Asserting something confidently does not make it so.
http://www.aim.org/newswire/obama-sequester-ii-treasury-says...
http://www.aim.org/newswire/obama-sequester-ii-treasury-says...
there is 0% chance that the US will be forced to default on the debt.
We could choose to do so, just as a person trapped in a warehouse full of food could choose to starve, but we could never be forced to. This is not a theory or conjecture, it is cold, hard fact.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/09/10/impossibl...
That might be relevant if someone on the thread had claimed such a thing.
It's extremely relevant to the argument at hand.
In case you didn't read the article, it's about Detroit going bankrupt, to which other commentators have drawn an analogy to the country that makes no sense. That's what we're talking about here.
But I'm glad you feel good pride in finding something tangential to the real topic so you can say, "Nuh-uh! You're wrong!". Yes, we can decide tomorrow to cease paying interest on our public debt, which would put us into default. Brownie points for you.
Of course the feds would inflate debt away with QE rather than defaulting. The real tangent is to claim that this makes such a world of difference that we don't need to worry about the federal debt.
BTW: Although your statement that "the federal government cannot default" was literally false, my response to it was overly pedantic.
You're pointing to the debt ceiling as an argument? It's political posturing. You know, to scare the plebes. Apparently it works.
The article is referring to a "default" because of some artificial cap placed on spending, which proposed spending would surpass. It's a technical default, by choice, not from inability to pay.
You can argue until you're blue in the face about the risk of default. It's wrong-headed.