CHESSNOID

So the debt clock keeps ticking away closer to the deadline of August 2, 2011.  It is only 9 days away now and the headlines focus on the armaDEBTon that America will experience.  Some news places say it is too late and the damage is done.  If that is the case, then what is different now than a month ago.  We still have over 14 trillion dollars in debt that we can’t pay.

Has unemployment gone up? Have foreclosure increased?  Have interest rates risen?  In the last year, month, and week, all the figures have been steady.  The economy is still in a big mess and nothing is different from yesterday.  Remember Carmageddon?  A whole of hype and whole lot of nothing happened.  Reminds me of the crazy reverend claiming the end of the world was going to happen a few months ago.   Well, he went into hiding after his epic failure.

Now the NY Times claims we still have excess money to pay bills for another week.  Does this mean the politicians have been lying to us?  Have they used the same fear mongering techniques they have used for the past 10 years?  Why is it so hard to just spend what we earn as a country?

What does the debt ceiling mean to me and you?

NY Times:

— It turns out the federal government is sitting on some extra cash.  Thanks to an inflow of tax payments and maneuvering by the Treasury Department, the government can probably continue to pay all of its bills for several days after Aug. 2, providing potentially critical breathing room for Congress to raise the debt ceiling, according to estimates by several Wall Street banks and a Washington research organization.

The consensus is that the government will not run short of money until Aug. 10, when it would be unable to cut millions of Social Security checks without borrowing more money.

President Obama has described Aug. 2 as a “hard deadline” for Congress to increase the maximum amount that the government is allowed to borrow.

“We have to do it by next Tuesday, Aug. 2, or else we won’t be able to pay all of our bills,” Mr. Obama told the nation in his speech on Monday night.

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, restated that position on Tuesday.

“That’s not a guess. That’s not a political opinion,” Mr. Carney said. “It is the judgment of career analysts at the Treasury Department. We give up our borrowing authority without action by Congress. And the result of that risks default for the United States for the first time in our history.”

That description, however, conflates two distinct events.

The government will exhaust its ability to borrow more money on Aug. 2, which is equivalent to maxing out a credit card. But there still will be cash in the federal wallet.

Some Republicans have expressed skepticism about the Aug. 2 deadline, describing it as an artificial line drawn by the Obama administration for political reasons. Analysts emphasize, however, that the deadline is real; it’s just the date that is inexact.