Goes to show how out of touch Pelosi is ...

[szh]

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch ... 42011.html

An interesting point by one of the reporters in the case. In the past, politicians have voted on raising the debt ceiling quite often, so President's Obama's desire to delay the next vote for three years may not be as strong a position as he is making it out to be.

Yeah, the vote should not occur every 3 months, but letting it happen in 2012 may not be a bad idea. Except that it is an election year, so I suppose that the concern is political ... since candidates could make election-year hay with it.

Getting down to the wire ...

Z

[szh]

Putting the Grand Deal in perspective: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/american ... d=14073116.

Why are politicians finding it impossible to spend 1.5% less than the 2010 budget? Without the cuts, the spending would increase next year by more than 6% over 2010 ... as far as I can tell from the numbers. That seems too high - surely the revenues are not growing by that much - making the debt higher and higher with no end in sight.

Since the impact of the Grand Deal is of relatively little impact anyway ... those trillions are spread out over so many years (later ones, no less), the debt will continue to grow for some time, I suspect.

Z

[IBCoupe]

They're finding it difficult because they're trying to budget while not working on a budget. The timing of this "crisis" is entirely arbitrary. Republicans have chosen to make a thing out of the debt ceiling vote, when it has absolutely nothing to do with the budget. The debt ceiling vote is a result of executing the budget Republicans and Democrats agreed to months ago.

The reason it's difficult to cut so much is because we genuinely like the things that we're getting for the money we spend. Democrats don't want to cut them, and Republicans don't want to get kicked the curb for cutting them.