The Debt Ceiling Fight in Historical Perspective

Who will win the Biden-McCarthy debt ceiling battle?

• The fatal flaw in these budget negotiations is that there is no effective budget constraint. There is no single legislative body responsible for the entire budget, and no effective constraint on the growth in federal spending.
• What Republicans and Democrats are really fighting over is not a budget, but rather a spending program program.
• Congress routinely increases the debt limit to accommodate the borrowing and spending that has already occurred, and they will likely do so in the current negotiations as well.

 House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his Republican colleagues refuse to negotiate an increase in the debt ceiling without a reduction in federal spending.

President Biden and his Democratic colleagues say that raising the debt ceiling automatically without negotiations over federal spending is "Not negotiable." For Democrats, the idea that discretionary spending should be reduced significantly and that the spending cuts should only be in non-defense programs is a non-starter in the current budget negotiations.

Theoretically, the debt limit imposes a cap on the amount that Congress can borrow and spend.

Congress routinely increases the debt limit to accommodate the borrowing and spending that has already occurred, and they will likely do so in the current negotiations as well.

A budget constraint was imposed in the 2011 Budget Control Act, which was the outcome of a compromise between Republicans and Democrats to increase the debt ceiling that year in exchange for spending constraints over the following decade.

The debt ceiling was increased by $1.2 trillion, contingent on Congress reducing spending by an equal amount over the decade.

Over the past decade, five difference pieces of legislation have altered the BCA because Congress could not live with the fiscal constraints imposed by BCA. Each of these five pieces of legislation increased the spending caps and postponed or modified the sequestration mandated by the BCA. Legislation also suspended the debt limit, which means that during the suspension periods there was not an effective constraint on debt.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/1_27_2023_18_19.html