Debt ceiling 101: eight questions about the latest round

Congress has until the end of February to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit, known as the debt ceiling, or the country risks going into default. How is this time different from the previous rounds of debt ceiling politics? Here’s a guide, plus the context.

7. Why does the US have a statutory debt limit?

The Constitution requires Congress to place restrictions on federal debt, but the setting of a statutory limit isn’t required by the Constitution. The first version of the debt ceiling was established in 1917, under the Second Liberty Bond Act. It set an aggregate limit on the amount of new bonds that could be issued. In 1939, Congress set an overall cap on almost all federal debt, and it has been regularly approving higher caps ever since.

Since 1960, according to the Treasury Department, the debt ceiling has been raised 78 times – 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democrats.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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