No End in Sight to Govt. Spending Spree: $12.1T Debt Ceiling

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

No End in Sight to Govt. Spending Spree: $12.1T Debt Ceiling Set to Be Raised
Posted Dec 11, 2009 12:17pm EST by Aaron Task

Earlier this week, President Obama laid out his latest plan to promote job growth. On the delicate issue of how to pay for the program, Obama declared: "Even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term, we have begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long term."

Clearly we are still in the "spending our way out of the recession" phase, judging by the House passage Thursday of a $1.1 trillion spending bill, which includes nearly 10% annual increases for the 10 cabinet agencies covered.

The latest spending spree comes as Congressional leaders are negotiating to raise the government's debt ceiling by as much as 16% from its current $12.1 trillion limit.

By law, Treasury cannot borrow more than the limits set by Congress, and administration officials fear money for Social Security checks and veterans' payments due in early January will not be available if the debt limit isn't raised by Dec. 31, The Washington Post reports.

As Henry and I discuss in the accompanying video, the debt ceiling would seem to be a limit in name only, as there appears to be no end in sight to the government's largess. The federal debt has increased by more than 20% for five straight quarters and the national debt projected to increase by nearly $1.4 trillion this year.

Given the gargantuan size of the deficits and the spending bills, the $200 billion of TARP "savings" recently announced with much fanfare amount to a rounding error - and a specious one at that, as discussed here.

With the mid-term elections looming ahead, it appears there's no end in sight to politicians' spendthrift ways, unless the global bond market or American voters impose some discipline on Washington.

http://finance.yahoo.com/techticker/art ... -Be-Raised