America Hits Debt Ceiling; Treasury Raids Federal Pensions Funds

Hoh boy. We should have seen this coming. I didn't. I didn't read anyone predicting it.

The best solution, for conservatives and America, is to just spend less, of course.

But Democrats will never, ever do that.

So the first thing they do is raid the pension funds, because that's not current spending, and they figure that will be replaced.

Should have seen it coming. It's so liberal. Just keep borrowing and spending and taking money from one federal account to spend it for other purposes.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has warned for months that the government would soon hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling — a legal limit on how much it can borrow. With that limit reached Monday, Geithner is undertaking special measures in an effort to postpone the day when he will no longer have enough funds to pay all of the government’s bills.

Geithner, who has already suspended a program that helps state and local government manage their finances, will begin to borrow from retirement funds for federal workers. The measure won’t have an impact on retirees because the Treasury is legally required to reimburse the program.

The maneuver buys Geithner only a few months of time. If Congress does not vote by Aug. 2 to raise the debt limit, Geithner says the government is likely to default on some of its obligations...

Or we could just spend less, but of course that's not even a possibility.

There's a theory the liberals adopted in law. At some point it occurred to them that if the federal courts kept asserting power to interfere in state law, forcing them to be more liberal, than that same asserted power could be used against them one day, to force state law to become more conservative. Conservatives generally don't support that, as we don't think the federal government should overrule states generally, be we could support it. (Some do, actually.)

So, to avoid that possibility, they made up yet another double-standard "We can do this but you can't, just because" theory, called the "one-way ratchet theory." Like a one-way ratchet, courts can only overrule state legislatures in the direction of increasing liberality; the ratchet cannot go the other way, they say.

Because: ratchet.

Good to see the same sort of rule applies to the size of government and ever-growing mountain of government spending and debt.

I have to admit, liberals are at least consistent in their wild inconsistency.

posted by Ace at 03:18 PM

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