That there is any solution to the debt problem that can be ratified by the House, ratified by the Senate, and avoid a Presidential veto.
I would prefer that there was, but there is no guarantee.
And then we ask, if we do not raise the debt ceiling, cut spending, or raise taxes etc., how long can the deadlock go on? A week? A month? All year? The next election?
At some point, a country becomes ungovernable. We saw that in Egypt and Tunisia, not to mention Libya, Syria, Yemen, not to mention less-covered but similar events in parts of former Yugoslavia. And then perhaps someone finds a solution. Or perhaps the deadlock continues. Or perhaps the country involved becomes one with the USSR, not with a bang but with a whimper.
Below the fold I note a few difficulties less likely to be recognized by readers here. If I had posting privileges at Red State, I would have listed a different set of difficulties. After all, they already realize that Republican primaries are rapidly able to target Republicans that conservatives do not like, while readers here see these as good news.
The front end difficulty is that the old-line Republican leadership spent several decades lying to its constituents that they were going to cut spending, balance the budget, and follow the local interpretation of the Constitution (your locale varies. Trust me, it does). The Republican constituents finally figured out they had been had. They are now purifying the Republican party of the people they disagree with, meaning the old line Republican leadership.
Will they do what their bankers tell them? One of the multitudes of tea parties sent me an email yesterday, which to my ear invites further distribution. I don't expect you to agree with the letter completely. The reason I am forwarding part of it is so you can ask yourself "are these people going to change their minds on the debt because their banker said so?" The following is quoted from the teaparty.org Tea Party.
A one-time limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has uncovered some eye-popping corruption at the Fed and the mainstream media is barely even covering it.
It turns out that the Federal Reserve made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to their bankster friends during the financial crisis.
These loans only went to the "too big to fail" banks and to foreign financial institutions. Not a penny of these loans went to small banks or to ordinary Americans. Not only did the banksters get trillions in nearly interest-free loans, but the Fed actually paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program. The GAO investigation revealed some absolutely stunning conflicts of interest, and yet the mainstream media does not even seem interested. Solid evidence of the looting of America has been put right in front of us, and yet hardly anyone wants to talk about it.
...
Many Americans have a hard time grasping just how large 16.1 trillion dollars is. It is an amount of money that is almost inconceivable. It is more than the GDP of the United States for an entire year. It is more than the U.S. government has spent over the last four years combined.
The Federal Reserve was just creating gigantic piles of cash out of thin air and throwing them around with wild abandon.
One of the only members of Congress that has wanted to talk about the GAO audit has been U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. The following is a statement about this audit that was taken from his official website....
"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world"
So precisely who got this money? Well, a recent article on Raw Story named some of the big Wall Street banks that got some of this money....
Out of all borrowers, Citigroup received the most financial assistance from the Fed, at $2.5 trillion. Morgan Stanley came in second with $2.04 trillion, followed by Merill Lynch at $1.9 trillion and Bank of America at $1.3 trillion.
...
But it just wasn't U.S. banksters that were showered with nearly interest-free loans. It turns out that approximately $3.08 trillion went to foreign financial institutions all over Europe and Asia.
So who in the world gave the Federal Reserve permission to bail out financial institutions all over the world? Nobody did.
But under our current system the Federal Reserve doesn't have to get permission. They literally get to do whatever they want.
On his website, Senator Sanders expressed his outrage over these foreign loans....
I don't think the people quoted above are going to do what (your least favorite large bank) tells them to.
So what should be done, if we have hit the limit on our borrowing capacity?