What's a ceiling again?

Over the past week, our representatives in congress have feverishly debated the idea of raising the United States government's legal debt ceiling. Let's take a look at what that would mean first. The debt ceiling currently sits at $14.3 trillion. That means that if we hit that number (and we will on August 2nd), then the government has to shut down and stop borrowing money. That would also mean a major loss in non-essential services - federal parks, entitlement checks, many government agencies, et cetera.
   The idea is to raise the ceiling to $16.7 trillion. That would allow the federal government to keep its budget for the rest of this year (Yep, $2.4 trillion in a year - no biggie, right?). Republicans refuse to pass such a law without major spending cuts - house majority leader John Boehner has put forth a letter signed by 150 economists that urges legislators that "any debt limit legislation enacted by Congress include spending cuts and reforms that are greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority being granted to the president." That sounds pretty cut-and-dry to me - stop spending more than we make. Isn't that the first rule of getting a credit card? I know my parents always told me that.
   It's not as if the Republicans are saints, though. Nope, this ain't no conservative apologist blog. They're the ones that got us into this mess. Take a look at this graph:

   A picture really is worth a thousand words, isn't it? In case you didn't bother looking and just skipped to more of my beautiful prose, I'll illustrate for you. The Bush-era tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq account for about 30% of GDP and more than half of the debt piled on what it would be without the recession. Those tax cuts also affect mostly the very wealthy in our country. The logic behind that is rich people don't keep their money under the mattress - they invest it to make more money. And when someone invests a lot of money, they tend to create jobs for other people. The problem is, you don't get a lot of that invested money back in taxes due to something called "capital gains tax." That's supposed to give people more incentive to invest because they get to keep more of the money they make. Makes sense, right? The problem is that Republicans refuse to let these tax cuts expire so that the excess cream at the top of the wealth cake can be put back into the private sector to help out entrepreneurs and innovators who drive competition.
   The national debt is a problem that neither side is truly willing to solve. Both parties dance around the issue, playing with the American taxpayers' money as if they were playing with cards. They are both a symptom in a larger problem, that being the confiscation of democratic rights from the average American to empower a small elite. These politicians spend our money without pause, but we will shoulder the responsibility in the end.