Posted on 01/13/2023 10:59:31 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notified Congress on Friday that the U.S. is projected to reach its debt limit on Thursday and will then resort to “extraordinary measures” to avoid default.
In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Yellen said her actions will buy time until Congress can pass legislation that will either raise the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing authority or suspend it again for a period of time.
Those measures include divesting some payments, such as contributions to federal employees’ retirement plans, in order to provide some headroom to make other payments that are deemed essential, including those for Social Security and debt instruments.
“Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability,” she said. “Indeed, in the past, even threats that the U.S. government might fail to meet its obligations have caused real harms, including the only credit rating downgrade in the history of our nation in 2011.”
Yellen said that while Treasury can’t estimate how long the extraordinary measures will allow the U.S. to continue to pay the government’s obligations, “it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June.”
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
It always gets raised. Perhaps there is some number of favors traded between Congressmen to make that happen. There is nothing else about it that really helps the rest of us at all.
Janet says ‘Come next Thursday, we’re gonna party like it’s 1929!”
Didn’t they get my Quarterly estimated tax payment?
Charge admission at the southern border like the Cartels do.
So, this is interesting to me and I’d like to understand it better.
Last month the lame duck Senate signed off on the House/Senate Omnibus authorization bill that supposedly hamstrings the newly elected GPS house from having power of the purse until sometime next fall.
But now we are about to hit a debt ceiling limit. Does that mean without the house authorizing a debt ceiling increase that they actually have some leverage to pull back some of the spending in the omnibus?
The order was simple: Burn the boats.
He wanted his men to realize that they had no opportunity to retreat, so they had to give this fight everything they had. Failure was no longer an option and winning this battle just became that much more important.
Silly question here. If everyone is owed this money now, and still isn’t getting it, what would happen if the US said screw it and defaulted on everything and zeroed out all accounts and started from square one?
Clean out all the crap, go through a new budget process and go from there. What are the ramifications to the American taxpayer?
GOP house, not GPS house
Kabuki theater
The Swamp: "Mission (almost) accomplished!"
Transitory debt limit?
Pfffftttt! I be already done that. Amateurs! 😵
True.
But only after several days of Democrats and their media placing the blame for a fictitious “government shutdown” exclusively on the shoulders of a cowering and apologetic GOP.
It’s time for the House to defund the USPS until mail in ballots are greatly restricted. Will the House do it?
There’s a difference between the budget and the debt limit. McConnell and the Dems passed a law on the former but not the latter.
“What are the ramifications to the American taxpayer?”
Everyone who has a 401(k) or pensions that contains US government bonds would take a massive hit.
The US is the only major sovereign currency issuer to have a “debt limit” enacted in law. It is simply a number that the Congress uses to leverage their spending priorities between parties and branches of government. Because the Treasury can simply ask the Federal Reserve for all the money it needs to meet its obligations, it can never default on its obligations.
Expanding the money supply through government spending can create price inflation but there is no upper limit to its “debt” as we have seen from the trillions that were added during the pandemic. The Federal government doesn’t actually need taxes to “pay off” its debt because they created all the money that pays the taxes in the first place. It’s just a matter of whose pockets the money is in at any time, public pockets or government bank reserves.
Maybe they shouldn’t borrow so much.
I understand that difference. My question is can the house now refuse to raise the limit without cuts from the authorized omnibus spending, like the 87000 IRS hires for example?
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