[radford-neal]

The "holding hostage" phrasing implies that somehow the House needs to use the debt ceiling as leverage to cut spending. But to cut spending, the House just needs to not approve spending - no agreement by the Senate or President should be required. So there's something funny going on. I don't know what exactly - maybe they anticipate that the Senate will "hold hostage" spending on essential programs in order to get the House to approve spending on programs the House doesn't want to approve?

Anyway, the "holding hostage" phrasing would make more sense if the House were using the debt ceiling issue to try to force action on some unrelated issue (eg, abortion). Linking the debt ceiling increase with future spending cuts is not that sort of thing.

[kasey_junk]

It is unrelated. They approved the budget that is causing the debt ceiling to be breached already. By tying it to future spending they are trying to conflate the issues when they are not related.

The place to discuss future spending is during the appropriations process, by requiring it to happen now because of the debt ceiling is precisely holding the credit of the US hostage.

[radford-neal]

So why have a debt ceiling at all? A ceiling makes no sense if whenever it is about to be reached, unconditionally increasing it is regarded as imperative, with any attempt to link an increase in the debt ceiling to measures that would limit future debt being denounced as "holding the credit of the US hostage". The only point of a debt ceiling would be encourage such a linkage.

[nrki]

The US is one of very few (<2, inclusive) countries that has this "debt ceiling" malarkey. It's a political tool in the US, that's ita only purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_limit

[kasey_junk]

Correct. It’s a flawed and hypocritical political tool, one used exclusively by one party when they don’t want to actually do the hard work of governance.

The American people would be much better off if there were no debt ceiling.