Breaking News: If you voted for a "tea party" congressman in 2010
Why not address them both head-on? If the debt ceiling is simply raised, the temptation will be to just continue kicking the can down the road and not change anything.
Spending has increased by a trillion dollars, more than one-third of the budget, in five years. No, it's not a spending problem
Curious how you compare the US to the UK and Germany, and not to itself, where federal revenues have been stable at 17-20% of GDP every year for decades. Nor do I know where you got the 15% nuraber, as I'm pretty sure it is more like 18 or 19% right now.
Well maybe you should ask why Senate Democrats and Obama seem so committed to defeating any proposal that addresses the issue -- first the Ryan plan, now the Boehner plan, which is so not-extreme that many conservatives want to boycott it.
Meanwhile, Obama has put forward nothing with any details, and nobody has seen Reid's vaunted proposal. It's almost as though they aren't even interested in anything besides the status quo: keep raising the debt limit, keep spending, pretend it makes no difference.