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By Congresswoman Virginia Foxx  

Over the past few decades, Congress raised the national debt limit more than 70 times, usually with little or nodebate.  Each time very few people even batted an eye. This history of blindly increasing the debt limit has been cited by many liberals as a reason to continue with the status quo.  But now things have changed.  

Over the last five years our national debt has increased by more than 50 percent.  In just the past three years the debt increased by more than $4 trillion dollars.  Even worse, the debt has increased by $9.2 trillion since a Balanced Budget Amendment failed by one vote in the Senate 15 years ago. As a result, the total national debt is now nearly equal to our entire economic output.   

The bottom line is simple: the government can pile uponly so much debt before it becomes impossible to make the payments without destroying its ability to fund priorities like national defense or Social Security.  As the national debt accumulates at a record clip we are quickly approaching that point. 

The main driver of future increases in our debt is so-called “entitlement” spending, which includes things like Medicare and Medicaid.  This spending accounts for most of federal spending and is projected to double within 40 years, eventually consuming all tax revenue.  Medicare is the largest driver of these future deficits.  It will cost as much as all non-entitlement government spending put together within 40 years if Congress does not enact some kind of reform. 

House Republicans began to tackle this issue in the House-passed budget this year, but that did not go far in the Senate.

So when people ask me if I favored increasing the debt limit, my response is, “it depends.”  First of all, any status quo increase in the debt limit was absolutely out of the question.   

However, we have to consider what happens should Congress not increase the debt limit.  Someone will not get paid—whether seniors depending on Social Security or members of the military or workers on federal highway projects.  

We cannot ignore that the government is currently borrowing more than 40 cents of every dollar that it spends.   As a result, if Congress did not raise the debt ceiling the federal government would have to slash spending immediately by more than 40 percent.   That would endanger America’s ability to keep its promises to those who have paid into programs like Social Security for years.

Consider these facts.  

• If Congress completely eliminated the popular over-spending whipping boy of foreign aid the budget would be reduced by only 2%.  
• If Congress funded only Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as well as the national defense budget there would be no money left to pay for anything else—not even the interest payments on the national debt.
• If Congress prioritized spending that is on auto-pilot, such as unemployment benefits, Social Security, interest payments and the like, there would be nothing left for the defense budget, or any other spending, including education and transportation.

So just ignoring the debt limit and slashing spending by 40 percent is not an ideal option.

That’s why I’m only in favor of major spending cuts accompanied by a smaller increase in the debt limit.  The compromise debt limit bill did just that, by enacting, for the first time ever, deficit reductions of greater than $2.4 trillion—including $21 billion next year.  Large reductions like this will stop the reckless accumulation of debt and help us avoid the sort of catastrophic debt crisis we will face if Washington continues with business as usual.   

Is the bill that passed Congress the one I would have picked?  Absolutely not.  I wanted more spending cuts and a stronger commitment to a balanced budget amendment.  However, it is a step in the right direction.  Conservatives like me know that with liberals in charge of the Senate and the White House, there was virtually no chance that our ideal bill (such as the Cut, Cap and Balance bill) could become law.  So we fought for the biggest spending reductions that we could and successfully opposed attempts to include any job-killing tax increases. 

It’s not news that no one wants to raise the debt limit.  The real news is that the old way of raising the debt limit is over. Raising the debt limit, as Congress has done in the past without accompanying spending cuts, would be a disaster with severe economic consequences.  Washington is in debt because it has a spending problem.  It’s past time we begin to address this problem and the bill that passed Congress does just that.