Dear Visa: My debt ceiling is capped

The first thing I intend to do is join the tea party. Then I'm going to refuse to raise my debt limit. Then I'm going to call the Visa people.

Y'all have me down here owing $6,000, I'm going to say. But I've become a fiscal conservative. I'm getting really disciplined fiscally. I'm taking my household back.

My self-imposed debt ceiling is $4,000. I've opted not to raise it. Nary a cent. I only went over it because the oral surgeon demanded immediate payment.

So $4,000 is the most you rascals will get out of me. You may as well quit compounding the interest on this outstanding balance. I am serious about this. You may consider this baby capped at four grand.

Oh, by the way: Don't even think about canceling this card. I have a second round of dental work coming up and the oral surgeon doesn't give these implants away.

Thank you, and remember: Vote Palin-Bachmann.

You are thinking this is absurd. You are right, of course.

But you are not intellectually entitled to call it absurd if you are among the seven in 10 Americans telling pollsters you don't want the federal government's debt ceiling raised. You are not intellectually entitled if you are one of these right-wing politicians pandering to this tea-drunken grandstand by threatening to vote not to raise it.

Here is how real fiscal responsibility works: You repay the debt that you have incurred to date. You make spending reductions prospectively by showing sufficient discipline to reduce the future pace at which you incur debt. You dare not let your existing debt go unpaid lest your credit score suffer and you get denied the next time you find yourself in a bit of a pinch and need to finance a refrigerator at Sears.

Nine times in the past decade, the federal government has crept near its debt ceiling, and Congress has voted to raise it.

Tea party types say they intend this time to tie their votes to raise the debt limit to actual and concurrent spending reductions.

But this is no equation. You absolutely owe your debt. Quite separately, it's up to your future behavior whether you can fashion spending reductions to gain control of tomorrow's debt so that you don't have to keep dealing with these kinds of untenable financial and political situations.

Our legal debt limit is $14.3 trillion. We are at $14.1 trillion and counting. A lot of fast compounding is going on. We'll reach the limit about May 16.

Politically, this is what is likely to happen: Conservatives playing to the tea-drunken grandstand will engage in yet another round of brinkmanship, braying about spending reductions and casting at least one vote -- for next year's campaign literature -- against raising the ceiling.

Then they will cut a deal in the last hours that could have been consummated more responsibly weeks before, thus avoiding uncertain and damaging signals to global financial markets that prompted Standard & Poor's to start talking about downgrading the United States credit rating.

There even is talk in credible circles that conservatives will let the deadline pass, and choose to wait for the visible beginnings of calamity before coming around.

That would be even more irresponsible than the minority vote cast in 2006 against raising the debt ceiling by a young liberal Democratic senator from Illinois.

Yes, Barack Obama did that. He ought to be ashamed. In a way, he deserves the irresponsibility that bedevils him now.

But at least his vote didn't have real consequences, being merely hollow and demagogic.

It didn't hurt anything except, that is, the young senator's credibility in the unlikely event he ever became president and encountered a tea party revolution. And who could have dreamed of either of those things happening?

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of High Wire, a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His email address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.