For weeks, we have been treated to comic opera in D.C.’s theater of the politically and economically absurd. On the stage, the actors—President Obama, the Secretary of the Treasury, congressional leaders—hop about, shouting moronic lines about the national “default” that will occur unless the government’s statutory debt limit is raised, reciting Chicken Little lines about how such a default will trigger worldwide economic catastrophe. According to a report in the July 5th issue of the Christian Science Monitor,

Facing an Aug. 2 deadline, Congress and the White House are stepping up face time to avert what the Treasury Department has called “catastrophic economic and market consequences” of a default on the national debt.

Think about this statement. Have governments defaulted in the past? Of course, they have, on hundreds of occasions over the centuries. Have these defaults triggered “catastrophic economic and market consequences”? No. When a government defaults, there are consequences, of course, including heightened reluctance of lenders to lend to the deadbeat government in the future or at least to lend at such favorable interest rates. Often partial payments of principal and interest are arranged or debts are restructured. The world keeps spinning.

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Seeking to make virtue out of vice, the political Left has launched a desperate, devious and dangerous ploy to prevent the spending cuts that the public demands.

They are laying the groundwork for President Obama to bypass negotiations and to ignore the $14.3-trillion statutory ceiling on federal debt.  They want him to instruct the Treasury to borrow whatever it needs to satisfy grandiose spending designs, by claiming that the borrowing limit is unconstitutional.

If this happened, it would add a constitutional predicament to our economic crisis.  And it would worsen our economic problems.

The Left bases their plan on a dangerous misreading of the 14^th Amendment.  They employ deceptive rhetoric to depict the big spenders as the saviors of the Constitution.  They claim it’s the Constitutional remedy to protect our economy from the supposed alternative Armageddon’s of defaulting on debt or devastating reductions in spending.

The Left adds that this also would save us from the evil Republicans who won’t go along with job-killing tax hikes.

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With the Federal government scheduled to shut down on April 8, Congress is not only debating where to spend trillions of dollars in the next fiscal year, but also whether to raise the roof, i.e. the debt ceiling.  The debt ceiling simply represents a cap on the total debt the U.S. government can hold, and it is currently set at a whopping $14.294 trillion.  Though the resolution for this limit was signed a mere year ago, we are quickly approaching the limit and should reach it sometime in the first week of April.  Keep in perspective that it would take more than 31,000 years of earning $1 a day to make a measly $1 trillion of the total debt. The government has added to the total debt every year since 1960 (except for two years).  Worse yet, it has added over $5 trillion in the past three and a half years alone.  Wouldn’t common sense indicate that there’s little room to borrow more?  Apparently not.

The reality is that many lawmakers want to “stabilize the debt” by increasing the debt ceiling.  Of course, you can’t stabilize trillions of dollars.  So essentially, the government ends up selling more bonds just to pay interest on the national debt and pay for new spending.  What’s a few more hundred billion when you already owe several trillion?

Often, to explain how we must increase the debt ceiling, government plays on one major fear – the fear of U.S. default.  Those in support of raising the debt ceiling argue that if it’s not increased the government will not be able to meet obligations.  They essentially say the country will go bankrupt.  To prevent this very issue, the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times since March 1963.  The problem with this rationale is that it’s like urging a boat to take on more water to keep it from sinking.  Imagine meeting with your financial planner and hearing him say, “In these tough financial times I recommend you add to your debt in order to stay solvent.”  I hope you would quickly find a new financial planner.

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Today, the State of Georgia welcomes Vice President Joe Biden for an update on the administration’s so-called stimulus bill. With national unemployment sitting today at 10%, and worse in Georgia, the White House’s credibility on stimulus success is dubious at best. Yet as proper manners would dictate, we owe the Vice President an opportunity to make his case.

President Obama tapped Mr. Biden to oversee the stimulus program because, as he put it, “nobody messes with Joe.”  While that may be so, as the Vice President has been traveling around the nation touting the various spending priorities of the stimulus bill, their alleged benefits have yet to materialize into jobs.  So if the Vice President is visiting to have us believe expanding broadband is how jobs are created or that we can “weatherize” our way back to prosperity, it may be Joe who is messing with Georgia.

It’s actually quite telling that the Vice President is visiting us to discuss the stimulus package on the same day that President Obama is setting off for Copenhagen to promote a job-killing National Energy Tax as a means to combat global warming. Because what was evident in the stimulus package, and has been reinforced through subsequent actions, is that this administration places a higher premium on its social goals than on putting people back to work.

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