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

Groups all my opponent's arguments. If he's right that not raising the debt ceiling would be devastating, then the Republicans need to hold out for concessions. Only if their threat NOT to raise the debt is legitimate (instead of telling businesses that they were just bluffing) will Obama be forced to give concessions. If he thinks the threat isn't credible, he won't give in to concessions to decrease the deficit in the future. But this is a double bind: if failure to raise the ceiling is devastating, Obama will have to give in, but only if the threat is credible. So we should not increase the debt right now, no matter what, as my opponent argues. We need to force Obama and Congress to adopt the recommendations of the Deficit Reduction Commission, which would cut the military, reform and simplify the tax code to increase enforcement, and cut Medicare and Social Security to sustainable levels. Second, my argument that dispensing with the facade of the debt ceiling turns all my opponent's arguments. If raising the debt ceiling is such a political problem all the time, why not just get rid of it? There's more net benefit to voting Con because we avoid having this problem again in a year or two, when we hit the new debt limit. My opponent claims he'd rather strengthen it than get rid of it, but he's weakening it by passing another rise, making it meaningless. You can't have it both ways - either it's meaningful and we stick to it, or it's meaningless and we dispense with the charade. My opponent makes a very good argument that the budget is allocated before the debt ceiling, so Congress basically forces themselves to raise the debt ceiling. But this is because it's been raised so many times automatically that no one takes it seriously. According to Murray Rothbard, the debt ceiling was around $2.5 trillion prior to the Reagan years. Since then, we've just raised it automatically every few years. http://www.lewrockwell.com... My opponent cites a number of DIRE predictions that getting rid of the debt ceiling will collapse our economy and the stock market. But first, most of his sources come from the government, specifically the Treasury Dept. It's their job to make us scared so Congress has to raise the ceiling - this is just politics. Second, none of these things would happen if we just repudiate the debt and say we won't pay it back. Three, none of these things will happen because China and Japan have so many Treasury bonds that they can't dump them fast enough without the remaining T-bonds they still hold losing all their value; our main debt holders will be forced to bail us out rather than let us default to maintain the value of their own Treasury holdings. That's exactly what's happening in the EU. We may as well leverage China and Japan's over-investment to get some lower interest rates and debt forgiveness. Military cuts My opponent says that military cuts wouldn't solve the problem all by itself. That's fine; we don't need to solve the problem all right now, although we could cut half of our military budget rather quickly by getting rid of most of our troops stationed abroad. Or we can just privatize Social Security and that would get as all the way there. I don't see why I have to pay Social Security taxes when there's no way I'm going to collect anything from Social Security. Just abolish it. My opponent never proves normatively that the cessation of the any of the government programs he cites would be bad. In fact, the free market would move in to replace these services, stimulating the US economy, which again turns my opponent's argument. And if the dollar collapsed, the US would just revert to using gold and silver coins as legal tender, as some states are starting to do, which will eliminate the boom and bust cycle, according to Austrian economics, and make the economy more stable. Unless you want US debt to balloon to unsustainable levels (defined as a percentage of GDP above which the US spends nearly all of its budget merely on maintaining the debt), then you must vote Con, to make the debt ceiling finally mean something or at least dispense with the facade and be honest with the American people, sparking a true dialogue about our priorities. Such a dialogue is severely lacking; when Bill Clinton calls Paul Ryan to apologize that the Democratic party is not taking fiscal reform seriously, you know there's a serious problem.