Will Steve King give up his paycheck
before cutting Social Security?
So Rep. Steve King (R-IA) thinks it would be better to cut Social Security and Medicare while shutting down about one-third of the federal government than to raise the debt limit.
His argument:
“We have about $200 billion a month coming into our coffers from tax receipts before we start to borrow money from American people and from abroad. That two $200 billion is plenty more than enough to pay our military and service our debt,” King told us.
“America is not going to default. We're just trying to scare people into being stampeded into a debt-ceiling increase. But we would hold our full faith in credit together regardless, unless the president had decided to punish America by refusing to pay our bills.”
Here's the thing thing that Steve King either doesn't understand or refuses to admit: if we don't raise the debt limit, there won't be enough cash to cover the checks that Congress has already written. Even if we follow his plan, prioritizing debt repayment and military spending before everything else, the U.S. government still won't be able to meet its obligations, and that's default by another name.
If King has his way, we'll spend nearly half of our tax revenue on servicing our existing debt and on paying the military. Roughly speaking, that'll be about $1 trillion of the approximately $2.2 trillion in tax revenue we can expect this year. So now we'll have something in the range of $1.2 trillion to spend, but Congress has already approved $3.5 trillion in spending. That means under King's plan, we'd have to cut about half of all non-military, non-interest spending.
Even if you got rid of every single government agency other than Social Security and Medicare, you couldn't do it without still making cuts from those programs. But then we'd be operating in a world without a federal court system and without federal law enforcement. Things like air travel would grind to a halt because we wouldn't have an FAA. If a hurricane hit, the federal government couldn't help. Education programs would be eliminated. Poor kids wouldn't get food assistance. Pregnant moms wouldn't get prenatal care. It would be an absolute disaster, at least it would be to everybody but Steve King, because I'm sure he'd still insist on getting his congressional salary.
You can do the math yourself using numbers from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. But no matter how you slice it, you can't make it add up without inflicting devastating damage on the United States of America.