Sidestepping Congress: The Debt Crises

One of the main arguments being put forward right now is that the government debt crises is "artificial" - there is no specific reason why there has to be a August 2nd deadline (that one's Obama's) and that congress can't just punt and raise the debt limit. That one is being blamed mostly on the Tea Party and Republicans. 

The claim is that there is basically no real crises, just something we made up to make a political issue out of it all.

In fact, an idiotic professor has put forward an idea about how another idiotic professor could sidestep Congress by issuing the Treasury two trillion dollar coins, or a two trillion option on government real estate. The man, a con law professor at Yale, is clearly exactly the kind of academic moron you would never want running the country... yeah..... 

The reality is that there is a crises. Yes, this specific limit is arbitrary, but so would any other limit be. Do you wait to hit $20 Trillion? $50 trillion (it wont take that long). At at this point there is a real risk that the govt debt of the United States gets downgraded, which would mean that every American company would have to pay more to borrow - which is a bad thing because they would then be able to spend and grow less. 

The crises is that we live in a country which is spending at a rate which has not been seen since WWII. This is not just a little bit of extra spending, we are running annual deficits which make the Reagan era look like El Dorado. 

We fundamentally have a decision to make as a country: are we going to let government run out of control, or are we going to try a limit spending to a reasonable proportion of GDP (say 20%)? The crises is that half or more of this country does not seem to have the balls to stand up and realize that taking the easy road now is not a solution.