If Congress is so concerned about fiscal responsibility and the federal deficit, then they should return federal taxation and spending to pre-1980 levels. Check out this chart from a Marketplace report on the history of the debt ceiling.
The ratio of public debt to gross domestic product has tripled since the 1960s. (Screenshot of FRED)
Notice the inflection point: A year after Ronald Reagan became president and began cutting taxes and increasing military spending. Based on my aging memory (so pardon some fuzziness) I think we can see that the points of dramatic increase coincide with a combination of tax cuts, heightened military spending, and responses to economic recessions. Notice that by 2000 we see a dip, largely owed to increases in taxes by the Clinton administration. But once George W Bush and 9/11 hit the country, we see it rise, albeit modestly. The big jump in 2009: attempts by the Obama administration to deal with the global economic meltdown — but also more tax cuts, more military spending. Obviously other factors like the rising costs of health care and the pandemic have made serious contributions. But if we had been taxing the wealthy and corporations at pre-1980 levels and spending far less on military defense contracts for useless shit like SDI and billion dollar jets we don’t use (not to mention two long grinding wars that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives), we would not have had to borrow as much money.
This crisis — which is very real and could negatively impact millions of people if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling on time and causes a default on federal debt obligations — is self-inflicted. Congress created the debt ceiling in the first place, it doesn’t have to exist. More importantly, Congress and every president since Reagan have cut taxes and increased military spending, mostly for the benefit of the wealthy and at the expense of everyone else. (Did Clinton raise taxes in 1993? Yes. Did he and Congress cut them again in 1997? Yes. Did Obama try to raise taxes on the wealthy in 2010-11? Yes. Did he eventually cave in and make most of the Bush era tax cuts permanent? Yes. I agree it would help if the country stopped handing Republicans majorities in the House and the Senate, but that doesn’t let Democrats off the hook.)
A note on putting Boebert in this comic: she has been critical of military spending in the past, and has even cast a vote against some provisions, but in the end has wound up supporting it. I think this will be the pattern of the rest of the Creeper Caucus that are more upset by supporting Ukraine’s self defense than by the ongoing waste on boondoggle projects the Pentagon love. So I don’t take them very seriously. Boebert is also more likely to take a brinkmanship position regarding the debt ceiling. She’s that kind of fool.
What about the Democrat in this strip? He’s a generic one. I couldn’t decide whom to pick on. So I went with Bland Condescending White Guy.
Nice