The debt ceiling gives a blank check to the ever-growing Federal government!

Wrong. The debt ceiling is for our debts we've already incurred. That's why it's called the debt ceiling. At this instant our government's debts exceed revenues and fungible resources--as was also true, spectacularly, at the instant President Obama took office in 2008. This would remain true even if our federal government stopped spending anything it wasn't legally required to spend right now.

If you as an individual welch on your debts, you lose whatever assets your debtors can lay their hands on and your credit rating tanks. Then when you want to borrow money later on, you're going to pay the rates people with bad credit ratings pay--if you can borrow at all.

When a nation welches on its debts it can hang onto its assets unless it still has to borrow. But when and if it does, Whoa Nellie. And nations that welch on their debts always have to borrow. And the new higher rates ripple through the economy, affecting all but the very rich.

The time to question the need for a higher debt limit was when the deb were being incurred--when we went to war in two countries and gave the richest of the rich a sweet tax break, and put it all on the national credit card, passing the bill on to the next President, along with the reckless fiscal policies that the nation had to bail out when that bubble popped.

And the Republican Congress did vote to raise the debt limit--seven times during the Bush era. It appears that deficits don't count unless a Democrat is in the White House. Then suddenly it becomes the biggest crisis in American history. And jobs? Turns out that's not important at all. Which is logical. All the members of congress have jobs themselves, after all.