Raising the U.S debt limit. Defaulting?

There is no way the Congress will not vote to enlarge the debt ceiling. Why do you think Obama was wining and dinning the Chinese president. The Chinese president was over here in the US so we can beg for a couple of trillion dollars to prop up the government for another year. However we are past the point of ever being able to pay back the loans… I read a bit of scary information on http://www.howlongolord.com/?p concerning the additions to the healthcare bill of a detainment force to be used in the event of an economic collapse... The establishment of a constabulary force should worry everyone...Also Unified Quest 2011!!!

Decades ago congress set a national debt limit to encourage itself to hold down deficit spending and/or to make it look like they cared about building horrendous debt for citizens to pay later. It was always a joke. I remember a limit of $500 billion. It's almost thirty times that now after raising the limit numerous times.

Once again the piles of poop in Washington are feeding us a lot of it. The ones who want to squander a lot more buying votes fraudulently use "default" for "delay" to scare people into pressing to raise the limit. If the Budget isn't passed, payments will be delayed, not defaulted.

When the debt, now increasing at a trillion dollars a year, reaches the level we can no longer even pay the interest on it, or repay people who are surrendering the debt bonds they hold, that's defaulting.

Failing to raise the debt limit does not mean default. Default happens when you stop paying on your debts. The government is still going to be collecting taxes whether the debt ceiling gets raised or not. That's around $200 billion per month of income. Servicing the debt only costs $40 billion per month. Secretaryboy Geitner has the option to spend that $200 billion dollars as he sees fit. He would have to intentionally choose to default on the debt for that to happen.

Raising the debt limit just means we're able to sell additional treasury securities. Lately this has been somewhere around $140 billion per month.

Each individual debt instrument will get paid off on schedule. Increasing the amount of debt we have means it'll take longer to eventually get it all paid off. But we wont ever get it paid off still we start to get it paid off. The way we start to get it paid off is to stop digging ourselves into a deeper hole.

I'm sorry, but this is a full crisis of the system that America has built after the 41-45 years war.

True, it will have to pay for all the countries on Earth. This is American-style democracy :-)

we won't default on our obligations, have our credit rating hurt, and be worse off then we currently are. we need to cut spending, we need to increase revenue, duh. but we can't just default on our obligations.