> Throughout that time it has appropriated billions of dollars to keep the government running.
In no other country is it considered an accomplishment for a government to debate a budget, agree on it, pass it, spend it, and then three quarters of the way through the year refuse to pay for the spending it agreed on, manufacturing a crisis that sometimes gets resolved at the eleventh hour, and sometimes results in a multi-week disaster and government shutdown.
If a company had a department that ran that way, every single director and manager in it would be fired after the first time it happened. It has so far happened three times (Including once when the Republicans fully controlled congress), and has been threatened every year.
That’s what the debt ceiling arguments are about: members of Congress don’t want to take the heat for actually canceling something so they don’t remove it from the budget but then refuse to pay without some kind of token win for their campaign ads. The real debt problem is that you either need to restore taxes to pre-Bush levels or cut popular programs, but there’s no way to do either of those without being willing to negotiate and that’s currently politically untenable for one of the major parties.
In no other country is it considered an accomplishment for a government to debate a budget, agree on it, pass it, spend it, and then three quarters of the way through the year refuse to pay for the spending it agreed on, manufacturing a crisis that sometimes gets resolved at the eleventh hour, and sometimes results in a multi-week disaster and government shutdown.
If a company had a department that ran that way, every single director and manager in it would be fired after the first time it happened. It has so far happened three times (Including once when the Republicans fully controlled congress), and has been threatened every year.