debt? remember, if those who have had the foresight, we have been in difficulty for more than 30 months. if you didn t lay money aside. i suspect what this ended up being was a two week paid vacation. they come back and get paid for the time they did not work and that is not a big loss, but you talked about the kids. if you think about this, we are going to blow past the $17 trillion debt line. if you think whether or not the right answer is to cut spending and change entitlements, everybody agrees that we are headed towards disaster and the fact that you could go through a moment like this and subject the american people to so much worry and concern and pain, through all of this, and get to the other side and for the president
handled differently than the other bills, so you might be able to separate that a little bit, but you can t separate the rest like you talked about. there are questions about the technical ability, about the legal authority, and then about simply what do they want to do. do you really not want to pay a social security payment so you can pay interest to the chinese? and the whole thing is while all you re doing is empowering the executive in the supreme way at the same time you re accusing barack obama of being a tyrant, saying he s picking and choosing political targets to impose the most pain in the political shutdown, you re also saying i hand over to the executive, the white house, the president and the treasury the ability to choose who gets paid and who doesn t. that s true, and there s also another important point, which is you can default by means other than simply not paying your interest. in other words, if you don t pay your interest on your home mortgage, yes, you re in
handled differently than the other bills, so you might be able to separate that a little bit, but you can t separate the rest like you talked about. there are questions about the technical ability, about the legal authority, and then about simply what do they want to do. do you really not want to pay a social security payment so you can pay interest to the chinese? and the whole thing is while all you re doing is empowering the executive in the supreme way at the same time you re accusing barack obama of being a tyrant, saying he s picking and choosing political targets to impose the most pain in the political shutdown, you re also saying i hand over to the executive, the white house, the president and the treasury the ability to choose who gets paid and who doesn t. that s true, and there s also another important point, which is you can default by means other than simply not paying your interest. in other words, if you don t pay your interest on your home mortgage, yes, you re in
that could put you in bankruptcy just as surely. so, either way you look at it, the treasury simply doesn t have enough money without borrowing. okay, so how should we think about the debt line? october 16th is when the treasury says extraordinary measures, we run out. you say it won t be probably until october 23rd that we actually literally go into default. i guess the question is, what do we look for? what happens? when we had the shutdown, we had the countdown clock because there was a statutory moment at which authority for the government to spend money ran out. how should we think about the countdown that we re engaged in this week? there s not as easy a way to count this one down, because i don t even think, frankly, as you point out, treasury knows from day to day exactly when the day is going to come. the point is, we re playing with fire. and so you can keep a safe distance from the fire, which is what we ve been doing, and even until october 17th, we re a safe distance f
another debt line coming in in about two months according to timothy geithner and that is the increase in the debt ceiling. the republicans hold most of the leverage because they can at least threat ton send the country into default unless there are serious and major spending cuts. at that point does this obama victory perhaps look a little different? the question is are they going to want to do what they did last time with the debt ceiling which ultimately caused us to have a downgrade of our economy. i think it is a bit of bluffing. i don t think they really rant to do that. in terms of the president winning, he has won, though, he is going to catch a lot of grief as byron was alluding to from the left for if he goes up to $400,000 for example. they think he should stick at 250. they don t want any kind of social security cuts and that is on the table right now apparently in the new deal. in that sense he will catch