Today’s dedication is for the U.S. Congress: “Pop a Top,” by Jim Ed Brown.
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The House of Representatives, as expected, voted today to raise the government’s debt limit — by a whopping $1.9 trillion. That’s not the total, but just the increase in the limit.
Senators approved the increase last week.
The increase raises the overall federal debt limit to $14.3 trillion. That would make our national debt — that’s expenses beyond those covered by the value of all revenue, goods and services produced in this country — more than $46,000 for every U.S. citizen.
We’re certainly not the first to ask why the government should bother to have a limit on its debt, if it never thinks twice about raising the limit. The answer, of course, is that it never was supposed to spend more than it had.
Like many state and local governments, including Texas’, the federal government has laws requiring that it maintain balanced budget. Expenditures should never exceed revenues. The federal law was the Anti Deficiency Act of 1870.
Balancing the budget was easier to do when governments honored their statutory restrictions and didn’t meddle too much in our lives. The people determined their own fortunes, and the government acted more as a guarantor and protector of their rights and freedoms. That’s all it was designed and intended to do.
The original bill to run a negative federal balance came nearly a century ago when President Wilson and Congress wanted to fund U.S. involvement in World War I. As with practically all legislation, however, this breached the fiscal dam, and the money has spilled our almost every year since. Now that they can simply keep raising the debt limit at will, lawmakers have little problem borrowing and printing all the money they need to buy votes and stay in office.
Lawmakers for years made a lot of political hay by touting passage of the Gramm-Rudman–Hollings deficit reduction act of 1985. The law sought to force deficit reductions every year until reaching a balanced budget by 1991, although its provisions were routinely waived. Actual budget reduction guidelines weren’t adopted until 1990, but they were overwritten a year later.
By the way, the “out of control” federal budget deficit in 1986, the first year that Gramm-Rudman applied, was $174 billion, less than one-tenth of the increase the House just approved.
It’s worth noting that even Gramm-Rudman was an attachment to a bill that — you guessed it — raised the debt limit.
Of course, there’s only one way to cut budget deficits, and that’s to cut programs — programs the government should never have created in the first place. Sadly, the American people have become accustomed to handouts, and usually vote for candidates who promise the most giveaways. They conveniently forget that they’re paying for them with their taxes.











