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The deficit/debt ceiling is not the same as the economy.The debt/deficit apocalyptic hysteria is a canard. We don't need to start reducing the budget deficit right now, it would actually be very harmful to do that when unemployment is still so high and stuck there.

An IMF report, Oct 2012, looked at their forecasts for European countries' economies and found their predictions were more wrong for countries that implemented severe austerity programs. Greece, already in trouble, and other countries did much worse than expected after austerity programs was forced upon them while countries like Germany which expanded their budgets, did better than expected. Roughly, you get an output loss of 1% for every 1% of austerity.

We can't cut our way to a booming economy. Our government has been hurting the recovery by spending and investing too little. The stimulus should have been bigger. We need so much infrastructure repairs across the country (one legislator made the remark that every bridge should have a sign "cross at your own risk") that investing in that alone would create enormous economic activity and save a ton of money fixing things before they deteriorate even further and cost much more to fix or replace. You work on the debt when the economy recovers.

Boehner came up with a new twist on the sequester Tues. He said it should be "in effect until there are cuts and reforms that put us on a path to balance the budget in 10 years". Hearing that, some Republicans are saying, Whoa. Remember the House Republican budget plan from the last Congress written by Paul Ryan? That didn't balance the budget until 2040 and was projected to run deficits every year for nearly 30 years. It also had very severe spending cuts, Republicans avoided talking about them in public. Boehner's plan to balance the budget in 10 years has Rep. Mike Simpson concerned. He's been telling his constituents "nobody is talking about changing SS/Medicare if you're 55 or older...well, to balance in 10, that 55 is going to move up to 58, 59, 60. It makes us look like we're going back on what we were telling people.." The CBPP crunched the numbers and concluded it would require across the board cuts totaling anywhere from 1/6 to 1/3 of the the government depending on whether defense and/or entitlements are included". Ten years or 30 years, we won't be able to count on SS/Medicare but, hey, balanced budgets!

The GDP report at the end of January showing the economy is shrinking and Republicans said, aha, that means we have leverage because it's bad economic news for Obama. However, the contraction was due to a drop in defense/federal spending. Now the Republicans think this supports their view that we need more spending cuts to help the economy. Huh? Republicans were against the sequester because spending cuts threatened severe harm to the economy but now want to use that to get more spending cuts. If sequestered spending cuts will do much damage to the economy, wouldn't replacing them with other cuts do the same harm? Totally incoherent.