Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — You can’t run a serious manufacturing operation on three-month continuing resolutions, and you can’t run a government that way either. We’ve had two shutdowns this year and we’re sitting in a third as I speak.
The brinkmanship raises uncertainty for everyone who depends on federal funding and distracts from the actual long-term drivers, which are demographics and healthcare costs and which nobody schedules a crisis about because they arrive on time every year.
The practical path is to separate the debt-ceiling increase from the spending fight, put automatic continuing resolutions at prior-year levels in place to remove the hostage opportunity, and then force real multi-year appropriations with clearer caps. Until the process itself is reformed, we’ll keep managing the next artificial crisis instead of the underlying math.
Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent — We’ve turned the debt ceiling into recurring theater while the structural trajectory continues upward, and the theater has the useful property of being over quickly, which the trajectory does not.
Continuing resolutions prevent planning and usually lock in last year’s inefficiencies. That’s not an accident. It’s the point, for anyone whose program did well last year.
The durable answer requires slower spending growth in some areas, a broader tax base, and budget process reforms that reduce last-minute leverage. Without those three together, we’re deferring a reckoning and calling the deferral a compromise.
Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent — People are tired of watching Washington manufacture a crisis every few months, and I’d say the fatigue is now doing more damage than the crises are. Pay the bills Congress already approved, then have the real argument about future spending.
Using the debt ceiling as leverage has produced very little lasting fiscal improvement and a tremendous amount of public cynicism. That’s a bad exchange rate. Separate the clean increase from the budget fight and make both more transparent.
Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — States have to balance their books. From that vantage point the federal habit of governing by continuing resolution looks reckless in a way that’s hard to describe to people who’ve never sat through a state budget session.
It creates uncertainty for anybody depending on federal funds and it teaches politicians they never have to make a permanent choice. Raise the ceiling cleanly when necessary, then force real multi-year appropriations with limits that can actually be enforced.
Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — Stop governing by expiration date. Pass a budget.
If you can’t pass a budget, you don’t get a clean raise of the ceiling without cuts that show up on paper, in accounts a county treasurer could reconcile.
Repeated CRs teach the agencies to wait and the public to tune out. That’s the point, for people who like last year’s number plus a little. I don’t like it. Make the vote costly. Publish the ten-year path. Tie the increase to something other than a press release.
Interest doesn’t care about your talking points.
Tyler, Texas Correspondent — I can’t run a book of business on six-week extensions and a threat to default. Neither can a country that still claims to plan roads and defense.
The long-term consequence isn’t a theory from a faculty lounge. It’s a larger share of the tax take going to interest, less room for anything you can touch, and a political class that calls the ritual leadership.
Now, I supported this President and I’ll say the next part anyway. He inherited a debt he didn’t invent. He also signed the spending. Both of those sentences fit in the same paragraph, and a man who can’t hold two facts at once shouldn’t be underwriting anything. We suspended the ceiling in February and we’re going to do it again, and the number will be bigger, and the speeches will be identical.
The remedy isn’t another midnight handshake. It’s a budget that reduces the rate of growth, tax policy that doesn’t punish the extra hour of work, and an end to the custom where each party pretends the other invented addition.
If the ceiling is the only hour anybody tells the truth about the total, keep it. Then use it. My clients live with notes that come due.
Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — Every continuing resolution is a confession that Congress won’t rank. When they won’t rank, the default ranking is last year plus a little, plus whatever emergency gets stapled to the packet on the way out the door. That’s how you get a government that can’t tell you what it’s for and a debt that doesn’t need a villain to grow. It only needs a calendar.
Address the long term by making the short term honest. Biennial budgets. Automatic restraints that hit the popular accounts and not just the orphan ones. A debt-limit vote paired with a published path that uses honest baselines instead of the fantasy baseline where a slower increase gets called a cut.
Infrastructure people already live with this. We can’t award a multi-year job if the authorization might vanish in March, so we don’t advertise it, so the work doesn’t happen, so the road stays posted. That chain is invisible in Washington and extremely visible in a county commission meeting.
Long Island, New York Correspondent — My clients live with assessments that rise whether Washington is adult or not, which gives me a certain detachment about the theater.
An actual default would be stupid. Unlimited borrowing dressed up as compassion is also stupid. Those aren’t the only two options, though you’d never know it from the coverage.
Pair every increase with caps that can be enforced and a baseline a voter can read without a translator. The public isn’t too simple for that chart. The buildings are too comfortable without it.
CRs are how you hide choices. Hide enough choices and the interest line becomes the choice, and that’s already underway.
