Imagine you have a credit card. On that credit card you schedule several auto-payments that will charge the credit card for goods or services over the course of the year. That card has a limit.

Now, you know that if you do nothing but pay the minimum payments on the credit card that eventually your auto payments are going to cause you to exceed your credit card limit. If you do nothing and allow this to happen, you will have increased fees, the amount you pay for that debt may go up to a penalty rate, and when the card rejects further payments to those other companies you will either lose those services you enjoy or the items that you purchased. If this happens to you, you would likely be called irresponsible and rightly so.

The GOP is in this same boat. They agreed to a certain amount of spending over the course of the year. They knew that at some point during the year that the debt ceiling would be reached if they didn’t do anything. Now, unlike you in the credit card example, government has more options. They can cut spending (i.e. the spending they already agreed to), they can increase revenue, and they can increase the amount of debt available to them. See, unlike you, they have a Constitution that states the debt of the United States may not be questioned.

But the GOP refuses increased revenue. During the Republican primary debates, when asked if they would accept a deal that reduced $10 in spending for every $1 in revenue gained via taxes, not one person would agree to this.

And the GOP refuses to commit to increasing the debt ceiling. In doing so they push us closer and closer to the edge. They are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that could be avoided IF they would just agree to allow the spending to take place that they agreed to in the first place.

And that is the problem in a nutshell. The GOP agreed to put the country on auto payments to the point that we would reach the debt ceiling. SO the GOP must now do the responsible thing and increase the debt ceiling so the problems do not turn into a crisis. Anything else and they can NEVER claim to be the party of “fiscal responsibility” again.