And the notion that it makes sense to raise a debt ceiling without making significant budget cuts. The possibility of raising the debt ceiling without curbing spending is bone-chilling. Where will it lead? An unlimited threshold for incurring debt with no effort to get the budget within our means, that's where. I've never tried that with my checkbook, but I can't picture it working out well.
The debt has already been raised. That happened when the budget was passed. The debt limit vote is just political theater added a few decades ago. There is absolutely positively ZERO chance that the debt won't be raised by the deadline, as the consequences would cost the people who support the parties way too much money.
They're just using this to push through cuts, and that's all they're talking about...look at you. Nobody's talking about raising revenues, even though we're at a historical low.
One thing that WAS taught in high school when I was there was that when you're indebted, the logical course of action is to pay as much off as quickly as possible while spending as little as possible in order to avoid adding to the principal. That was in accounting, economics, and home ec. I guess not many of our political leaders went to my high school.
Did you go to college? In macro economics you learn that government spending is nothing like personal or business spending. Paying down our debt during an economic downturn is quite silly and pointless.
As to the original question, are theatrics like this a waste of time? Yes. But even if it was only a staged bluff done only to prove a point that was self-evident anyway, at least something got done in the Senate. Can't say that every week.
What point was being proven?
And as long as we're making a list of buzzwords that have been corrupted and abused so much that everyone has forgotten what they mean and whether or not they're even true in context, don't forget "ignorant." These days you could have a Ph.D. on the topic at hand and still be declared Ignorant if your opinion didn't match the left's agenda.
Who's stretching the definition? If you think government finance is similar to balancing your checkbook, you're probably not qualified to be commenting.