The Real Issue is the Size of Government, Not the Debt Ceiling

Mark Steyn thinks the GOP is missing the real point of the whole debt ceiling debate:

Is the Republican Party missing the point of these debt ceiling negotiations — that is, have they allowed the Democratic Party to define what the debate is really about, which is to increase the debt ceiling to expand the role government?

Columnist Mark Steyn says the answer is yes. Filling in as the guest host on Rush Limbaugh’s Monday show, Steyn explained the debt ceiling is not just a mechanism for allowing government to survive, but one that will allow it to continue to grow.

“What we’ve been talking about today is not really the debt ceiling because I don’t accept that as a kind of legitimate way of looking at it because the only issue — the only issue that matters is the size of government,” Steyn said.

“The bigger government gets, the more wasteful , the more unproductive it gets, the more stupid it gets,” he explained. “And that’s why we shouldn’t be talking about it in terms of the debt ceiling and the debt limit. The world will set America’s debt limit, and the world is already doing that.”

Steyn argued there are some assumptions that can’t be taken seriously in this debate, particularly that the rest of the world will invest one-fifth their gross domestic product in U.S. Treasury bonds. He said there is not any proof that other nations would be willing to buy that much American debt. So the real “debt limit” will be based on how much the world is willing to lend, which is partly tied to our own government’s fiscal responsibility.

The current level of spending is unsustainable...period. Any reasonable person can see that, but we have so many special interest groups that demand federal dollars in exchange for their votes, and a congress that can't seem to say no, I'm not sure we have what it takes to fix all this.