Wildflowers have taken over a portion of our lawn, and, for me, that means leaving it alone until the blooms have passed. The grass will grow a little too tall, but the beauty of the blossoms is worth it.
Lest one discounts that and entertains the idea that it is simply laziness that keeps me from mowing that side hill, a closer look at the field of flowers shows them filled with butterflies and bees. With a trend of declining bee populations, anything that attracts bees is something to encourage. After all, nearly 75 percent of the major food crops, including fruits, vegetables, and nuts, depend on honey bees and other pollinators.
Aesthetic concerns combined with practicality suggest that compromise is warranted.
Some compromises are not pretty at all. They may not even be warranted. The debt ceiling compromise is the perfect example.
The popular understanding is that the debt ceiling is about limiting the amount of money the country can borrow but, in fact, it is a limit on how much the country can spend on debt service. In other words, it is about paying the bills on money already borrowed.
The debt ceiling was designed to allow the United States Treasury Department to sell Liberty Bonds — loans to the government to help pay for wartime military operations. Before 1917, the U.S. government needed Congressional permission each time it borrowed money, so during World War I, Congress established the debt ceiling to give the Treasury the flexibility to raise money for the war effort.
(It is interesting to note that the first Liberty Bonds offered an interest rate of 3.5%, which was lower than most savings accounts paid at that time. The bonds’ interest rate gradually increased to 4.25% to make them more attractive investments, although the main selling point was to show patriotic support for the country.)
Paying the country’s debt has nothing to do with future spending. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution made it clear that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
The main focus of the Fourteenth Amendment was to prevent any state from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” However, it also was aimed at attempts to repay the $2.5 billion Civil War debt in greenbacks, the nation’s first national currency, rather than gold. Congress was printing more and more of the currency to pay its expenses, making their value decrease, so those who had taken out the bonds wanted to make sure they were repaid in gold. The answer by the Lincoln Republicans who instituted the bond sales to pay war expenses was the Fourteenth Amendment.
With all that in mind, raising the debt ceiling is a constitutionally guaranteed obligation that should be only a formality.
Today’s Republican Party has successfully convinced enough people that the debt ceiling is about future spending that 60 percent of Americans now support linking the raising of the debt ceiling to budget discussions. President Joe Biden Jr. has insisted that debt ceiling discussions are separate from budget discussions — until this past weekend.
Under the compromise he and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy worked out, the country will pay its debts for two years, while limiting future spending — a discussion that should be separate. After all, it is during budget discussions that future debt is created. If Congress wants to limit future spending, that is where it happens.
The compromise agreement blurs that distinction. It also imposes work requirements for low-income people on food stamps while preserving tax breaks for the wealthy and cutting back on funding for the Internal Revenue Service to seek out tax cheats.
If passed by Congress, the compromise means that, in two years’ time — after the 2024 election — the country would face another debt ceiling debate with Republicans holding a stronger hand because of their success in holding the nation hostage in this year’s negotiations. The advances in bringing people out of poverty in the early years of the Biden Administration, already partially reversed by the Federal Reserve’s emphasis on putting people out of work in order to reduce inflation, will be further eroded, while the wealthy will be allowed to continue evading taxes.
Biden appears to have abandoned the Constitution in order to appease the party that already is doing its best to tear the country down. However, perhaps he sees it as being a necessary step to avoid putting the United States in a worse position, since defaulting on the pledge to honor the nations’s debts would be more devastating. It may seem to be bad deal, but the New York Times paints it as a victory for Biden, too.
“The caps would not actually reduce spending,” The Times points out, “but aim to make it grow more slowly than inflation and the economy. This arrangement lets both sides claim a win of sorts: Republicans can call it a spending cut, since spending will grow more slowly than it might have otherwise. And Democrats can say they prevented actual cuts. The deal would also claw back some of the funds previously allocated to the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on rich tax cheats. Under the deal, some of the I.R.S. funds could be used to mitigate other spending cuts.”
Of course, it’s not a done deal. The compromise agreement has to go before the full Congress, where extremist Republicans oppose any compromise, and Democrats view it as unnecessary capitulation. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has proposed a parliamentary maneuver to force the House to consider a debt ceiling increase without spending cuts, and he has 213 of the 218 signatures necessary to force a vote to approve that legislation. All it would take, he said, is “five reasonable Republicans to end this madness”.
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