Uh oh, Americans — the Big Bad Debt Limit is coming for you (again)!
According to a letter from Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, sent to Congressional leadership on Monday, the federal government will reach the limit of its borrowing authority — which currently stands around $16 trillion — sometime in mid-October. The government would then be forced to fund itself using its daily income, or roughly $50 billion.
“Operating the government with no borrowing authority, and with only the cash on hand on a given day, would place the United States in an unacceptable position,” Lew wrote.
The Secretary implied that the government might not be able to fund military salaries and Medicare and Social Security payments.
Lew also points out, rather craftily, that raising the debt limit “does not increase government spending; it simply allows the Treasury to pay for expenditures Congress has previously approved.”
And while that is technically true, it misses the point of the debt limit entirely.
Those “previously approved” government expenditures — and therefore debt — grow automatically over time, mostly due to entitlement programs, as The Heritage Foundation has repeatedly pointed out. Without reform, the debt will keep increasing and Democrats will keep utilizing scare tactics in order to increase the debt limit indefinitely.
But the debt limit was originally intended to force Congress to reconsider its rampant spending and make much-needed reforms. Hitting the debt limit should mean lawmakers come together to reevaluate, to cut and, you know, to make choices — instead of putting off responsibility, burying their heads in the sand and making things that much worse a few months later when the debt limit comes back around again.
That, however, is apparently too much to ask.
So if you don’t like the same old partisan bickering, we suggest you tune out of all national news coverage until mid-October. Once Congress gets back in session at the end of this month, the debt limit is all anyone will be talking about until it’s ‘resolved’ — only to show up again a couple months down the road.
