You have to read the story at Conservative News Service (CNS) to get the full absurdity of what is going on. Basically the nation’s debt has been set 16.699 TRILLION dollars. By law it cannot be exceeded. So in spite of bonds becoming due periodically and new bonds being issued in greater proportion to those redeemed, thus increasing the debt beyond the limit (in realville dollars), the Treasury department, if we understand this correctly, has simply deemed the debt has been constant at $16,699,396,000,00,000.oo for 56 days.
That figure is steady at approximately 25 million short of the debt ceiling. The claimed allowance for this comes under a provision referred to as extraordinary measures.
According to the CNS article Treasury Secretary James Lew says:
“The effective duration of the extraordinary measures is subject to considerable uncertainty due to a variety of factors, including the unpredictability of tax receipts, changes in expenditure flows under the sequester, and the normal challenges of forecasting the payments and receipts of the U.S. government months into the future.”
It is an amazing feet of money management of course as by our calculation it entails tolerances on the level of .0000015 %.
We had to go online to find a calculator that could do calculations involving 16 digits
Of course the truth is we have been lied to, certainly misled by politicians of various stripe. Our debt is more than 16 trillion, and their resolutions mean nothing. R Mall
*Thanks to commenter Alecj writing in response to the CNS article for the title of our post. He paints the perfect picture.
