House Republicans are moving forward with plans to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $4 trillion as part of a larger plan to advance President Trump’s tax agenda.
House Republicans are moving forward with plans to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $4 trillion as part of a larger plan to advance President Trump’s tax agenda.
The debt ceiling has always been used by Republicans to pressure Democrats into further concessions that would otherwise not have been needed to give. Remember, the debt ceiling is just an extra hurdle towards spending money that was already appropriated by Congress. So Congress as a whole voted to spend all that money and thus a certain amount of debt. The CBO can calculate exactly how much something will cost, so if you’re worried about what tax cuts/spending would do to the debt, you can always find out. There’s no need to have an additional thing on top of that that can randomly shut down the government.
The debt ceiling is used that way by Republicans for the most part. They don’t want to increase taxes even for corporations, but they try to force a budget resolution by cutting spending when there really is only so much you can cut without hurting people.
The debt ceiling is a reminder that there is a cost to the money we spend, I personally believe we are still far from it being an issue but we should be increasing taxes to properly allocate money for spending. Ideally you want to collect more than you spend, but some instances it makes sense to go into a steeper debt to get those tangible benefits I mentioned.
Really a shutdown should trigger elections because it just shows that the governing body can’t do their jobs.
Exactly! The Democrats can’t use the debt ceiling, because shutting down the government hurts their constituency more. So it’s a loaded gun that can only be used by Republicans, and whenever Democrats are in a position to do something about it, they don’t. Same with the filibuster, BTW.
This has basically been my experience as a Democrat-voter for years. “Our guys finally made it in, now we’ll finally see those changes they’ve been talking about” followed by crickets for 4 years 😬
Yep, so many examples of Democrats not doing the thing they could’ve done when they had the power. Putting Trump in prison (by not hiring a Republican as AG), codifying Roe v. Wade, replacing Supreme Court justices before they die, abolishing the filibuster, getting rid of the debt ceiling, …
And they always point their little finger when people give up on them, even though the facts are that democrats are either just putting up a puppet show where they’re always a vote short for something, or they’re incompetent.
This last election had shown that it wasn’t so much Trump that won, the Democrats lost because too many people stayed home because they’re sick of their games.
“If the democrats got a magic lamp and three wishes, they’d negotiate it down to one wish, and then use that to wish for something they think the republicans would want.”
We are 100% on the same page 🥂
I still don’t think increasing the country’s debt should be the first choice, increasing taxes should be the first choice when the spending bill shows we would be spending more than we would be taking in. I’m not sure if they can show they want to increase taxes at the same time on that bill in not, but increasing taxes to cover the additional spending is important.
I do agree that the country even being able to be shut down is a major problem. I would say a shut down does hurt Republican voters more, but Democrat politicians care about their constituents.
It really doesn’t make a ton of sense for either party to get rid of the filibuster at this current point in time. If Democrats won big in 2024 then I believe they should have gotten rid of the filibuster, but they didn’t win big. They needed to win the swing states and at least gain an extra seat or two in the Senate but that didn’t happen. They could have expanded the House under such a situation so it is really unfortunate that did not occur. The main hope now is for Democrats to pick up seats in the midterms and in 2028 to try to make up some of the losses.
Really, anyone that wants to see positive change stick should consider moving to purple states and purple districts from their deep red state/deep blue states. If the swing states became solid blue states then we would have a much easier time passing legislation that is beneficial.