Going to work? As in benefit the country?
Or going to work, to make the Biden presidency look bad so he has someone to blame the failure on??
McConnell is a self-serving Republican ghoul.

Mitch will cave at the last minute as they always do. He’s simply delaying it to pander to the Republican voters that never agreed with all these Pandemic benefits. We desperately need the infrastructure bill but we really just can’t afford it, no matter who is in office. That’s just my opinion.

The debt ceiling was raised 74 times from March 1962 to May 2011,[12] including 18 times under Ronald Reagan, eight times under Bill Clinton, seven times under George W. Bush, and five times under Barack Obama. In practice, the debt ceiling has never been reduced, even though the public debt itself may have reduced.

Congress has raised the debt ceiling 14 times from 2001 to 2016. The debt ceiling was raised a total of 7 times (total increase of $5365bil) during Pres. Bush’s eight-year term and it was raised 11 times (as of 03/2015 a total increase of $6498bil) during Pres. Obama’s eight years in office. ~wiki~

What I got from his efforts are a political tactic. What has always happened in the past is that the Dems have wanted to raise the debt ceiling to support some pork bill and the Repubs have resisted but eventually give in. Then, if they complain later about the increased debt, the Dems can just say they (the Repubs) voted for it too.

Raising the debt ceiling has a lot of negative consequences. From a fiscal responsibility perspective it is very poor ownership of our budget. It’s the governmental version of the teenager writing checks and believing them to be good because there are still checks in the checkbook.

So what it looks like Mitch is doing is making the Dems own their choices without giving them the option of blaming the Repubs later for all the negative results. The Dems will have to push it through without any help from Repubs and will lose all the votes of those that believe this is not the right sort of thing for the country. Not to mention losing the support of all the others that are impacted by the negative aspects of the increased debt.

But let’s be honest about what the Dems are proposing. They are not proposing an increase in the debt ceiling, they are talking about eliminating the debt ceiling altogether. Oh they call it “indefinite suspension of the debt ceiling” but that is the same as saying we don’t have one. That way they can spend, spend, spend without ever having to go through justification again.

@seawulf575 While I get your point, in reference to my post about how many times it’s been raised and by whom, is there a reason to keep pretending Republicans have any more or less financial responsibility in regards to the debt ceiling than the Democrats?

All I’m saying is we may as well suspend it at this point since both parties know it has to happen and will continue to happen. Shrug.

@KNOWITALL I think you know I feel all our elected officials in Washington DC are fiscal idiots or fiscal criminals. But eventually even they have to recognize that at some point there is no going back until the country defaults. Right now the interest on the federal debt is about $562B for fiscal year 2021. We are at a point were we are already well past 130% of the GDP for our debt. At some point the dollar loses value in the world. It is conceivable that if that happens we could no longer be the reserve currency of the world. I saw one number that said our debt is now over $87000 per person in our country.

If we eliminate the debt ceiling, we are basically telling the world that we don’t care how much we owe and that we can just print more money. That doesn’t send a strong message of confidence to the rest of the world.

I think it is time for the politicians to be fiscally responsible. Stop supporting pork projects, only start new projects you can fund with existing funds, not with debt we don’t need. It is time for them to be responsible.

@seawulf Exactly, we know it, they know it, we know they know that we know. And nothing changes.

Don’t get me started on Turtle Mitch. Just, don’t.