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Gobsmacked Canadian seeks insight and offers help [1]
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Date: 2023-03-15
Last night my wife and I were talking. She is Canadian. That’s my good luck.
She asked, “I just don’t understand the U.S.. What’s the difference between the debt ceiling and the budget wrangling?”
She thinks I should know this stuff because I read Daily Kos, I guess.
I went through the debt ceiling as the obligation to pay for expenditures already incurred, and the very different budget negotiations for what to spend in the future.
She said, “What happens if the debt ceiling is not raised?”
I said, “They say there is a very real chance of economic catastrophe – worldwide, even.”
She said, “But what will that mean to me? How will it affect our daily lives?”
Therein lies the point of this post. She feels that “worldwide economic catastrophe” is so abstract to an individual as to be meaningless (gesture hand passing quickly back overhead).
She feels that for the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling to exert any political leverage people need to be able to understand them on a personal level.
She’s seen enough about the U.S. to know that when talk gets around to “my stuff” people start to pay attention. She feels that not making the economic damage of defaulting more explicit in people’s day to day lives is missing almost the entire opportunity to mobilize popular opinion against it.
What the personal consequences of playing chicken with the debt ceiling are is way beyond my economic understanding. This post is a request for those of you in the Kos community who have a knowledge of such things to help bring it into focus. It seems to be a revelation that will provoke a powerful reaction to the Republican recklessness.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/15/2158439/-Gobsmacked-Canadian-seeks-insight-and-offers-help
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