This past Friday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. is projected to reach its borrowing limit next Thursday, January 19. Writing to Quiverin’ Qevin McCarthy (R-Oklafornia) and other congressional leaders, the Secretary said the Treasury Department will commence “extraordinary measures” starting next week in order to prevent a government default on its obligations.
The “extraordinary measures” can give the House time to find a bipartisan way to raise or suspend the debt limit. However, for months Republicans have said they plan to use the debt limit as a bargaining chip, once again attempting to take the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to achieve their policy objectives, such as they are
The day before, Quiverin’ Qevin stated to reporters, “We’ve got to change the way we’re spending money wastefully in this country. And we’re going to make sure that happens.”.
Ever since he was elected Speaker, the question has been what secret agreements he made with the terrorists in the Fweedumb Kawkuss to get them to support his becoming speaker. Shortly after Yellen’s announcement, one key condition of that agreement was revealed: Quiverin’ Qevin has agreed to pursue what the terrorists are calling “prioritization” as part of their plan to push for a debt default. Yes! As bad as they were the last time, they have now dialed Duh Crazy to 12 -they WANT to see the country default on its debt. They WANT to see the destruction of the U.S. economy. As South Carolina seditionist Representative Norman put it during the Speaker Circus, “I will give my support to McCarthy when he promises we will have a default.”
“Prioritization” means that the government would stop doing various functions - food and safety inspections, Medicaid reimbursements, road construction, school lunches, operation of air traffic control, maintaining border security - in order to prioritize making only debt interest payments and likely Social Security and the military. The argument the terrorists put forward is that there’s no need to default on the debt.
You default on the U.S. government.
The fact that this is impossible doesn’t matter to these seditionist scum. Just the prospect of a default resulting from Republican brinkmanship resulted in credit-rating agencies downgrading their rating for the government in 2011, increasing the cost to the government after the “fiscally conservative” crazies recognized they had shot themselves in the foot through payment of higher interest rates that only finally changed in recent years.
The basic problem with this “plan” is that the government isn’t technologically capable of paying some bills and not others “on the fly.” Every day, the government makes millions of payments - separating some to be paid and others to be denied is not possible. Doing so would not avoid the kind of financial crisis full default would. Finally, the only way this would happen would be for the House Krazies to write and pass enabling legislation allowing such “prioritization,” which was then passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed by President Biden.
This has been called an “emergency plan for breaching the debt limit.” It’s not; it can’t work. It’s not a plan to avoid default. It’s a plane to blame the White House for the federal debt default and the ensuing financial crisis for not passing such legislation after default happens, to protect the seditionists of the Fweedumb Kawkuss from being held up for blame for their act of treason. They want to be able to say, “We offered this plan and you rejected it so obviously this is on you.”
What’s really important about discovering McCarthy’s treasonous agreement is that is proves the House Republicans are not simply talking about threatening a default, a clearly unconstitutional act in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The existence of this agreement is proof they are serious about actually forcing a default.
The House Seditionists got the spineless, conscienceless Quiverin’ Qevin McCarthy to agree to put in place a messaging plan that assumes they will force the country into default.
How serious would this be? Last year, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi predicted that a default “would wipe out as many as 6 million jobs and erase $15 trillion in household wealth.”
That’s pretty damned serious.
So, since Quiverin’ Qevin is signed on to this act of treason, and even if he wasn’t doesn’t have the power, skill or ability to lead his caucus to avoid catastrophe, since any promise he might make to the Senate or the White House would result in at least one of the Traitor calling a “motion to vacate” that would result in his being thrown out of the speakership because the rest of his caucus knows that 60 percent of Republican voters favor such a default and they are too cowardly to act in other than their own personal self interest - what can be done?
It turns out there are several actions the White House could take, under the President’s constitutional responsibility to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” None of them have ever been tried before, because there has never before been a collection of traitors in position to carry out this attack on the country.
The Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed in the wake of the first attempt by the Southern traitors to question the national debt, specifically states in Section 4 that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” “Shall not be questioned” does not mean “shall be paid most of the time unless you can score political points against the other party by not paying it.”
That constitutional text bars the federal government from defaulting on the debt. Not a little; not even for a short period of time. Never.
When this crisis game was played out in 2013, there were serious proposals that the President authorize the minting of a pure platinum coin valued at a trillion dollars that would be deposited with the Treasury, destroying the debt limit for at least a number of years, during which the fever might pass in the Republicans.
Up until 2011, when the first collection of Crazies formed the Republican House majority after the Tea Party election of 2010 and made good on the threat to shut down the government over the debt ceiling, the top congressional Republicans were, whatever else their their flaws, residents of what George Orwell called “the ordinary world where grass is green.” They understood that if Congress threw the U.S. economy against the wall, it was throwing the world economy against the wall. And things might not bounce back. With luck it would merely be a worldwide recession. More likely is the prospect of a worldwide depression that makes the Great Depression of the Thirties look like good times.
And now there is a serious majority of the majority party in the House, representing a majority of Republican voters, who don’t give a damn what happens.
In the run-up to the Civil War following his inauguration, President Lincoln ordered federal troops to refuse a writ of habeas corpus that had been issued by the chief justice of the Supreme Court in aid of a pro-treason politician. He later asked Congress what he should have done: “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”
In 1933–34, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the United States off the so-called gold standard using a combination of executive action and statutory change. This was done because Roosevelt had concluded that linking the dollar and gold was preventing a healthy inflation which might lift the nation out of the Depression. Many observers predicted the conservative, Republican-dominated Supreme Court would invalidate this. Roosevelt and his aides quietly prepared a message to the nation explaining why, as president, he would not be bound by an adverse decision by the Court. “To stand idly by and to permit the decision of the Supreme Court to be carried through to its logical, inescapable conclusion would so imperil the economic and political security of this nation that the legislative and executive officers of the Government must look beyond the narrow letter of contractual obligations, so that they may sustain the substance of the promise originally made in accord with the actual intention of the parties.”
Today’s conservative Supreme Court is not as reasonable as was the one Roosevelt faced.
If Congress decides to default, the president has the power and the obligation to pay it without congressional permission, even if that requires borrowing more money to do so. The result would be a constitutional crisis. Article I clearly states that the power of the purse to borrow and repay indebtedness are congressional, not executive, powers. A constitutional showdown may be preferable to an economic collapse.
If the President’s action was challenged in court as it most likely would be, it is reasonable to expect that in the face of such a crisis even the six traitors at the Supreme Court would hesitate to allow default to take place and take on the ultimate blame for the disaster themselves.
There is an action the Treasury could take which would only attract a legal challenge because the Republicans were upset over being outflanked, but the action isn’t illegal.
Using his constitutional authority to see that the laws are faithfully executed and that the constitution is preserved and protected, Biden can order the Treasury to continue funding the government.
With a small change.
Instead of selling a $100 Treasury Bond with a low interest rate for $100 dollars, the Treasury can offer a $100 T-bill with a high interest rate and see how much people would pay for them. With a high enough interest rate, buyers would pay more than $100 for such a bond. Thus, the Treasury could raise more than $100 though they only issued $100 worth of debt. And, since the debt ceiling caps the face value of the debt, this situation suggests the Treasury should continue to meet the nation’s financial obligations by changing the way it sells bonds to prevent the face value of the debt from growing too high.
How would it work? Matt Yglesias laid out the following:
The Treasury Department could basically flip the terms of the auction. Instead of saying “We want to borrow $100 for 10 years, how much interest will you demand to give us the money?” they would say “I have this nice juicy $100 bond for sale that pays a 27% interest rate, how much are you willing to pay for it?”
If the current yield on a ten-year treasury bond is 3.79%, then we would expect our new bond to sell for a market price that causes convergence with that yield. It turns out the $100 bond sale would raise $712 by the magic of fixing the interest rate before the auction rather than at the auction.
The Treasury could just as easily sell a $1 bond with a 2,700% interest rate and raise the $712 that way. This is the magic of the trick. Just as the government can sell high face-value bonds at low interest rates to raise a large sum of money, they can also sell tiny face-value bonds at high interest rates to raise the exact same sum of money.
The government sells a lot of short-term debt — 1-month, 2-month, 3-month, 4-month, and 6-month bonds — so there are always some fresh bonds coming due. By swapping out old bonds with high face values and low interest rates for equivalent-yielding bonds with low face values and high interest rates, the Treasury can not only slow the pace at which the face value of debt accumulates, it can start to reduce the face value of that debt. This should not only get around the debt ceiling issue — it should make it entirely irrelevant over time.
Whatever is done, the U.S. government policy of not negotiating with terrorists must be upheld. If the Republicans actually are stupid enough to push the country into default, then the resulting catastrophe must be hung around the neck of every Republican office holder and candidate in the country. Responsibility for the crisis must be clearly that of the Republican Party.
As one of their lesser lights is fond of saying this week, “let the voters decide.”
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I'm actually for minting the coin. But I'm also for suspending the writ of habeas corpus and saying anyone who helps the US default is guilty of treason, and jailing them. As Biden should have done on January 20, 2021.
I agree that we should not negotiate with these terrorists. They think they are participants in a reality tv show. Causing the US to default on its debt would have serious real world consequences. It might even damage the billionaires. These traitorous people should be in jail!