It’s back! It was just two weeks ago that the U.S. Congress delayed a scheduled presentation of federal government shutdown theater until the holidays, and now that the holidays have come, the U.S. Congress has… delayed what could have been a Christmas pageant episode of federal government shutdown theater for another month. Mike DeBonis…
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The U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding finally surpassed the grim milestone of $20 trillion on September 8, 2017, following President Trump’s surprising deal with Congressional Democrats to suspend the statutory debt ceiling through December 15, 2017. On that Friday, the national debt jumped by $317.6 billion to reach $20.16 trillion. The total public…
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Following up President Trump’s surprising deal with Congressional Democrats to suspend the U.S. government’s statutory debt ceiling through December 15, 2017 as part of providing funding to support hurricane damage relief in Texas, Louisiana and Florida, President Trump also appears to have reached a “gentleman’s agreement” to permanently eliminate the statutory debt ceiling altogether….
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It’s official! The 2017 edition of Government Shutdown Theater, which MyGovCost hinted was coming less that two weeks ago, was initiated by President Trump at a speech in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, August 22, 2017. The Hill‘s Mike Lillis reports on the now increased chance that the U.S. government will be partially shut down…
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For the U.S. national debt, the date of March 16, 2017, marks the day when the statutory debt ceiling, which limits how much money the U.S. government can borrow, will go back into effect for the first time since it was suspended back on November 2, 2015, as part of former President Obama’s last…
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With the national debt soon to reach $17 trillion, it’s not surprising that even the President can’t quite grasp the concepts of the debt ceiling and our national debt (see: “Raising the Debt Ceiling … Does Not Increase Our Debt“)—numbers this size are notoriously difficult for any of us to accurately conceive. That’s why…
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I could not resist posting this beautiful graph of the current state of the momentousness US debt. The graph is particularly useful for eyeballing the historical path of U.S. debt to GDP. Often pundits will say that our current debt-to-GDP ratio is not unreasonable because it is not too high relative to the period…
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The latest effort coming out of Capitol Hill to reduce the debt and avoid default is called the “Gang of Six Plan”, named after its three Democrats and three Republican authors. The plan includes $500 billion in immediate “budget savings”, reductions in marginal income tax rates, and the abolition of the alternative minimum tax….
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With the White House and the House of Representatives still at loggerheads over how to resolve the debt crisis, administration officials are turning up the heat, claiming that Washington has only two choices: increase the government’s borrowing capacity beyond the current $14.3 trillion limit or face a catastrophic U.S. Treasury default. If the latter…
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