US debt limit raised to $8.96 trillion

Originally Posted by xen0phobia

But maybe the effects of increasing taxes could hurt the economy more then the amount the debt will burden us later on. Of course, knowone can really know this but its a valid point to bring up.

Well at the rate we're spending money it'll be very hard to pay off the debt at a reasonable pace. I read in the newspaper today from the Washington Post that some republican safety committee or whatever did a study and found out that we can repay our debt by 2011, but at the cost of education, transportation, and welfare programs. Much of the federal funding for the arts and humanities will essentially be gone, medicaid and all other kinds of programs to help people below the poverty line will either be significantly cut back or eliminated. They say by about '08 or '09 the Federal Highway program will also get trimmed significantly. All this is on top of tons of other programs getting the axe (however defense and veterans funding was not touched in this study). No one will want to make these kinds of cut, for that matter even really talk about it. So its either we raise taxes to help pay off this ridicuously massive debt of ours, cut all those welfare programs etc etc, or we just keep accumulating debt.

Jam it back in, in the dark.