Someone Explain This To Me

I don't get the Republican Congressmen saying that we won't default on August 2nd. Ok, so default actually means not paying our bond holders which doesn't need to happen on Tue. But it could also mean not paying our obligations (social security, medicare, military salaries, etc.) which should happen Tue or least soon. Sure there is some money to pay things and maybe we can last another week, does that really make a difference? Look if you think the deficit is a real big problem that has to be addressed right now, then you have to think that we don't have the money we're spending, which means we don't money to pay our bills! How does this not make sense?

I've heard the above a few times and it grates on me. I just heard Tea Party Rep. Steve King (R-IA) repeating it on Hardball. The interview was ridiculous. He talked about voting no on the Boehner plan because it doesn't go far enough and "we give up on the Ryan budget if we do that". As I understand it the Ryan budget also requires a raise in the debt ceiling. He said our current trajectory is to have a $25 trillion debt in 10 years.

He said we've had 75 years of overspending and there's been a big acceleration by "this administration and the Pelosi congress." This is just ridiculous. The biggest contributors to the debt were the Bush tax cuts and never ending wars. The increases during the Obama administration have been one time stimulus measures and expenses due to the recession (unemployment payments) and there have been lower revenues because the economy has been in the toilet.

"We came within $168 billion of balancing this budget during the height of the Iraq war." As I remember, Bush never put the wars into the budget and always treated them as special spending authorizations. I'd have to check the budgets specifically but offhand I don't believe this figure at all. Though it's certainly the case that the economy was doing pretty well for most of Bush's term and Obama inherited the worst economy since the 30s.

"The president is messaging this to damage the markets." That's just deranged.

And the annoying thing, Michael Smerconish, the guest host on Hardball didn't challenge any of the above statements.

Ugh.

Fortunately I have plans for tonight and won't hear more of this crap.