The deficit/debt fiasco.

• Author: Adams, Tucker Hart
• Position: The ECONOMIST

AS I EXPECTED, CONGRESS DEALT WITH THE DEBT ceiling crisis at the ninth hour by raising the ceiling and appointing a committee (the third), leaving the basic problem unaddressed. The market for U.S. Treasury securities yawned - there is still no safer place for your money--while the stock market swooned, then bounced back.

The basic problem is simple: We spend more as a country than we raise in taxes. It gets politicians reelected but has serious long-run repercussions.

I am totally disgusted with our representatives in Washington, whether they are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Progressives or Tea Partiers. No one seems to care about the outlook for anything except their chances of getting reelected. Perhaps we should adopt the Minnesota approach and try running things without a government for a while.

I'm no expert on constitutional law, but I find it hard to understand why Congress even has the right to vote on the debt ceiling. They voted to spend the money. They voted to levy the taxes. Which, it seems to me, means they voted to run a deficit and add to the debt. How can they now have the right to vote on whether to borrow to pay those bills?

Maybe we should all adopt that approach in our personal finances. We will buy the fancy new car, the big house and the big-screen TV. We will cut back on what we earn because we find that going to work five days a week, 50 or so weeks a year, interferes with the way we want to spend our time. Then we will "vote" not to increase our borrowing because we don't approve of "deficit" spending, i.e., running up a lot of credit card debt.

I assume we, the American people, like the way Washington is doing things. Otherwise, why do we return the same people to Congress year after year? Why is it political suicide even to raise the possibility of cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid when fourth-grade math shows there is no other way to balance the budget?

We are fortunate that Europe is teetering on the brink of disaster because of the debt of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and possibly Italy and Spain. If the European Union and the euro were solid right now, we would see a massive exit from U.S. government debt and the dollar. Our interest rates...