NewportBarGuy: edmo: [Fark user image 425x318]

Why do we even have a debt ceiling?

So, back in the Beforing Times, every bill included a provision allowing the Treasury to issue bonds to cover the cost of the bill.  And this was generally fine.  But, as the US got bigger and more complex, this became problematic.  Laws might incur long-term costs, or just go over-budget.  So, laws were having to be passed that were literally just authorization for issuing bonds for some other bill.  This all came to a head with the World Wars, as costs wildly exceeded the expectations of Congress when the bills were introduced.  It seems absurd now, but the US used to have a simply microscopic military compared to other industrial nations, so when we got involved in international buttfarkery, we were not conversant in what that level of militarization meant.

Between that and the more generalized problems with rising costs for laws, Congress decided to decouple raising money from individual laws.  But, since Congress is also Constitutionally-mandated to oversee the purse, they did not just let the Treasury have free rein, worried Presidents would just raise shiattons of cash and do whatever they wanted (not entirely unwarranted considering early-to-mid-20th century Presidents).  So, Congress would set some arbitrarily-high ceiling on what the Treasury could raise, pass laws without specific instructions, and let the Executive figure out the exact way how to use the money to cover the laws' requirements.  This was never going to be perfect, but it was seen as a way to keep the President under control without Congress having to micromanage costs.

However, it quickly became apparent this could be used to play whack-a-willy every time the cap was close to being met.  The party out of power would gnash their teeth and wail about how every dime ever spent since the beginning of time was pure waste and the sole and complete fault of the party in power.  The party in power would say the other side were lying sacks of shiat who wanted to unpatriotically destroy America just for the  raw funsies.  And then everyone would raise the cap, shake hands, and sing kumbaya.  Sometime around the Newt Gingrich era, the Republicans turned from performative jackholery to actual jackholery, actually waiting until the cap got reached and causing a real panic before relenting.  Except they get closer and closer every time - and they also started to just threaten full death even when they were the ones in power.  They've still passed increases, but it gets more worrisome each time.

In theory, Congress could just remove the debt ceiling and charge the Executive to issue bonds to pay the US's obligations.  But things have become so routine that the pantomime is considered something like Holy Writ instead of a budgeting hack from last century.