase.

The government is expected to come within $100 billion of the current $15.2 trillion ceiling by the end of the year, Treasury Department officials said.

That effectively puts lawmakers on notice that they will have until mid-January to oppose a fresh increase.

But a reprise of the vicious political debates over the debt ceiling that brought the US to the brink of default over the summer is unlikely.

Congress agreed on July 31 to immediately increase the national debt by $400 billion, and then increase it in stages after that when necessary.

An increase can only be blocked if both the House of Representatives and the Senate pass measures opposing it.

Read more here.

The Tea Party has stopped President Barack Obama and the Democrats from bailing out profligate state governments, from passing new so-called “stimulus” spending, and from raising tax rates. It has even begun to win bipartisan support for major entitlement reform.

However, the Tea Party has failed thus far to stop the overall growth in the size and cost of government. It passed over a dozen bills that would accelerate economic growth and create new jobs, only to see those bills languish in Harry Reid’s Senate.

In both the debt ceiling and the payroll tax debates, the Tea Party saw its sensible bills rejected in favor of absurd compromises–then found itself being blamed for congressional gridlock.

The key to the Tea Party’s fortunes has been its relationship with the very establishment it dislikes. Where it has found common ground–for example, with House budget chair Paul Ryan–it has been able to promote its agenda of limited government. But when the Tea Party has clashed with Republican leaders–starting with key Senate races in 2010–Democrats have won by dividing conservatives from moderates, House from Senate.

The Obama camp is exultant about its political victory in the payroll tax debate. They do not care about the substance of the issue; if they did, they would worry that lower payroll taxes are gutting the Social Security system. They simply want to win–on any issue, at almost any cost.

As Democrat strategist (and convicted felon) Robert Creamer wrote today: “People follow–and vote–for winners….Human beings like to travel in packs.”

That remark, equating voters with animals, betrays the contempt Democrat leaders have for the American people–a contempt packaged more subtly in the misleading, divisive term “middle class.”

The United States is not a class-based society. Democrats adopted “middle class” to disguise redistributive tax-and-spend policies from the voters who had rejected them, in much the way that “progressive” came to replace the tainted “liberal.”

President Obama’s re-election campaign is largely based on contrived class warfare. His message has been amplified by a media that eagerly repeated the false “1%” meme of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tea Party, reading Madison instead of Marx, has lacked the language to respond. And the likely Republican presidential nominee, Gov. Mitt Romney, has simply capitulated to the Democrats’ “middle class” conceit.

American voters want an alternative, which is why Rep. Ron Paul’s rhetoric about liberty is winning support in Iowa, despite his controversial social views and his reprehensible foreign policy. Other candidates, who might have bridged the Tea Party-establishment divide, have abdicated not only the race, but the debate. Without clear leadership and strategy, the Tea Party may fail–and the country may pass the fiscal point of no return.

The Tea Party still needs leaders outside Washington, like Sarah Palin, to help carry its message. It should fight Obama’s class war, but on conservative terms, focusing on the “crony socialism” through which Obama enriches his friends at the expense of broader economic growth. That strategy will appeal to voters–and will encourage new leaders with the right political priorities to emerge from the establishment’s shadow.

The latest Obama plan “doesn’t produce any more in realistic savings than the plan they offered in April,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “They’ve filled in details, repackaged it and replaced one gimmick with another. They don’t even stabilize the debt. This is just not enough.”

The most disheartening development, MacGuineas and others said, is Obama’s decision to count $1.1 trillion in savings from the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan toward his debt-reduction total. Because Obama has no intention of continuing war spending at last year’s elevated levels, that $1.1 trillion would never have been spent.

Congressional Republicans are resisting the move to count war savings toward deficit reduction. But congressional Democrats are preparing a major push to count such savings in the budget blueprint under development by a bipartisan joint committee on Capitol Hill.

The “supercommittee” is under orders to produce a 10-year plan to save at least $1.2 trillion by Thanksgiving. If the panel counts war savings, “then it’s over,” MacGuineas said. “The committee will have done nothing real.”

Obama’s proposals to overhaul the tax code, which were included in the deficit-reduction plan, drew criticism. In his previous budgets, he has measured his policies against a baseline that assumes a continuation of tax cuts for the middle class enacted under President George W. Bush; those cuts are scheduled to expire next year. Because Obama wants to extend the middle-class tax cuts, the assumption permits him to do so without appearing to make annual budget deficits worse.

This month, however, the White House began using a new baseline that assumes continuation of all the Bush-era tax cuts, including those for high earners as well as for the middle class. This approach, as one senior GOP aide put it, allows Obama to claim “fictitious savings” of $866 billion over the next decade by letting the tax cuts expire for high earners.

Read the whole thing here.

For nearly three years as Americans have struggled through this Great Recession, President Obama has given speeches that relied on failed Keynesian economic theory and the politics of class warfare and envy. As his big government policies have spent this nation to the brink, the employment picture continues to worsen.

Tonight, President Obama will deliver a major economic address before a Joint Session of Congress. The MacIver Institute expects it will be more of the same rhetoric and promotion of government solutions we’ve been hearing for the last 3 years.

The timing of the speech also conflicts with the pomp and circumstance surrounding the kickoff of the 2011 NFL season. As a Packers’ fan and in the spirit of public service, I directed our staff to comb through the hundreds of speeches President Obama has already made to give you a concise two-minute preview of his latest ‘big speech.’

You can watch this and not miss one second of Thursday’s football festivities as the 13-time World Champion Green Bay Packers begin their defense of their latest title.