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Comment by sharemywin | Hacker News Reader

but would you not pay your mortgage and f* up your credit if your wife said I'll talk to you about budget once we pay the mortgage?

btw, I didn't downvote you.

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A better analogy is my wife took out a mortgage in my name and I’m refusing to pay it.

Ah, so anarchy. No continuity in government. What rational thinking. I too was a big anarchist when I was 15 and there was a fun punk scene in the Bay Area.

Anarchy?

Not sure I follow. I’m simply saying that you need to compromise with me or I’m willing to take action that will hurt both of us.

If the government was obligated to get approval from every single person for every single decision there would be no government; you cannot even get every single person to agree that the sun rises in the east or the sky is blue. You have a petulant child's worldview.

The system is designed in this way though. If it wasn't meant to be a two step process, which allows a new party to make a different (painful) decision later on, then it wouldn't have been designed this way.

There's a big problem with US debt these days. I'm not sure the Republican's gimmick today is the appropriate solution, but something has to be done, or this will be the undoing of the US. Increase income, reduce spending, there's not many ways to go about it. And you need to do both. Unless you just plan on devaluing the currency, which isn't going to last long with the nascent tug of war in reserve currency status being mounted by China.

The US is very vulnerable right now and most people aren't willing to swallow the hard medicine required. The undoing of previous prominent powers historically came in similar fashions.

More tax, reduced spending. Harder work.

No, the system is not designed to be a two step process. The debt ceiling was created to give authority to Treasury to issue debt to X limit so that Congress did not need to approve every single bond (think of it as a way to keep the separation of powers yet also run government debt in the more efficient manner needed in the modern world versus when the United States had 2.5 million people). It was not created as a Sword of Damocles. It was purely for administrative purposes not to replace actual budgets being created by a clearly incompetent Congress and horrible political class.

That's a terrible analogy.

A better one would be that my wife and I ran up a huge pile of debts and now even though I want to pay it she went off her meds and has changed the password on our banking app. This is putting us at risk of being foreclosed on.

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