Raising The American Debt Ceiling

While some talk of the distraction of Obama's pulling out of Afghanistan, I ask:

If Conservative/GOP members get their way and the debt ceiling is not raised, will there be actual and immediate chaos?

From Reuters:

The CBO report found that public debt will exceed the size of the economy by 2021 unless lawmakers raise taxes or scale back benefits.

Republicans say they will not consider tax increases, while Democrats have said they won't back cuts to expensive health care benefit programs.

The group aims to reduce budget deficits by $4 trillion over the next 10 years to give lawmakers the political cover to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by a large enough increment to cover borrowing needs through the 2012 elections.

Many in Congress do not want to focus on the issue longer than necessary. Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat involved in the talks, said a short-term fix was unlikely. "There will be an agreement," he said.

Investors say a temporary fix would likely cost the United States its coveted AAA credit rating, raising borrowing costs and hurting the fragile economic recovery.

Moody's main analyst for the United States Steven Hess told Reuters in an interview that a modest rise in the debt ceiling could be a sign that Washington's final budget agreement will not be enough to meaningfully cut the U.S. deficit.

I submit: it is way past time to draw a proverbial budgetary line in the sand.

I wrote about this on July 10th of 2010, where I submitted -- then -- that it was past time to create mayhem. In terms of stepping away from the Middle East, I postulated:

If we are not going to remove and ship oil from Iraq . . .

If we are not going to send Killer Squads into Pakistan to eliminate bin Laden . . .

If we are not going to kill five terrorists for every one soldier killed, and put their bleeding heads on sharpened sticks in public . . .

If we are not going to assault mosques and ventilate the Taliban and al Qaeda in what is, essentially, just another building . . .

If we are not going to tolerate collateral damage or casualties in any way . . .

If we demand perfection from our soldiers and expect lawlessness from our enemies, then prosecute our soldiers for being human . . .

Then we have committed ourselves to defeat and allowed our good men to die. And therefore, no more good men should die if we lack the political will to kill the enemy. Lots of people. People who deserve killing no matter where they be, no matter how they dress.

For Christ's sake, people, we refuse to even call the enemy "the enemy." We use euphemisms.

And then, maybe then, it really is time to pack up and go home.

If we refuse to turn those countries into rubble, and then break the rubble into sand, then we don't belong there. Our young men deserve better because we lack the will to win and kill people overtly. Under both Bush and Obama.

People may call this Isolationism. I call it: a line drawn brave. Because if we deem we're such cowards as to not cross that line -- to kill people outright -- then we need to subsume. It is, to me, a clear IF / THEN equation.

BZ