Monday , 14 October 2024

The Debt Ceiling Concept: It’s Origins & Why It’s Now A Dumb Idea

America was once the world’s model democracy. Now it’s a global laughingstockdebt-ceiling with a government that can’t keep the lights on and is threatening to renege on its debts. How did this happen?

So writes Rick Newman (finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/) in edited excerpts from his original article entitled Here’s Why We Have a Debt Ceiling in the First Place.

[The following is presented by Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.munKNEE.com and the FREE Market Intelligence Report newsletter (sample here). The excerpts may have been edited ([ ]), abridged (…) and/or reformatted (some sub-titles and bold/italics emphases) for the sake of clarity and brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. This paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright infringement.]

Newman goes on to say in further edited excerpts:

The Debt Ceiling – It’s Origins

…[T]he seeds of the latest fiscal smack down were sown almost a century ago when Washington needed to raise a lot of money fast to finance World War I. In 1917, when Congress enacted new limits on the amount of debt the U.S. government could issue – a “debt ceiling”. It made federal spending easier, not harder, because it eliminated the need for Congress to approve every debt issuance one by one.

The Debt Ceiling Approach is a Dumb Idea!

If the U.S. budgeting process seems uniquely chaotic, well, it is. “Not one single advanced country has taken this approach,” says John Blake, chief equity strategist for Zacks Investment Research. “If you’re the only one in class with this idea, and nobody else takes it up after years and years, it’s fair to conclude it’s a dumb idea.”

There are two basic oddities of the U.S. budgeting process that other countries don’t have to grapple with:

  1. Congress approves spending bills without always approving the funding needed to cover the spending, like an impulsive shopper who buys stuff at the mall without having cash at the bank to pay the bills. Since Congress routinely approves more spending than the government can pay for with tax revenue alone, it’s a given that the government will have to borrow money every year by issuing Treasury securities, and that the total amount of federal debt will inevitably rise. In that way, Congress is now arguing with itself over whether to pay bills it has already incurred.
  2. Governments of most other advanced countries include the authorization for borrowing, if necessary, in spending bills passed by the legislature so there’s no need to raise borrowing limits months after bills that require more borrowing actually pass. Congress, by contrast, repeatedly sets up confrontations over the debt ceiling by approving spending levels that necessitate the additional borrowing Congressional Republicans are now protesting.

Some Better Alternatives?

Many nations do put limits on the amount of debt the government can take on, but it’s usually expressed as a percentage of GDP rather than a fixed amount of money. That allows cumulative borrowing to rise without limit, as long as it’s proportionate to economic output. The 27 nations that belong to the European Union, for instance, target total debt levels to no greater than 60% of GDP, along with annual deficits that are no greater than 3% of GDP.

Some countries have obviously exceeded those targets, including Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and of course Greece. That highlights the difficulty Europe has enforcing its rules for government borrowing. Still, no European nation—not even Greece—has threatened to default on its debt simply because politicians disagree on basic policy issues, as the U.S. Congress has done. In 2011, the Government Accounting Office examined budget practices in several other countries including Canada, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand, and concluded that “the United States is unusual in using the authorization of additional borrowing authority as an occasion to draw attention to past fiscal policy decisions.”

There was once a nifty way around repeated debt-ceiling standoffs. Starting in 1980, the so-called “Gephardt Rule,” named after Democratic Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, allowed de facto increases in the debt ceiling to match the amount of spending Congress approved in a given year. That meant no second vote on raising the debt limit would be needed once a federal budget had been passed. The rule tamped down budget disputes for 15 years but was revoked after Republicans captured the House of Representatives in 1994. Some budget watchers think it should be restored.

Congress could also do away with the debt limit altogether, since it’s not required by the Constitution or it could give the Treasury Department more authority to do whatever is necessary to pay the nation’s bills.

Conclusion

What’s more likely, however, is [that Congress will pass] a series of temporary increases in the debt limit that allow more federal borrowing but also guarantee we’ll fight familiar battles many times in the future—and provide other nations continual reminders of how not to run a country.

[Editor’s Note: The author’s views and conclusions in the above article are unaltered and no personal comments have been included to maintain the integrity of the original post. Furthermore, the views, conclusions and any recommendations offered in this article are not to be construed as an endorsement of such by the editor.]

 

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