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| Ron Paul (R-TX) Wikimedia Commons image |
Stephen Gandel, Senior Writer
TIME
Is Congressman Ron Paul our savior?
The Republican, and libertarian, who is running for President, again, in the past few days has been floating a plan that has the potential to end the debt ceiling standoff, for now, and eliminate the growing possibility that the U.S. government could have to default on its debt, which could cause disastrous economic consequences. Even better, in Ron Paul’s plan Republicans and Democrats wouldn’t have to come to some compromise about taxes or spending cuts. In fact, they wouldn’t even have to vote to raise the debt ceiling, at least not for a year, perhaps more. And that’s not all. Paul’s plan would not only solve the debt ceiling problem, it also might eliminate any harmful after shocks the Federal Reserve’s QE2 program could have on the economy.
Not possible, you say. Well at least one left-leaning economist, Dean Baker, thinks the plan has promise. Here’s why:
Paul’s plan starts with the Federal Reserve. In the last year or two the Fed has been buying up U.S. Treasury bonds in an effort to lower interest rates and boost the economy. The most recent round of that buying has been dubbed QE2, and has come under a good deal of criticism, though most economists agree that it was a generally helpful policy. The result is that the Fed now holds nearly $1.7 trillion in U.S. debt. But that is really phony debt. The Treasury pays the interest on the debt on behalf of the U.S. government to the Fed, which in turn returns 90% of the payments it gets back to the Treasury. Nonetheless, that $1.7 trillion in U.S. bonds that the Fed owns, despite the shell game of payments, is still counted in the debt ceiling number, which caps that amount of total Federal debt at $14.3 trillion.
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