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Gov. Tim Pawlenty has offered an alternative to raising the debt ceiling: instead, pass a law putting creditors first in line for the receipts that flow into the Treasury in April and May.
This suggestion is more a piece of campaign positioning than a serious idea. But let’s take it seriously for a minute. How would it work?
1) Creditors are owed interest. They are paid first.
2) Doctors and hospitals submit invoices for Medicare and Medicaid. The early arrivals are paid, but the later arrivals not?
3) Replacement equipment is needed in Afghanistan. It goes unreplaced?
4) Does the Treasury Secretary get to pick and choose which bills to pay? Or is it first come, first served?
5) The US is running a deficit of $1.3 trillion on spending of $3.8 trillion. In other words, we hit the wall about 8 months into the fiscal year. What happens then?
6) Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” calls for moving to a no-net-increase-in-debt budget over the course of decades. Tim Pawlenty is calling for it to happen by May. That’s ambitious, in the same sense that trying to knock down a brick wall with your car is ambitious.
Maybe delay Granny’s Social Security check by a couple of months? That’ll go over well.
Pawlenty, didn’t think this through. That’s really the trouble with a great many politicians – lack of critical thinking skills.
Nah, Pawlenty did think it through. He’s just confident than anyone who would potentially vote for him will not.
I’m so sick of this. This isn’t a plan. I could respect him if he had a plan. I might not like the plan. I might even oppose it but at least there would be something to oppose. Does anyone really believe that he has a plan to come up with enough cuts and/or revenue to ensure that the government can meet its obligations through the end of the year? If so, where’s the plan. Vague concepts are not a plan. So, Tim, either put up or shut up.
As I understand, the SS law states that SS has to be paid first.
Pawlenty has some very odd economic ideas and apparently no understanding of finance:
Former Governor and likely GOP 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty (MN), however, readily prescribed this economic kamikaze mission to the GOP today on Fox News Sunday. Pawlenty, whose failure to sign a state budget in 2005 forced 9,000 state employees to stop pubic services for nine days, told host Chris Wallace that GOP lawmakers “should not raise the debt ceiling” and should “take it one step further” by somehow “sequencing the pain of the bill” to prevent default:
WALLACE: Back in 2005, you allowed the government of Minnesota to shutdown for nine days because of a disagreement with a Democratic legislature about taxes and spending. Should congressional Republicans take the same tough stance when it comes to raising the debt limit and federal spending?
PAWLENTY: …I’m glad we had that showdown in Minnesota. As to the federal government, they should not raise the debt ceiling. I believe we should pass legislation, allow them to seek spending, as the revenue comes in to make sure they don’t default and have a debate about what other spending could be reduced.
WALLACE: You would say to Republicans up in the building behind me do not raise the debt limit?
PAWLENTY: That’s right. To avoid the default, I would take it one step further. Send the president a piece of legislation that authorizes the federal government to sequence the pain of the bill so we don’t default on the debt obligation and then have debate about how we reduce the other spending.
The government doesn’t hit the wall in eight months. The revenue is $3.8B/12 per month. Expenses are $5.1B/12 per month. We hit the wall on the 22nd of each month! Everybody gets a punch in the gut a number of times during the year and chaos reigns.
Frankly, this suggestion from Pawlenty is really surprising. He has correctly identified that businesses and people want everything to be uncertain. His proposal would result in a huge pile of uncertainty for every part of society and in fact the rest of the world.
With the surge of tax payments that come in between April and June, that would at least buy time to try to cut spending dramatically, he said.
Wow. Anyone remember this?
http://tinyurl.com/GOPeconplan
I think we need a new one:
pay interest first
cut spending later
Surplus!
It is really sad that his guys gets any press at all. The idea of a debt ceiling is a totally moronic concept.
Lets build the fastest race car in the world and then make it so it can only go 45 mph. Why don’t people bitch slap this ahole into the ground? Are we all that stupid or timid?
Pawlenty is just like Romney, i.e. another pathetic insincere panderer.
He is running for President so he tells conservatives with a straight face that –
a) he “really” opposed TARP all along despite serving as McCain’s de facto spokesman on the issue when Maverick (like most of the GOP elite) supported the measure back in 2008,
b) he would “support” reinstating don’t-ask-don’t-tell (but don’t ask him whether he would make it a high priority if elected President, I guess),
c) he refuses to raise the debt ceiling, instead proposing politically unrealistic, unworkable legislation to prevent the government from defaulting. Whatever…the dumb uninformed majority of Americans thinks not raising the debt ceiling is a good idea — until pollsters point out THEIR (in fact, everybody’s) cherished social programs and benefits will have to be cut.
MARCU$
Strange… when the GOP controlled the White House, the Senate and the House (2000 – 2006) there was no problem raisin the debt ceiling each year.
I wonder why it’s only a problem now?
What?
Oh.
Sorry.
The official inauguration of the 2012 election silly season.
And Obama would only need say we can not afford to place our soldiers at risk because there is no reliable and adequate revenue source so we have no choice but to pull all our troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, hell out of all of foreign bases. The Republicans would cave in 2 seconds, of course the real Republicans ie. the one who actually have a hand in running the government, would never entertain such nonsense.
Imagine if Pawlenty were President in 1941, we would all be speaking German, except for the people in Hawaii, who would be speaking Japanese.
Can’t wait to see the seniors turn on the GOP if the US doesn’t raise the debt ceiling and SS checks are delayed. Way to piss off your largest and most reliable constituent group guys…
Another Republican dumbass.
But, I repeat myself.
The official inauguration of the 2012 election silly season.
That is rather terrifying, and almost certainly true. Is there ever a time for sober, responsible governance?
Tim Pawlenty is Harold Stassen on training wheels.
It’s not the debt ceiling plan. It’s the debt silly plan. Silly.
Pawlenty just wants to be the next politician from Minnesota who won’t be President.
He has a record in Minnesota, he is now flipping around like a fish out of water to make the Far Right happy in the hopes of getting the nomination – but he is really just looking like a Romney-Lite…
Pawlenty is just the carbon copy of George Bush on fiscal and economic matters. All talk and BS. We do not need any more George Bushs thank you very much.
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“But what Pawlenty failed to highlight is that he’s leaving Democratic Gov.-elect Mark Dayton and the Republicans ready to take control of the Legislature with a $6.2 billion budget deficit in the coming biennium.
Pawlenty called the massive budget hole a work of “fiction.” That’s a dramatic departure from 2003 — when Pawlenty characterized the $4.5 billion budget deficit he was inheriting as “the Incredible Hulk of budget deficits.”
Pawlenty has wrestled with budget problems since he first took office. It’s partly due to a sputtering economy, but it’s also due to the failure to enact permanent spending cuts or tax increases that would have balanced the budget over the long-term. That failure meant a budget roller coaster that went mostly downhill over the past eight years.
Pawlenty and the Legislature would see a surplus in 2006, when the governor said, “We’ve completed the biggest financial turnaround in Minnesota history.”
But just two years later, the state faced a growing deficit.
Pawlenty’s main governing principle was not to raise state taxes. With the exception of a fee on cigarettes of 75 cent per pack that he pushed in 2005, Pawlenty did not call for higher taxes during his eight years in office. ”
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“For most of Pawlenty’s two terms, Minnesota lagged the nation in creating jobs. A look at Minnesota’s jobs record shows that the state has just 6,200 more workers now than it had in January of 2003. In January, 2009, the state’s unemployment rate started performing better than the national average — a point he repeatedly highlights during speeches.
A look at other numbers shows that Minnesota became less prosperous during Pawlenty’s tenure, even when accounting for the national downturn. In 2002, Minnesota ranked eighth in the nation in per capita income. By 2009, the state had dropped to 14th in the nation.
Those state rankings concern Art Rolnick, a former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank at Minneapolis.
“What’s a little disturbing is the states that were higher than us back in 2000, they grew much faster,” Rolnick said. “So it wasn’t just simply a matter of the poor states catching up. We haven’t stayed pace with some of the more successful states.” ”
The state of Minnesota’s fiscal and economic performanc under Pawlenty almost exactly mirrored the fiscal and economic performance of the U.S. under Bush. Pawlenty was an economic failure for Minnesota, as Bush was for the U.S.
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“A place where Minnesota has lost ground over the past eight years [under Pawlenty] is the number of people who have health insurance. Minnesota still ranks in the top five in states with the highest percentage of insured people.
But the number of people without health insurance has increased. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, 9.1 percent of state residents did not have health insurance in 2009, up from 6.1 percent in 2001.
One factor that led to higher numbers of uninsured people is Pawlenty’s cuts to state subsidized health insurance. State Department of Human Services officials say there are more than 36,000 fewer people enrolled in MinnesotaCare in 2010 than there were in 2003. ”
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PAWLENTY’S GOVERNORSHIP BY THE NUMBERS
State’s Budget Outlook
2003-2004 two-year budget: $4.5 billion projected budget deficit
2011-2012 two-year budget: $6.2 billion projected budget deficit
Source: Minnesota Management and Budget
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Rate of the Uninsured
2001: 6.1 percent
2009: 9.1 percent
Source: Minnesota Department of Health
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Graduation Rate
Four-year graduation rate, 2002-03: 72.79 percent
Four-year graduation rate, 2008-09: 74.85 percent
Source: MN Department of Education
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ACT scores by state
2002: 65 percent tested
Avg. composite score: 22.1
2010: 70 percent tested
Avg. composite score: 22.9
Source: ACT
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Job numbers
January 2003 (Total non-farm employment, seasonally adjusted): 2,662,200
November 2010 (Total non-farm employment, seasonally adjusted): 2,668,400
6,200 more jobs than in 2003
Source: MN Department of Employment and Economic Development
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Unemployment rate
January 2003: Minnesota’s unemployment rate was 4.6 percent
National unemployment rate was 5.8 percent
November 2010:
Minnesota’s unemployment rate was 7.1 percent
National unemployment rate was 9.8 percent
Source: Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development
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Per Capita Income
2002: $34,081 – Minnesota ranked 8th in the nation
2009: $41,589 – Minnesota ranked 14th in the nation
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/12/22/gov-tim-pawlentys-record/
I don’t know if Pawlenty can distinguish between campaign positioning and a good idea any longer, if he ever could.
“Tim Pawlenty’s fawning appearance on American Family Association Bryan Fischer’s radio show is an interesting indicator of where the power really is on the right. Here is a Republican from Minnesota who, as a state senator in 1993, actually voted for Minnesota’s pioneering anti-discrimination law. He has held meetings with gay conservatives and has portrayed himself as a moderate. But he has now come out in favor of reinstating DADT, when repeal was supported by over 70 percent of the country, and passed with Republican and Democratic votes in the lame-duck session.
We are all familiar with what has happened to public opinion since Pawlenty’s 1993 vote (he has said he regrets it now but only because it included gender identity in its protections). Opinion has moved rapidly in favor of civil rights, with even marriage equality reaching 50 percent public support this year. But Republican leaders have moved as swiftly in the opposite direction – from Romney to Pawlenty.
But fawning over Fischer is a new level of mainstream pandering to the Christianist right. His record is appalling and led the Southern Poverty Law Center to label his organization a hate-group. He wants to reinstate Biblical law over US law, and said so as recently as the Tucson shootings. Here’s Fischer’s full, staggering record of extremism, as compiled by Christine Shwen:
* Who could forget the time he said the US should “restrict Muslim immigration” and “send them back home”? That was after he’d argued that a devout Muslim can not be a “good American” and that Muslims should be barred from the military. And what about the time he suggested that a plane crash in Montana killing 14 people occured because a doctor who performs abortions was on board, saying that “If you do not hate bloodshed, bloodshed will pursue you”?
* And then there was the time Fischer wrote this:
“Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews. Gays in the military is an experiment that has been tried and found disastrously and tragically wanting. Maybe it’s time for Congress to learn a lesson from history.”
Does Tim Pawlenty believe that gay people are responsible for Hitler? That American Muslims and gays should be barred from serving their country?
More to the point: is embracing a man who believes this kind of bile now essential to being viable as a primary candidate for president in the current GOP? If a Democrat had gone on a radio show with anyone as far out on the left as Fischer is on the far right, his or her career would be over.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/01/pawlentys-ally.html
* And then there was the time Fischer wrote this:
“Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews. Gays in the military is an experiment that has been tried and found disastrously and tragically wanting. Maybe it’s time for Congress to learn a lesson from history.”
Does Tim Pawlenty believe that gay people are responsible for Hitler?
If he doesn’t, I do. People of the Book arent the problem, liberals are the problem.
For the love of God, leave muslims alone! Soldiers earn like 30K tops and they need someone to hate in that job, so the culture puts “muslims” out there as a target, and the media runs with it b/c the media has to run a 24/7 news cycle, and if you dont have anything to do except watch TV all day..then you swallw that crap and…there ya go….
armstp, thanks for the oppo “dump”. So predictable, so tiresome, so not in good faith.
You have to agree with, and own, everything a talk show host says before you appear on his show? Asinine, and you know it perfectly well.
Furthermore, the MN deficit as projected assumes a 27% hike in spending.