Gary Varvel for August 25, 2017

A shame your Congressman doesn’t have the time to work on solving problems for “we the people” and is tied up with working for lobbyists and the wealthy and planning for vacations and reelections. If we knew that they were working 100% for “we the people” there would be no concern about raising the debt ceiling as it would be used to add value to the nation.

By electing hacks and wannabees to government, we get the government we deserve. Do you honestly think that talk radio host you voted in, really knows how to balance a budget?

Raise the debt ceiling, cut taxes and send more troops to Afghanistan. Sounds familiar.

Gary, I’m sorry you have zero understanding of economics. But since you don’t, why comment on it?

Thanks, republicans. We taxpayers like all your unfunded and deeply ignorant wars and financial crises. Then your silly obsession with the Laugher curve puts icing on the cake. But let’s blame Medcaid patients in nursing homes, or hungry children who need food stamps, OK?

Coming soon to a congress near you. Republican Tax Reform, aka The Flat Tax. The result of a flat tax? Huge tax cuts for the rich and huge tax increases for the poor (see today’s comic).

Raising the debt ceiling is an entirely different issue than questions about the debt, the deficits, and tax reform, since the raising of the ceiling is to pay for already committed expenses. We cannot allow the credit of the US to be compromised in this manner (unless y’all are ready for major economic disruptions). We have to address debt/deficit/tax reform spectrum from a position of credit stability, or we may as well kiss our rears goodbye.

Debts don’t count when Republicans are in charge, all spend, no tax, that way there is no money to help Americans, leave it for the Dems to fix.

He’ll have to get it from the poor. The Republicans are in office, and they don’t take from the rich. The GOP follows Mooreism – steal from the poor to give to the rich, stupid b*tch

Pretty clear on this thread that no one knows what “raising the debt ceiling” actually means. A national economy is not a household economy and doesn’t function the same way. And the use of that reasoning to attack social spending in order to provide tax reductions to the rich and to pay for unneeded military hardware (ie: spending the same amount of money elsewhere) is the height of hypocrisy.

Watch out, kid! tRump is is gonna run out from behind that tree and snatch your money box so he can build his dumbass wall.

Just say no, kid, just say no.

Gary, the debt ceiling is to address money that has already been spent. The responsible thing to do when a situation like this happens is to increase income – RAISE TAXES. Bring back the higher tax rates that existed during the expansion of the middle class – companies invested in their employees and the future of the company to lower their tax burdens. Change capital gains rates to match income rates – hedge fund managers dishonestly claim their income as capital gains and too many execs get stock options to pay the loer tax rates.

.Cuts should be made in DoD. Looking at the latest accidents with the ships – did they replace old-fashioned lookouts (actual people) with unsupervised high-tech “toys”? Pentagon and DoD need to undergo an audit ASAP.

I would like to reduce the debt Gary, but the Republican party is currently calling to spend 21 Billion dollars towards dumping concrete across the desert.

The Republicans never cared about fiscal responsibility, they just used that as an excuse to resist Obama.

The Republicans want to make it possible to end spending money used to help people so that only those parts of the govt they like;military-industrial-espionage complex they like and $ 887 billion will do nicely for all of their projects to take us over more and more and enlarge our already over sized military.

The debt ceiling is the upper limit of federal borrowing. It is completely artificial. A sovereign state like the US with a fiat currency can expand the money supply in several ways, making it 180 degrees away from a household or corporation. The ignorance on this forum and others about how money gets created in fiat currency systems creates a lot of misunderstandings about how the world of money actually works. In fact a proximate cause of the global financial crisis (among the various elements in the total web of causality) was the loss of control over the creation of US dollars.

Given our reserve currency status (based on economic AND moral standing), we can borrow cheaply because lenders think we are creditworthy. In fact, we could easily inflate our way out of all of our debt by increasing the money supply. But too much inflation unacceptably erodes wealth. No, we have to raise taxes, not to balance the budget, but to bend the borrowing curve so that the deficit is brought down during good times and allowed to increase during recessions through stimulus spending. We know this works because President Obama did it successfully and helped avoid a global depression. This is what the US recovered faster than Europe. Is our memory so short we don’t remember this?

Martens is 100% spot on about the credibility and creditworthiness of the US being at stake. Ironically, years ago, trump’s lack of creditworthiness pushed him into the hands of the Russians. When all this comes out, and it will, it will be shown that he has been laundering money for the Russian oligigarchs, among his many, many unsavory Russian-related transgressions.