Remind Me Again Why We Have a Debt Ceiling?

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About a million political analysts have reminded us lately that it’s crazy for the United States to even have a debt ceiling. No other country does, after all. And it doesn’t make any sense: Congress incurs the debt when it passes a budget. Why bother with an entirely separate restriction on the level of debt? It’s just goofy.

So here’s my question: Since this is almost universally acknowledged, why do we have a debt ceiling law? Why wasn’t it repealed long ago by a majority party tired of the opposition using it to score political points? My seat-of-the-pants guess is that repeal could be passed as part of the budget reconciliation process, which means you wouldn’t even have to worry about a filibuster. You just need to control Congress and the presidency, and both parties have done that on a number of occasions over the past few decades.

So what keeps it around?

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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