In a back and forth with WaPo’s Greg Sargent this morning — and with several self-styled conservatives on Twitter last evening (one of whom has, predictably, threatened to block me, ostensibly for violating some Twitter rule I care little about, but mostly because I’ve been pointing out his sneering, brash, almost adamant calls for surrender) — I’ve been pointing to a piece in Forbes by Jeff Dorfman that underscores the theatricality (and dishonestly) over the looming “default” showdown.

Most troubling to me is how many on the right have accepted the necessity of a raise in the debt limit to avoid default — cues they’ve taken from Boehner himself and other GOP establishment types who, like Obama and the Democrats, seem invested in this myth that failure to increase the amount of future spending available, the US won’t be able to “pay its bills.” This is, not surprisingly, false: what a debt limit denial does is force the government to prioritize spending, and as Dorfman shows in his piece, the government can indeed run on a balanced budget if lawmakers and the President are forced to make cuts.

Of course, to most of you this isn’t news. But it bears repeating because, as I’ve repeatedly found in my Twitter exchanges (which have proven nastiest with establicans on the GOP side), not only will many on the right refuse to listen to the reality of denying a debt limit increase, but they actively embrace the demonstrably and constitutionally false premise of imminent default, a move that in fact aids in Obama and the progressives’ own desired end game: a removal of the debt limit altogether in a move that removes House majority authority over spending.

Sargent notes that the House would retain its spending authority. But that wouldn’t apply to monies handed over to bureaucracies, whose growth and reach promises to institute regulations and new de facto (and revenue enhancing) laws.

Forbes:

As much as the politicians and news media have tried to convince you that the world will end without a debt ceiling increase, it is simply not true. The federal debt ceiling sets a legal limit for how much money the federal government can borrow. In other words, it places an upper limit on the national debt. It is like the credit limit on the government’s gold card.

Reaching the debt ceiling does not mean that the government will default on the outstanding government debt. In fact, the U.S. Constitution forbids defaulting on the debt (14th Amendment, Section 4), so the government is not allowed to default even if it wanted to.

In reality, if the debt ceiling is not raised in the next two weeks, the government will actually have to prioritize its expenses and keep its monthly, weekly, and daily spending under the revenue the government collects. In simple terms, the government would have to spend an amount less than or equal to what it earns. Just like ordinary Americans have to do in their everyday lives.

Once the reality of what hitting the debt ceiling means is understood, the important question is: can the government actually live with a balanced budget?

Dorfman argues that of course it can — though naturally some cuts would need to be made.   But Social Security is paid by law.  Leaving us with enough funding to run the government with modest cuts that take us back to 2003 levels in spending:

The federal government estimates it will collect almost $3 trillion in revenue for the fiscal year that runs from October 1, 2013 until September 30, 2014. Below I demonstrate one possible way the federal government could institute some priorities and spend only the amount it receives in revenue. (All the numbers I use to construct the balanced budget below can be found here.)

To begin with, the interest on the national debt must be paid. I will budget $240 billion for that. The White House is guessing a little lower, but interest rates have been rising, so I will play it safe. Next, social security payments should run about $860 billion. Place that as the second priority and we already have spent $1.1 trillion of the $3 trillion we have.

Holding Medicare spending to about its fiscal year 2013 total and making some small cuts to Medicaid and other health spending would keep health care spending by the government to $860 billion. This does not include additional spending for the Affordable Care Act, but we need to prioritize and I am making it a lower priority than the health spending we have already been incurring. Also, there is no need for extra spending for the Affordable Care Act before January 1 since the coverage does not start until then. So as long as the debt ceiling is raised before then, there is no problem.

Veteran’s benefits will cost another $140 billion if we leave it unchanged. Department of Justice programs and general government functions add another $83 billion if their spending levels are held roughly constant. We can save some money by cutting science funding to $10 billion and international affairs spending to $13 billion which is enough to operate the State Department and embassies, but not pay foreign aid. This takes total spending to $2.2 trillion.

Cutting spending on conservation programs in half and paying only for agricultural research programs (no more farm subsidies) would cost $25 billion. Some moderate cuts to transportation spending bring it to $90 billion. Slicing education spending in half would reduce it to about $40 billion. The total for annual spending is now $2.36 trillion.

Retirement programs for federal employees add $137 billion to our spending. Cutting welfare programs back to basically food security programs (food stamps, WIC, the school lunch program) and housing assistance programs will leave federal welfare spending at $150 billion. Total spending has risen to $2.65 trillion.

That leaves only about $300 billion for defense spending. However, employee contributions to the retirement plan and some miscellaneous offsets that the government does not count as part of the $3 trillion in revenue expected next fiscal year bring in $90 billion per year. That means we can spend about $400 billion on defense and still have a balanced budget. This would reduce military spending back to 2003 levels, before we were fighting wars in the Middle East. Not a small cut, but probably feasible.

Most people will probably complain about one or more of the cuts proposed here. That is to be expected. If you didn’t notice, NASA and the Departments of Commerce and Energy were completely eliminated. Deep cuts were made to some other departments (Education, EPA, Agriculture, and HUD). Welfare spending was reduced. However, the point was not to propose a budget that people loved, but to show that a balanced budget was not completely beyond reason.

That last point [my emphasis] is important to highlight for a number of reasons:  first, because it gives lie to the myth of a “budget default” that BOTH parties have and will continue to use as leverage to demand increases in (at the very least potential) deficit spending.  But second, it speaks to what our “representatives” are truly about:  because things would of necessity be cut, the Republicans fear that they will be blamed for any pain felt by those cuts, even as the “draconian” impact of the sequester cuts — the “law of the land!”, incidentally, that Obama is demanding be refigured as part of any “deal,” — were negligible in terms of public perception, and even as we know that Americans overwhelmingly WANT cuts in spending that lead to a balanced budget.

Or, to put it another way, this is about incumbent discomfort over media coverage that will highlight the suffering of those whose welfare benefits are pared back — and the GOP establishment hasn’t the requisite principles to articulate why exactly these cuts have become necessary in the face of a recalcitrant President who won’t compromise and who insists on ever more deficit spending, even as the dollar falls, taxes rise, jobs disappear, median income plummets, and the cost of fuel (and so of commodities, electricity, and generally living expenses) rises.

I’ve written this before — and I posed it to the GOP boosters who keep insisting the Cruz/Lee strategy was “destined to fail” — but the clear “end game,” for those prepared to follow the bouncing budgetary ball, is this:  Should the GOP hold firm (and if Obama is going to reject Susan Collins, it isn’t interested in accepting even the most obvious surrender attempts, believing, with good reason, that the GOP will eventually cave to all its demands, provided he leaves them a fig leaf to claim some sort of victory), there are three possible scenarios that can play out:

1) The President, realizing that a failure to compromise will force him to prioritize spending should a debt limit increase not be granted, will concede the one-year universal waiver on the individual mandate — a waiver he’s already granted to constituents, special interests, and cronies in what amounts to a change in the law as passed; the GOP holds the rhetorical upper hand here, as Obama’s entire propaganda presidency is built around notions of “everybody having skin in the game,” “fairness,” and “social justice.”  Giving waivers to some but not to others is the action of a despot, not a President.

2) Obama can choose to allow the debt ceiling to be reached, then either choose to default — and it would be a choice, which in addition to shaking world markets would lead to a widespread populist uprising and is clearly an impeachable offense under the 14th amendment — or be forced to prioritize spending.  Now, there is no doubt he would try to make Americans suffer, but that strategy has already backfired, showing what a petulant President and a petulant federal Leviathan is willing to do in order to break the will of the people.  And so if he uses monies to fund implementation of ObamaCare while refusing to, say, pay veteran’s benefits, he risks another enormous backlash.  And there’s only so long the media can pretend what we are all witnessing is the work of fringe crazies who wish for a return of KKK prominence and the end to any kind of social safety net.

3) Obama can either rely on liberal law professors and a host of leftist “intellectuals” to argue that section 4 of the 14th amendment demands he ignore the House and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling — an “interpretation” of that section that is completely at odds with legislative history and originalist intent — or he can direct Lew to default, causing a potential meltdown of worldwide financial markets.  Cloward-Piven realized.

Of course, this would probably end poorly, because it would end, my guess is, in some kind of civic uprising.

Both options 2 and 3 are on their face unconstitutional and therefore impeachable offenses.  Leaving the most rational choice option 1,  while the most likely choice the first move in option 3:  a claim that to stave off “default” the President is protecting the “full faith and credit” of the US by “paying its bills” when the GOP won’t let him do so otherwise.

As I noted before, such an argument is constitutionally dishonest and seeks to conflate appropriations with authorization.

In an exchange in the comments to Dorfman’s piece, this is made clear, as Dorfman answers a critic, whose argument I will include here along with Dorfman’s response: