and every american, every american will lose if we allow that to happen. hopefully the republicans will come to their senses. congressman steny hoyer, minority whip and democratic senator of maryland. thank you very much. coming up, how did it come to this? raising the debt ceiling used to be a non-controversial washington routine, but this year, washington has used the debt ceiling to create a new phenomenon, elizabeth drew will join me. and at 9:00 p.m. eastern, the president will address the nation about the debt ceiling negotiations, a speech you will see live right here on msnbc. announcer: this past year alone there s been a 67% spike in companies embracing the cloud big clouds, small ones, public, private, even hybrid. your data and apps must move easily and securely to reach many clouds,
including the debt ceiling. the last four balanced budgets that were offered and passed were offered by bill clinton when he was president of the united states, and we had a balanced budget, so we have not only a rhetorically committed to it, but we ve done it. we ve passed statutory payments which says you pay for what you buy. simply because we bought a lot and we didn t pay for it, and republicans, of course, were in control of all the economic policy, but the issue is not what happened in the past or who s responsible, the issue is who s going to be held ç accountable, who s going to be responsible right now to make sure that america, for the first time in history, is not put in a position where it can t be relied upon by its creditors to pay its bills. that would be destablizing for not only our own markets but the international markets as well
it meets the requirements that they laid out, dollar-for-dollar savings in the debt ceiling, no revenues, and cuts that they have supported. so ask yourself, the american people will be asking themselves, if they oppose this, why? since it s everything they asked for. this is a very hard decision for many on our side. our side knows that any serious debt reduction plan must include revenues, but in the interest of preventing a default, we can have the fight on revenues later when we get to the grand bargain speaker boehnor couldn t bring himself to accept from barack obama, we offer this plan. it s a tough choice, but for democrats, we get an increase in the debt ceiling through 2012, and we succeed in extending benefit cuts in medicaid,
of playing politics with this debt ceiling recently because the president says he doesn t want to have a vote during an election year, he wants the next debt increase after the election year. if the president is playing politics by saying he doesn t want a vote during an election year, aren t the republicans playing politics specifically by saying they do want to put the democrats and the president through another debt ceiling vote in an election year? i think it s very obvious that s exactly what they are doing, and as a matter of fact, their rhetoric is to put president obama in a bad spot. i disagree with chuck schumer, by the way, he said what democrats get out of this is raising the debt limit. that s not what democrats get out of it, that s what america gets out of it, a responsible country that pays its bills and protects the financial stability of our country, every credit card, 401(k) programs, stock market, so mr. boehnor made
president has actually accepted the republican premise that this is what needs to be done now. he didn t fight it, he joined it. it is striking, and i m very much of the growth first school, which says let s get this economy growing. growth would do more to solve this deficit problem than any of the cutting proposals that are out çthere, even minor increas in our rate of growth over what we re doing now, but and in reading your piece, elizabeth, it was really striking to me how recently some of these ideas have come into the mix that speaker boehnor was at the beginning of the year wasn t saying there has to be a dollar-for-dollar cut in spending to match an increase in the debt ceiling, they ve been making up new ideas as they ve been going on. today is an inkapslation of that, new plan, different from the brand new plan of last week, but they ve been coming up with new plans all year. i don t know