The US should raise it's Debt Ceiling, with or without concessions

Thanks Double_R. C1) The absurdity of having a debt ceiling that you can raise How absurd is it that the US has the debt ceiling, which we are in the process or raising for the third time in 4 years? What is the point of having a debt CEILING or a spending LIMIT if you raise said ceiling or spending limit whenever you feel like it. The purpose of having a debt ceiling was to prevent presidents from accruing too much debt. Had George W. Bush believed that the debt ceiling was a REAL ceiling, not some artificial annoyance that Congress would raise whenever he clapped his hands, then he would not have gotten us embroiled for so long in Iraq. Imagine if all of life worked like this. You go over your credit ceiling (the maximum safe amount that your credit card company thinks you can afford to spend in a month and still pay them back), and the credit card company merely raises it. You spend more money than you have budgeted in your allowance (let's pretend you're in college, paid with a credit card, and still get an allowance), and your parents simply react by raising your allowance. This is the definition of absurdity. Assuming my opponent wins that we have to remove the debt ceiling, I would then negate by saying we should at least be honest with the American people and remove the ceiling altogether, since it is effectively useless in curtailing government spending. C2) Contingency My opponent seems to be arguing that Congress needs to pass the debt ceiling rise NOW, with or without concessions. I assert that Congress should not pass ANYTHING until they have cemented clear future cuts into the budget. Politicians always put short-term decision-making over long term, since short term gets votes, but long-term thinking doesn't. The only way we will ever get future spending cuts is if they are agreed to now. This should take as long as it needs to. I'll take a hit in the stock market now so I'm not taxed 90% of my income 30 years from now to pay off the debt. C3) No debt ceiling raise I'm implicitly refuting my opponent's case here as well, where he says that if we DIDN'T raise the debt ceiling, we can't pay off the debt. First, think of how ridiculous this sounds. The only way we can pay off our debt is by making it BIGGER? ?? ?? That sounds completely unsustainable. When you pay off your debt, it's supposed to get smaller, or at least stay the same size. If our debt is getting bigger, we're actually not paying it off. Second, defaulting on our debt would only happen if the government keeps spending more and more money and doesn't cut anything. There's a $700 billion peace-time Pentagon budget that is BEGGING to be cut. If we're in such a desperate fiscal situation, get rid of the 60,000 troops we still station in Germany, the 15,000 we still have in Italy, the 10,000 we have in England, and the 40,000 we have in Japan. None of these are necessary or vital to US security. As Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute explains, we are currently borrowing from our allies for the privilege of defending them (even though they can clearly afford to defend themselves). Cutting the Pentagon budget by $200 billion would effectively solve this debt ceiling problem. Raising the debt ceiling just procrastinates the inevitable spending cuts that our government needs to make and forces another generation of politicians to take the heat for it. But if we can always make the next generation of politicians take the heat for it, why would our government ever make the cuts? They'll just keep raising the debt forever, until our debt collapses upon itself, wiping out the value of the dollar overnight. Congress has completely ignored the MANY recommendations of the deficit reduction commission, even though they are all fairly obvious ways to reduce the deficit, but all because many of the measures would hurt politically. If we DON'T raise the debt ceiling, Congress would have to finally decrease the defense budget, reform the home mortgage deduction tax break (which is wasteful, used mostly by people with second homes, and unnecessarily subsidizes homeownership when renting is often cheaper), reform and simplify the tax code to increase enforcement rates (hundreds of billions of dollars are potentially at stake if the IRS collected from a larger percentage of Americans, who currently avoid taxes in a myriad of ways), etc. Point being, it's time to do what the Deficit Reduction Commission says, since their task was to FIND WAYS TO REDUCE THE DEFICIT, yet we instead are IGNORING them and deciding to instead CONTINUE TO DEFICIT SPEND and merely raise the debt ceiling once again, to try to forever delay the day of reckoning and make another generation of politicians bear the anger of the American people for the inevitable cuts that are coming.