The PC Explains It All

Because, it would seem, he has to.

This graphic has been going around on the internets since the last Debt Ceiling debate.

It has been shared on Facebook by friends on both the right and the left.

True bipartisanship!

But, the central idea contains a flaw.

Because it seems to be The Blog's lot in life, he is compelled to explain something.

Social Security and Medicare are not tied to the debt ceiling. Soldier's pay is, sort of.

But, because the debt ceiling is about paying for debts already incurred by Congress in the past, not future spending, not raising the ceiling (as has always been done without controversy before this past year, when the Republican members of the House decided that it would make an awesome political hostage,) it isn't that there will be no money for Social Security and Medicare recipients, that money will still be there. (Soldier's pay is a little more complicated, but that money is still there, too.)

The problem is with paying the employees who process, print and mail the checks. If they aren't in the offices to do that, then people won't get their checks.

"Why not stop your pay, your staffs pay, or Congress???"

(That is some seriously bad sentence construction! Did the original poster sleep through Sophomore English? The Blog is thinking, yes. History and Civics, too.)

But, to answer the semi-literate question...

If the debt ceiling raise doesn't pass, that is exactly the result that will be achieved.

Not the Congress' pay.

And, probably, not the President's.

But their staff?

Yeah.

They would be, pretty much, fucked.

This is not unprecedented.

Back in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich's Congress shut the government down in a political hissy fit.

The result wasn't pretty.

For, pretty much, anybody.

Especially the Republican party.

Social Security and Medicare recipients, and soldiers, didn't get their checks.

                                            Newt was forced out of Congress in disgrace.

And, at the mid-term elections, the American voters handed the Republicans their asses and gave us a Democratic Party controlled Congress that balanced the budget and left the country with a surplus.

Newt has, recently, tried to take credit for this. As if he was the Messiah of the Clinton years, rather than the Scaramouche of that decade. 



The new Tea Party Republicans have a short memory.

On the other hand, withholding Congress' pay until they resolve the mess isn't a bad idea.