From Pajamas Media:
…Right now all the action is in the U.S. House of Representatives, where The Hill newspaper recently reported that a majority of the House Republican Conference sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) “laying out conditions to be met before a higher debt ceiling is agreed to.”
The letter “called for discretionary and mandatory spending cuts to halve the budget deficit next year, spending caps to hold Washington’s spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product, and passage of a balanced-budget amendment.”
The strategy, which is known by its nickname “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” is expected to dominate the discussion surrounding the debt ceiling as events move forward.
Conservatives have embraced the plan, which is expected to be put forward in the Senate by the likes of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint and freshman Utah Senator Mike Lee. They especially like the part about securing passage of a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but only if it includes a supermajority requirement to raise taxes and strict spending limitations pegged to U.S. GDP…
Doing all that would be the budgetary silver bullet – it would solve the fiscal problem, make it impossible for us to ever default and allow the United States, over time, to outgrow Big Government, entirely. There still would be a lot of difficulty in the nitty-gritty of what to cut and by how much, but the overall plan exactly matches the need.
The big risk, as usual, is in the GOP leadership – right now, there are efforts being made to spook the leadership in to really believing that a failure to raise the debt ceiling will cause problems. And, in fact, if the economy tanks – as I fully expect it to – then failure to raise the debt ceiling will be blamed by the Democrats for the collapse. The patent absurdity of such an assertion won’t matter – all that will matter is how much the Democrats can frighten the GOP leadership with the assertion.
By holding firm we can win it all. By caving, we’d lose our best chance in a generation. Let’s hope for a bit of back bone in the GOP leadership.
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