Democracy and Power 104: Future Debt Burden A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property – an unpaid tax bill. —Hans F. Sennholz

Fox News, CNN and other news organizations are reporting that a deal has been reached in the Senate to resolve the shutdown and debt ceiling battle that has been raging for the past couple weeks.

Here we go again… The U.S. is expected to hit the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling by the end of February. That means that we can expect more partisan bickering in Washington over whether to raise the debt ceiling—with or without spending cuts. It has now become typical for Washington to stumble from one manufactured crisis to the next instead of fixing the root cause of the problem.

The so-called historic debt-ceiling deal passed the Senate 74-26 yesterday and quickly landed on President Obama’s desk. He immediately signed the lousy compromise to raise the debt ceiling by $900 billion. The past few weeks have been filled with numerous lies and scare tactics.

With the Obama administration’s phony debt-limit deadline just five days away, all eyes remain fixed on the ongoing debate in Washington. Per usual, nearly all members of the party in power support raising the debt ceiling with no strings attached while most in the minority party do not. The debt ceiling has been raised ten times in just the past decade with both parties playing political games.

Dear FreedomWorks member, As one of our million-plus FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your Representative and ask him or her to vote NO on Speaker Boehner’s new debt ceiling plan. While we applaud House leadership for passing the Cut, Cap and Balance Act last week, we do not support Speaker Boehner’s new compromise, which violates the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge because it neither cuts nor caps nor balances federal spending.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warns that America is just 40 days away from Armageddon. Don’t let the scare tactics fool you. Even if the debt ceiling is not raised, the U.S. will not necessarily default on its debt on August 2. It’s difficult to understand how anyone would still see Geithner as an authority on the economy due to his previous gaffes on everything from the “stimulus” to the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law.