Paumgarten on the debt ceiling

RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM: Nick Paumgarten opines on the debt ceiling. The money quote: "The government spends too much (i.e., money it doesn’t have). This we know. It needs to spend less. This too we know. What we should spend less on, or whether we should tax a little more and spend not as much less—these are worthy of ongoing and even uncivil discussion. But the debt ceiling, in this particular moment anyway, has nothing to do with all this, except insofar as threatening not to raise it gives the Republicans good leverage in their attempts to get the government to spend less in the way they’d prefer."