Debt Ceiling To Increase by $1.8 Trillion

Not content with fiscally enslaving your children, Congress plans on doing the same to your grandchildren:

In a bold but risky year-end strategy, Democrats are preparing to raise the federal debt ceiling by as much as $1.8 trillion before New Year’s rather than have to face the issue again prior to the 2010 elections.

“We’ve incurred this debt. We have to pay our bills,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told POLITICO Wednesday. And the Maryland Democrat confirmed that the anticipated increase could be as high as $1.8 trillion — nearly twice what had been assumed in last spring’s budget resolution for the 2010 fiscal year.

The leadership is betting that it’s better for the party to take its lumps now rather than risk further votes over the coming year. But the enormity of the number could create its own dynamic, much as another debt ceiling fight in 1985 gave rise to the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction act mandating across-the-board spending cuts nearly 25 years ago.

You have to love the lead sentence: “In bold but risky year-end strategy …”. “Bold”? It’s more like feeding an addiction. And it’s hardly “bold” in another sense. They’re going to hide it in a defense appropriation bill:

“This is a defining moment,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), one of the lead sponsors, and New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, the panel’s ranking Republican, is already maneuvering to try to add the legislation as an amendment to any bill tapped to carry the debt increase.

As explained by Hoyer and other Democrats, that will almost certainly be a pending $636.4 billion Pentagon appropriations bill that includes $128.3 in contingency funds for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That’s not “bold”, that’s cowardly. But what it buys Democrats is cover. Adding it (and hiding it) in a defense appropriations bill guarantees “bi-partisan” passage or contingency funds for our two wars won’t become law. But the fact remains this is an old tried and true tactic of both sides in Congress.

Somehow spending like this needs to see the requirement to stand alone imposed on it. Make them do this sort out in the open and in the sunlight. Make them pass any debt increases where everyone can see it – and judge it on election day.

~McQ