Real issue governance deficit, not debt: China Daily editorial

With the United States' federal debt expected to hit the existing ceiling on Thursday, the US Treasury Department has announced that it will have to take unusual means to sustain the operation of the government if the ceiling is not raised.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged lawmakers to act quickly to raise the debt ceiling, which at $31.38 trillion is already more than the economies of China, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom combined.

Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives, want to use the debt ceiling as leverage to force the Joe Biden administration to cut spending on a "far-left" agenda that is anathema to them. As one Republican lawmaker said there's no reason for them to help facilitate policy that they disagree with.

The struggle between the two parties is further indication that the country is evolving in exactly the direction its founders made so many institutional preparations to avoid.

The rise of Trumpism was an inevitable response of the nation to the weakening, if not fake, representativeness of the US political system, which has been hijacked by the private interests of the wealthy. But that has only aggravated the situation.

The Republicans make budget cuts a prerequisite for their agreeing to a new debt ceiling, which will only sustain the US debt crisis as before instead of addressing it, and create spillover effects for the world as the US prints more dollars. Meanwhile, the Democrats think the GOP is turning a serious governance procedure into a "political game", as the White House spokesperson called it. "This should be done without conditions," Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. "There's going to be no negotiation over it."

The Democrats accuse the Republicans of not really caring about the US people, while the Republicans claim the Biden administration is putting future generations in debt.

The horse-trading over the debt ceiling only serves to show how much the nation pays for the political tussle between the two parties, whose only point of agreement is fabricating a fake, external enemy in the form of China.

They are both willing to borrow big so they can spend money like water to contain China. This serves their common interest of keeping the people uninformed of the true nature of their governance, which hijacks the country's interests for their own.

In fact, there is no real debate between the two parties and the widely anticipated debate over the federal debt ceiling is just the latest round of bargaining over future exchanges of interests between them. The haggling over the debt ceiling makes clear that the zero-sum game does not exist between the US and China, but between US politicians and the US people.