US Politics: Don't Manchin the war...

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I just called both Senators and my Representative William Timmons.  I told their staffers this is horseshit and to vote affirmatively on stand alone bills.

[Gorn]

2 hours ago, Kaligator said:

ETA: also just saw the Sanders made up the 6T number thing - and let me be clear. The number was never a particularly serious or negotiated one. He never talked with anyone else about what was in it. He wasn't particularly serious about the breakdown of it either. The reason you can't find anything is because it was a pipe dream to start with and never meant to be serious. 

What exactly are you basing this on? Sanders is not some rando throwing out numbers from the sidelines, he's the chair of the Senate Budget Committee.

Quote

 

Where the $6 trillion figure came from. In their summary table, the Sanders staff had rearranged every Biden Administration proposal shown in Summary Table S-6 of the President’s budget message – all of the tax proposals, and all of the proposals that would increase non-appropriated spending (the spending classified as “mandatory”). The American Jobs Plan, the American Families Plan, and all of the odds and ends. The gross deficit impact of every single one of those Biden proposals (before counting the tax increase “pay-fors”) added together, would be $4.45 trillion of deficit increases over 10 years. The Sanders draft budget would add an extra $1.55 trillion in spending or tax breaks on top of that – $500 billion for Medicare expansion, $343 billion for climate change, $331 billion for affordable housing, $126 billion for extra immigration expenses, $120 billion for partial restoration of the SALT deduction, etc. The total gross deficit impact of all of the mandatory spending and tax proposals would be a $6 trillion increase above baseline, over 10 years.

Then, while the Biden budget proposed $3.6 trillion in tax increase pay-fors over 10 years, the Sanders draft budget reduces that to $3.2 billion. As a results, federal deficits over the next decade would be $1.9 trillion higher under the Sanders draft plan than under the Biden budget.

 

https://www.enotrans.org/article/the-sanders-6-trillion-budget-what-would-it-look-like/

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

but I do wonder if they're secretly ready to mint the platinum coin or do the 14th amendment section IV thing of just ignoring the ceiling.

Yellen has already ruled out both of these options (although obviously that could always change).  I think the most plausible unilateral solution is this one:

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4. Issuing quasi-debt while the crisis plays out

Steven Schwarcz, a professor at Duke Law and expert on capital markets, has proposed getting around the debt ceiling by having the Treasury Department create a “special-purpose entity” to issue new securities, distinct from traditional Treasury bonds, that can pay for government expenditures. Because they’re not Treasury bonds, these securities would not be subject to the debt limit.

This may seem bizarre, but Schwarcz got the idea from state and municipal finance in the US; many states raise most of their debt with special-purpose entities, rather than by directly issuing bonds, often so they can get around their own state debt limits.

As mentioned, this has precedent at the state level.  It's also not as, well, silly as the mint idea and not as..concerning as the president simply declaring a law unconstitutional.

Anyway, the Dems gave away their only leverage by avoiding a shutdown.  They know this, or at least should, so hopefully they're figuring out the best way to raise it on their own.  I imagine Schumer's holding the line on "no reconciliation" right now because the Senate has taken the vote on a clean bill yet (the House has).

What should be done is the Dems taking this opportunity to abolish the debt ceiling for good.  It's absurdly, dangerously dumb in the first place.  Of course, even if they tried, this may well be another thing Manchema would block.

[Fez]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Yellen has already ruled out both of these options (although obviously that could always change).  I think the most plausible unilateral solution is this one:

As mentioned, this has precedent at the state level.  It's also not as, well, silly as the mint idea and not as..concerning as the president simply declaring a law unconstitutional.

Anyway, the Dems gave away their only leverage by avoiding a shutdown.  They know this, or at least should, so hopefully they're figuring out the best way to raise it on their own.  I imagine Schumer's holding the line on "no reconciliation" right now because the Senate has taken the vote on a clean bill yet (the House has).

What should be done is the Dems taking this opportunity to abolish the debt ceiling for good.  It's absurdly, dangerously dumb in the first place.  Of course, even if they tried, this may well be another thing Manchema would block.

Well, Yellen has publicly ruled them out, but who knows what's being said privately? There's also the issue that possibly some computer systems can't process a US debt not being filled, so things might just automatically proceed as normal and it'll be on Treasury to figure out a legal justification. Special purpose entities sound fine to me on that front.

As for abolishing the ceiling entirely, I agree; though I suspect that doesn't pass muster under reconciliation rules. But they could just raise it by $100 quintillion or something like that, so it effectively is abolished.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Fez said:

Well, Yellen has publicly ruled them out, but who knows what's being said privately?

Agreed, that's why I said that could always change.  That being said, I just don't see those options as particularly plausible.  I remember them being bandied about during the Obama administration and I never took the mint idea seriously and, again, the 14th amendment solution is not a good precedent to make.  

3 minutes ago, Fez said:

But they could just raise it by $100 quintillion or something like that

Right.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

This is stupid raise the damn ceiling.  Wasn’t the debt ceiling tied into one of the big bills?  Isn’t avoiding default a political positive?

They need to just do away with the entire concept. I don't think any other major country has something even remotely comparable to it. 

[Zorral]

Biggest hack to date of FB, etc.

 

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I don't think any other major country has something even remotely comparable to it. 

Quick, can you name another country with a debt ceiling? It's hard:

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At least one other nation does have a debt ceiling: Denmark.  

Lisbeth Pedersen, an economist at the Danish National Centre for Social Research in Copenhagen, says Denmark is different, though. “In Denmark, we never hit the ceiling."

She says the reason is that Denmark sets it high.

“You really have to do something stupid to hit the debt ceiling,” says Pedersen.

In other words, it’s kind of an emergency check on Danish lawmakers, not a bi-annual fight, as it has become in the US.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

18 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Biggest hack to date of FB, etc.

 

Is this why Facebook has been down since 11:30 AM EDT?