Debt Ceiling Scam is a Crime Against America

The Debt Ceiling Scam is a Crime Against America

The attack on Democracy in the United States is shifting into high gear with the public drama of the supposed Debt Ceiling Crisis. Performance politics is out of control as the Republicans and Democrats collaborate in a charade that is completely based on a lie.

Revolutionaries must be able to expose what will be a major crime against the American People.

The lie is that the government is supposed to live within its means, just like a family or a business, which cannot really run a deficit. This is untrue. The federal government can print money whenever it wants, therefore it can always pay its bills. Every politician knows this fact.

We are told that it is a disaster for Congress to raise the Debt Ceiling, a formal procedure that allows the US to borrow money. Republicans under Trump raised the Debt Ceiling three times. Between 1962 and 2011, the debt ceiling was raised 74 times. No other country even bothers with a debt ceiling except for Denmark. But now suddenly – it can’t be raised!! And raising it or not does not cut one penny from the budget.

So there is no crisis here at all. Just political power plays, drama designed to create fear and lots of gaslighting – all combined to do what both of the twin parties of Capitalism agree on: cutting what American Fascists refer to as the “Administrative State”.

This term refers to each and any program that provides funds to people – rent relief, child care subsidies, food stamps, aid to poor families, helping the disabled, funding research into cancer and pandemics, etc. In other words, public services. The money will be then directed to the corporations and billionaires who have feasted of our tax money for decades, which, in fact, is the cause of the problem.

The drama is stoked by the Republicans, who trumpet this lie and demand cuts to Social Security and Medicare. As of December 2022, Congress borrowed $2.7 trillion from the Social Security Administration.

In other words, Congress permits borrowing from SSI, which pushes it into financial stress, while proposing cuts to SSI to resolve the crisis that they create by refusing to repay what they borrowed. Since the US budget has billions of subsidies to petroleum corporations, this money is essentially taken from SSI and other public services. Both parties are OK with cutting public services to subsidize Big Oil.

The Debt Drama provides cover for Biden and the Democrats to conciliate and make the cuts that the Republicans demand. This is how the twin parties of capitalism operate in tandem.

And what drove the debt ceiling thorough the roof? The Bush and Trump tax cuts together are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in our ratio of debt to GDP according to the Center for American Progress!

Biden has already acknowledged that he accepts cutting human services. He refuses to call the Republican bluff and bends the knee to cut more social programs that people desperately need.

The Debt Ceiling Scam is directly connected to all the other attacks on Democracy we are all familiar with – killer cops, the criminalization of poverty, impossible housing rents, voter suppression, the rise of vigilante justice, a surge of laws denying essential rights to African-Americans, women, LGBTQ+ and everyone that a corporate dictatorship intends to marginalized. These rapid and severe changes in government directly strengthen corporate dictatorship.

Revolutionaries everywhere are already debating how can we put an end to this sorry situation and create the cooperative world we all need to be fully human. This means ending corporate rights to make a private profit from exploiting and oppressing anyone!

Check out the League’s take on this great debate: https://lrna.org/lrna-program/.