Hockett: The budget is its own debt ceiling.…Kake News
We don't need gimmick vs. gimmick when we have budget law
WOLF: What about the other ideas to get past the debt ceiling? Trillion dollar coins and such?
HOCKETT: The wonderful thing from my point of view here is we don't need any of those gimmicks. We just have a little garden-variety budget law on our side, and so we don't really have to resort to anything kind of unusual or surprising or gimmicky..…
A simple way Biden could stop this drama and ignore the debt limit
Zachary B. Wolf, CNN interviews Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell University who specializes in public finance and consults for the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
5 comments:
Are art degree lawyers too stupid to figure this out?
After so long going on with this same issue you have to assume so….
HOCKETT: Yes. It's not only artificial, but I think it's also legally invalid. The only reason we haven't heard that definitively from the courts yet is that both parties have benefited, I think, from the grandstanding opportunity that it affords them.
Politics has little to do with reality. Politics is about who wields power. So from the point of view of reality, it mostly kabuki.
The USA is the only country that does this “debt ceiling” dance -- i.e. the only country that separates a parliamentary vote on appropriations from a vote on paying for the appropriations. The US Congress votes on how much money to spend, and then Congress votes on whether to spend it.
It’s a silly political gimmick that both parties use when they are in the minority, and when they want to block spending on things favored by the majority.
Whenever Congress uses this political gimmick, the executive branch and the Federal Reserve resort to “extraordinary measures,” meaning they continue to create money out of thin air like they have done all along. Thus, the “crisis” is fake; a pretense. The drama is play-acting.
In 1979 Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Missouri) proposed doing away with the “debt limit” charade. Democrats had a majority in Congress, and they all agreed. Tip O'Neill was Speaker.
For the next 16 years there was no “debt limit” circus until Republicans re-imposed it when they took control of the House in Jan 1995.
If the US had a parliamentary system, you wouldn't see debt limit theater.
@ Konrad
Professor Hockett argues that when an appropriation bill is passed, and the budget is bunch of such appropriations, it's a done deal. It can only be undone by either repealing the prior legislation or amending it. The debt ceiling does not do this in his view of the law. I am of the same view. But he is a law professor and I am not a lawyer.
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