Austan Goolsbee: Hitting Debt Ceiling Would Be 'First Default In History Caused Purely By Insanity'
Sam Stein
HuffPost
First Posted: 01- 2-11
NEW HAVEN -- There are, it seems, only two major issues that have a set time frame for political brinkmanship between the White House and Congressional Republicans. The Bush tax cuts will make for an interesting election-year dynamic when they expire in two years. Well before that, however, the president will have to persuade GOP leadership to ignore Tea Party insistence and allow for the country's debt ceiling to be raised.
That issue is set to come to a head this spring. So far the administration has been (or perhaps just expressed a sense of being) self-assured that the ceiling will be raised, but on Sunday its rhetoric was noticeably sharper.
Appearing on ABC's "This Week," Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, laid out the fairly alarming implications of the United States defaulting on its obligations while asking the question: What type of insanity would persuade us to do this?
"Well, look, it pains me that we would even be talking about this," he told co-host Jake Tapper. "This is not a game. You know, the debt ceiling is not something to toy with. If we hit the debt ceiling, that's essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. That would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008."
(More here.)
HuffPost
First Posted: 01- 2-11
NEW HAVEN -- There are, it seems, only two major issues that have a set time frame for political brinkmanship between the White House and Congressional Republicans. The Bush tax cuts will make for an interesting election-year dynamic when they expire in two years. Well before that, however, the president will have to persuade GOP leadership to ignore Tea Party insistence and allow for the country's debt ceiling to be raised.
That issue is set to come to a head this spring. So far the administration has been (or perhaps just expressed a sense of being) self-assured that the ceiling will be raised, but on Sunday its rhetoric was noticeably sharper.
Appearing on ABC's "This Week," Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, laid out the fairly alarming implications of the United States defaulting on its obligations while asking the question: What type of insanity would persuade us to do this?
"Well, look, it pains me that we would even be talking about this," he told co-host Jake Tapper. "This is not a game. You know, the debt ceiling is not something to toy with. If we hit the debt ceiling, that's essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. That would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008."
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
You don't have to worry about the debt ceiling, Mr Goolsbee, if you don't borrow any more money. Frankly, we've borrowed enough - so much that we have overpromised and overborrowed on what can legitimately be delivered. You can't just keep borrowing and borrowing and borrowing assuming there will be no problem in paying it back. We have borrowed so much at government, we are adversely affecting the ability of the private sector to to function properly so we can have the necessary economic growth to be able to fund our debt. Printing trillion dollar bills with Obama's picture on them is not paying back our debts.
We need to stop borrowing money. You don't need to be a PhD from the University of Chicago to figure his out.
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