Shut 'em Down!

You gave no good reason except to say TEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTYTEAPARTY. The average American will not see things thru the same hateful eyes that you do.

No, I gave a very thorough explanation of why this course is complete horsecrap and what even the average non-political person on the street is thinking... Guess how I know that? I live in a very conservative area and I go outside and talk to people.

The public is pissed, and they're not pissed at the senate.

I hope you and your crazy friends will quietly return to the shadows on the fringe where you belong, and the US can move on from this brief experiment with staffing congress with toddlers.

Actually, I'll rescind what I said a bit. There are going to be people who will fall for this false equivalency. It's repeated in the media as "Gridlock!" or "Both sides can't agree!" and I see it on my Facebook feed from twits repeating the both-sides-are-equally-bad schlock.

The blame for this idiotic political theater production lies solely on the people who felt it was necessary to tie their demands to a routine budgetary vote. It is not an acceptable way of governing. Can you imagine the national outcry if House Democrats wanted to amend the debt ceiling vote to include harshER restrictions on gun ownership? What makes this all even stupider is that it has accomplished ***-all with regards to Obamacare.

AND WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE PANDA-CAM

Why is Boehner wasting time passing piecemeal legislation doomed to failure when he has enough votes to pass the clean budget? That makes no sense.

I hope government stays shuttered. At least it may make good on Obama's old promise to gut governmental programs and reduce the deficit by half.

BURNING QUESTION: What will be up and running smoothly first: GTAV Online, or the US Gov't? Sound off!

It's pretty simple unfortunately. Boehner needs to have the 40 odd votes from the teaparty to remain speaker. If he doesn't play chicken then he loses his speakership. Boehner himeself isn't that twisted, he just has to act like he is.

Specifically to the piecemeal approach, he's trying to save his party from the brunt of the blame while satisfying the tea party. He's trying to pass provisions for programs that are highly visible so they get funded and people don't feel the hurt of the shutdown as much. That way they can drag out the shutdown with less risk of the Republicans eating the total blame. I guess on the other side they figure it looks like they're holding out an olive branch by offering "compromise" as well, if you buy that, so they may convince some people that the Dems won't compromise.

It's looking like parliamentary style politics when winning parties have to make strange coalitions with parties and add weird provisions to bills to satisfy smaller parties they're allied with to form a government.

If Boehner expects to keep his job he should probably focus on appeasing the larger group of Republicans in his caucus, and that is not the Tea Party.

It may eventually come to that (the sooner the better imo), but for now it's the TP that are most likely to defect.

I mean at the end of the day you have to be at least somewhat unhinged to threaten the full faith and credit of the US government. The effects of a default would be horrible, and are totally unavoidable. That's why until recently the debt limit was never an issue, because every rep knew that it was just something that had to be done.

I don't know if any TPier really would risk throwing the government over the edge, but really its bad enough as it is just to threaten it.

Where exactly would they go, lol. No one wants them.

That's the brilliance of the TP really, they've essentially formed a third party in a political machine that should run inevitably into two parties. Not only that, they've secured an disproportionate share of power out of it too.

Really its the fault of gerrymandering. The GOP decided they wanted to control the House and one way to do so was to create safe districts that are conservative bastions. Ironically some districts are now SO conservative that they are no longer safe districts. Republican incumbents are now threatened by people even further right than the mainstream.

They need to fix gerrymandering, federal districts shouldn't be drawn so that they're so conservative that the only option is the absurd right stances we've been getting. Democrats shouldn't be 100% safe either.

And the problem isn't at all that we have to keep raising the debt ceiling. Continuing on this path is economic death for America anyway. Massive debt destroys our full faith and credit as it's called. In 6 or 7 years when we are 30 trillion dollars in debt do you think our credit will be good? What is the daily interest on 30 trillion dollars?

It goes farther than gerrymandering, they have resorted to enacting laws to prevent more liberal and swing voters from even voting.

Even the most pescimistic CBO estimates project a maximum for 20 trillion by 2022. And that is based on current deficits, not the decrease from 2013's 585 billion dollars to 345 billion in 2014, and the mid 200's for the following several years. That means that not only will the national debt only increase by about 1.7 Trillion in the next 6-7 years, continued sequester and budget reform will drive that down even further. Some economists project surpluses as early as 2021.

Your numbers have no basis in reality.

did it even cross your mind that the daily interest on the national debt goes up if our credit rating is downgraded again thanks to the tea party's absolutely moronic symbolic flagwaving?

Edit: syntax

The debt limit has nothing to do with the deficit or the debt. Its an artificial construct. The government has already spent the money, but they are capped on how much cash they can acquire. The debt is already ours, its just not paid for.

The deficit and debt are both problems absolutely. But you don't fix your debt by defaulting, you fix it by creating a surplus and paying down your debt.

Defaulting would make it harder to pay the debt because 1) we would damage the economy so much that we'd generate less revenues from taxes 2) interest rate on already acquired debt would skyrocket meaning we'd owe even more money.

The time to debate what you want to eat is when you're ordering, not when you've already finished your meal and it's time to pay the bill.

The debt limit is just the process of shifting around who the creditor is. The debt is already acquired. Very simplistically, it's like taking out a loan to pay off your credit card bill. Your credit card goes to 0 and you owe the bank instead.

Can use that excuse forever. The government is unwilling to make even the most modest cuts to the growth in their baseline rubber stamp budgeting. Who are you kidding? If President Obama was a responsible steward of the economy I'd be there with him. But he has been using that tortured dinner analogy that you just used for five years.

Again, the deficit has nothing to do with the debt limit. I don't know how to make that more clear. Defaulting on obligations would just make it harder/impossible to close the deficit and pay off the debt.

Economically speaking its suicide.

Just because you look at facts and call them excuses doesn't make them less factual.

Don't even bother, he's intentionally ignoring facts, and nobody has an obligation to spoonfeed stupid people. That would be welfare!

Par for the course for him.

He understands, his teleprompter just broke and is now playing that last line over and over again. Incoming 7 more pages about how Obama uses his teleprompter more that amand does. Please burn thread, we are done here.

You two are just pathetic. Having a rational debate, not even with the two of you yet you constantly jump in just to troll me because you cannot debate reason. I have said nothing irrational or unsubstantiated. You follow me like puppies. Please go ahead and ignore me. You will be doing me a favor. You think 30 trillion dollars in debt will be a good idea apparently. I do not. I don't think most people would call me crazy for that.

You should abandon it. You have the weaker argument.

I just wanted to make it clear, because people really should be informed on how serious it is. There is nothing good that could come from defaulting, it won't fix the budget, it won't lower debt. It'll make everything worse by orders of magnitude.

Fixing the deficit and debt are both incredibly important. But defaulting is the most insane way possible to do that.

The congressional budget office releases very complete statistics and figures. Stop using that number, it's dead wrong. And the WORST estimates put the debt at half of that.

You can't make a rational debate when you ignore facts, even when someone literally puts your nose in them.

You have never come close to posting anything remotely accurate, instead posting nonsense and asking other people to do your work for you, good try playing the victim card tho, it was very cute. You clearly have no understanding of the debt ceiling debate despite it just being fully explained to you, so just give up. You would be doing yourself a favor.