Not entirely true actually and the producer of this image clearly doesn't know their arse from a hole in the ground on this subject.
Using the analogies in the image you can arbitrarily increase your household salary to pay the debt by increasing taxes (for instance on the richest Americans by expiring Bush's crazy tax cuts) or by printing money - something a household can't do (which is why it's a crap analogy). In the US case the tax increases should have happened long ago and is happening now to a certain extent.
There is also a large proportion of the shit in the house (defence or some agricultural subsidies for example) that can easily be removed with limited impact to most of the occupants of the house but the politicians supported by the sort of idiots who created that image are ideologically opposed to removing that particular brand of shit from the house. The shit they want to remove is the shit that's essential to those occupants far worse off than they are (i.e. unemployed, sick, disabled, old).
Anyway, that's all about balancing the budget which by the way is completely separate to the debt ceiling.
If the debt ceiling isn't raised you still owe your liabilities that have already been approved by congress in the budget. All the debt ceiling does is delegate authority to the government to make those payments without having to continually go back to congress for approval (which they had to do previously). Therefore, while debt ceiling remains unraised, the debt is still ticking.
The Republicans use the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip because shutting down the government and therefore stopping it from making payments to social security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military etc is catastrophic and therefore they're more likely to get their own way. Pretty irresponsible really considering they have caused the federal budget deficit and are not serious about reducing spending if it directly affects any of the constituents in their respective state / district. Unfortunately, their misleading rhetoric about what the debt ceiling is has filtered down to large parts of the electorate and is fostering widespread misunderstanding, as illustrated in this image.
Last edited by base615: 03-Jan-13 at 05:02pm
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