Peter Schiff is using the latest news about an attempt to end the debt ceiling as a way to promote his long gold positions:
Source: Peter Schiff YouTube
Of course Schiff works in the gold promotion industry and so it’s not surprising to hear all the ways Schiff interprets the news as being good for gold. He’s been wrong since 2012 when gold peaked but eventually he’ll be right again, at least for a little while.
Minus the gold bug doom and gloom spinning, let’s look at what’s really going on with the push to end the debt ceiling.
Debt Ceiling
President Trump said he would think about working with Democrats to end the limit on the country’s borrowing. According to The Washington Post, Trump and Schumer have agreed to work on a plan to eliminate the debt ceiling.
President Trump told reporters on Thursday that “there are a lot of good reasons” to get rid of it.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., specifically has come out against eliminating the debt ceiling.
Republicans Dishonest About The Debt Ceiling
Republicans have been dishonest about the debt ceiling for many years. The debt ceiling has nothing to do with being fiscally responsible. In fact, it is just the opposite. Using the debt ceiling to control spending is like a corporation using Accounts Payable to control costs. Dumb, right? In a corporation, Accounts Payable writes the check and mails it to a vendor. It would be detrimental to the health of a corporation for the boss to tell Accounts Payable to stop writing checks and paying vendors as a way to control costs. Vendors would stop doing work for the corporation and the entire business would implode. A boss controls costs by making decisions BEFORE an invoice gets to Accounts Payable for payment.
Another analogy is declining to pay a credit card bill or agreeing to go to dinner and then arguing about whether you’re going to pay the bill, after you’ve already eaten.
Congress is dumb to threaten to not pay its bills as a means of controlling costs. It destabilizes the country and sends the message that it’s risky working for or doing business with the US government. The time to control costs is during the budget approval process and NOT after the debt has already been incurred.
The debt ceiling is hardly more than a public manipulation tool of Congressmen to fool voters into thinking they are trying to control costs by voting against raising the debt ceiling, while at the same time voting for the government programs that caused the ceiling to be hit in the first place!
When Republicans took back the House in 1995, they brought back the debt ceiling vote as a way to pressure members on spending. Republicans would waver back and forth on using the debt ceiling vote. Sometimes they’d use the budget procedure to wave it through, and then other times they’d require the vote. It’s silly because it’s just politics and grandstanding. I mean how effective has the debt ceiling really been considering we have $20 trillion in debt?
If Republicans really wanted to control spending then they would vote for budgetary and spending decisions that would balance the budget. If Republicans really wanted to reduce government spending they would do that because that’s where the money is spent.
Richard Gephardt, D-Mo. has proposed the ‘Gephardt rule,’ which does away with the need for a second debt ceiling vote to approve borrowing once Congress has already voted once to approve spending that inherently necessitates borrowing.
Peter Schiff doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he claims that President Trump is for big spending and even bigger government and that his working with Democrats to end the second debt ceiling vote is somehow proof of that. I’m not sure Schiff himself honestly believes that. I think Schiff is playing to his alternative-news audience which are primarily gold bugs. Any bit of news that can be spun to support some lofty $5,000 an ounce for gold prediction, is what Peter Schiff does and boy does he do it well.
