Talk:United States fiscal cliff/Archive 2

Suggesting a new section for 2013 debt ceiling debate
request edit I've noticed that this article doesn't provide much information on the 2013 debt-ceiling debate and I wonder if a section on this topic would be helpful for people looking for background about current events. Right now, readers are directed to this article from the United States debt-ceiling crisis, which focuses entirely on events from 2011, however this article doesn't actually have a lot of detail on the current debt ceiling debate.

To help with this I have prepared a new section to add to this article, if other editors think it's ok. I'd like to have this reviewed because I work for The Heritage Foundation and though I have not used any Heritage sources, I have referred to a piece co-written by Heritage Action for America's Michael Needham, and I'm aware that my adding this information directly might be seen by some as a conflict of interest.

Below is the text I'd like to add to the article. I'll keep an eye on this talk page in case there are any questions. I hope that another editor will be able to take a look at this and help me make this change. Thanks! Thurmant (talk) 19:15, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

In January 2013, following the signing of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, preventing the projected fiscal cliff, political debate focused onto the debt ceiling. The ceiling is a limit set by Congress upon the amount of money the government can borrow for public spending and was set at $16.4 trillion in 2011. The debt limit was technically reached on December 31, 2012, however "extraordinary measures" were taken by the Treasury Department to allow spending to continue. According to a letter from Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner to Congress in mid-January, the department projected that they would exhaust the measures allowing spending to continue between mid-February and early March. Once the debt limit is reached, the Treasury is not able to borrow more money to pay for financial commitments, unless the debt ceiling is raised.

The decision whether or not to raise the debt limit, thereby increasing the amount that the government can borrow, became a point of political debate in early January 2013. President Obama argued that Congress should raise the debt ceiling without conditions in order to prevent the U.S from defaulting on government debt. Raising the debt limit was also supported by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. However, Republicans insisted that an increase in the debt limit should occur only if accompanied by an equal level of spending cuts to reduce the federal deficit. In particular, the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner and the Senate Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell both argued that the debt limit should not be raised unless spending cuts were made reduce the budget deficit in order to prevent further fiscal problems in the future.

In a press conference on January 14, 2013, the President stated that not raising the debt limit would cause delays in payments including benefits and government employees' salaries and lead to default on government debt. Republicans have argued that the Treasury can avoid debt default by prioritizing interest payments on government debt over other obligations. In a Politico opinion piece on January 15, the leaders of Heritage Action for America, the Family Research Council and the Club for Growth argued that rather than increasing the level of debt, or refusing the raise the limit in order to cut costs and reduce the deficit, that a raise in the debt ceiling should be accompanied by a plan to balance the budget within ten years, through reduced spending in the discretionary budget as well as for entitlements.

Fitch Ratings has stated that delays in raising the debt limit could result in a formal review of the credit rating of the U.S., potentially leading to it being downgraded from AAA. However, the company also stated that failing to create an agreement to reduce long-term budget deficit without negatively impacting the country's economic recovery could also result in a downgrade of its rating.


 * Disagree. The looming debt ceiling crisis is related to the fiscal cliff but it's not part of the fiscal cliff. It logically fits better in its own article or in an article about debt ceiling crisEs (plural). Besides, the proposed language suffers from severe WP:NPV problems, since it gives much greater weight to Republican arguments than Democratic ones, and excludes some very notable comments by the Obama and others. Though I do appreciate you being upfront with the conflict of interest. --Nstrauss (talk) 19:54, 17 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Nstrauss, thanks for commenting. I get your point about the current debt ceiling debate needing its own page. My suggestion here was based on the fact that readers are directed to this article for information on the debt ceiling crisis (see hatnote on United States debt-ceiling crisis article) and also that consensus reached here seemed to be that discussion of the debt ceiling debate should be kept in this article. I'm happy to consider other options, including creating a new page for this topic if there's consensus to do so.


 * On your other point, I'm not averse to adding other details as needed to make sure my draft is neutral and I also expect that others might have thoughts about information to add. Do you have specific information in mind that you think can be added to my draft? If you would like to add more, that's also fine with me. Thurmant (talk) 15:13, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't think it can be said that consensus was reached on putting such material in this article. There were only 2 editors in that discussion and RoyGoldsmith qualified his position as "very tentative" and only "if the debt ceiling is resolved by the same measures that resolve the fiscal cliff" (which of course it wasn't). So really, it was a lone editor's position taken well before House Republicans floated the idea of a 3-month can-kicking. As for the hatnote at the debt ceiling crisis article, see this discussion -- Geraldshields11 apparently agrees with me. --Nstrauss (talk) 18:23, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Every aspect of the "cliff" was set in motion by a previous debt ceiling debate, so I'd rather have this intertwined, rather that split into its own section. Hcobb (talk) 17:37, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * If we include everything in this article that was "set in motion" by responses to the fiscal cliff then this article will become a giant and unsightly amoeba. The stage for every budget negotiation is set by previous budget negotiations. Yes it's difficult to untangle them but that's the challenge we face. --Nstrauss (talk) 18:23, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Sorry if I'm a bit blunt here, but where should this information go? Currently you're saying it doesn't go in this article, meanwhile the editors on the debt ceiling article have voted to rename that page "United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011", so the information clearly doesn't belong there. Right now there's nothing about this for readers who look up this topic on Wikipedia. I'm wary of just creating a new article myself, since I've never done so before and there were some issues raised with my proposed content. Does anyone have a solution? Thurmant (talk) 20:31, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I certainly understand your conundrum. The issue has been floated in at least one discussion but AFAIK it hasn't gone anywhere. I'm no expert at such things but I suppose I'd recommend creating a new article which could then be merged into another article fairly easily if there's consensus to do so. --Nstrauss (talk) 20:50, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Ok, I've gone ahead and created a new article for this topic here: United States debt-ceiling crisis 2013 It's the first article I've created from scratch so I've borrowed the basic format and templates from the United States debt-ceiling crisis article. I used my draft above as the basis for the article text, but added in another Democratic viewpoint to address your concern that it focused too much on conservative views.


 * Also, I'd like to invite editors from here to help develop the new article, since it's fairly short right now and could do with input from others on what to include. I'll also leave a message over at Talk:United States debt-ceiling crisis to the same effect. Thurmant (talk) 15:52, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Bravo for being WP:BOLD. Btw, it looks like you made a copyedit error in your COI disclosure, you probably want to fix that. --Nstrauss (talk) 18:34, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Recharacterization of potential recession in lead
There was a [recent edit] which changed the characterization of the potential recession mentioned in the lead. I have some questions and comments about that edit:


 * Why was the phrase "...followed by growth later in 2013" removed?
 * Employment is a lagging indicator of macroeconomic activity and one of many indicators of a recession -- a few months after the start of a recession, the unemployment rate goes up. Other indicators include: GDP, investment spending, capacity utilization, household income, business profits, deflation, bankruptcies and others. It's redundant to mention any of those in conjunction with the recession, especially in the first paragraph where concision is demanded.

I think it was better stated as: "...would have likely led to a mild recession in early 2013 followed by growth later in 2013."  Sparkie82 ( t • c )  02:15, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Not at all. The effect on employment specifically may be of general interest to the reader and the material is sourced. Regarding, "followed by growth later in 2013", that isn't what the source says. The source provided from the CBO states, "Such fiscal tightening will lead to economic conditions in 2013 that will probably be considered a recession, with real GDP declining by 0.5 percent between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2013." Somedifferentstuff (talk) 07:39, 5 January 2013 (UTC)


 * First, that report you are citing is an old report issued last summer. We should work with the most current data available prior to the cliff. The most recent full report on the fiscal cliff was issued Nov. 8, 2012. Here is the unredacted first paragraph of the summary from that report:
 * "Substantial changes to tax and spending policies are scheduled to take effect in January 2013, significantly reducing the federal budget deficit. According to CBO’s projections, if all of that fiscal tightening occurs, real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) will drop by 0.5 percent in 2013 (as measured by the change from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013)—reflecting a decline in the first half of the year and renewed growth at a modest pace later in the year. That contraction of the economy will cause employment to decline and the unemployment rate to rise to 9.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013. After next year, by the agency’s estimates, economic growth will pick up, and the labor market will strengthen, returning output to its potential level (reflecting a high rate of use of labor and capital) and shrinking the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent by 2018."
 * We need to boil all that down into a single sentence within the first paragraph of the article's lead. It says that they projected a mild recession in the first half of 2013 with a recover beginning later in 2013. The CBO statement also has specifics about GDP and employment. If we try to squeeze in all those specifics we end up with a monster sentence that says that there's a mild recession and lower GDP and lower employment starting in 2013 (except that the employment rate lags the general economy by a few months) and then a recovery and increased GDP later in 2013 and higher employment beginning in 2014.
 * As I said above, a recession implies all those other metrics. If we simply say that there was a projected mild recession followed by a recovery it accurately and concisely explains what the projection was. I'm not saying that all those details and more can't be included in the article, just not in the first paragraph.  Sparkie82 ( t • c )  20:26, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I disagree. The first paragraph isn't overly long and mentioning the estimate on unemployment isn't a problem. It's telling information and more relatable (less abstract) than GDP. Somedifferentstuff (talk) 22:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Okay. Now I better understand why you want to mention the change in employment. I'm I big fan of making things more understandable to more people. We also need to mention the recovery, too, or else it looks like we are applying POV to the characterization of the macroeconomic effects. So we must also mention that the projection was for a moderate recovery to the labor market after the uptick in the unemployment rate. As part of making the explanation more understandable and to avoid recentism, I suggest that we avoid providing a specific unemployment percentage rate. Ten or fifteen years from now when the unemployment rate is closer to 15-20%, a rate of 9% will sound like a low rate, when what we want to say it that the projection was for the unemployment rate to increase and then recover. Perhaps, for purposes of simplicity in the first paragraph and to make it easier for people to grasp, we could just mention the direction of movement for these economic indicators without specifying exact percentages which will eventually lose meaning over time. (We can go into more detail later in the article.)  Sparkie82 ( t • c )  00:52, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That "Okay" above means "Okay, I understand", not "Okay, I agree with your edit". I'd like you to take a crack at fixing your edit based on what I just said. If not, I'll go ahead and do it myself. (or anyone else can have a go at it...)  Sparkie82 ( t • c )  05:56, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It has been more than a week -- I rewrote the sentence to include the higher unemployment as well as the projected recovery per above discussion.  Sparkie82 ( t • c )  19:03, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It has been more than a week -- I rewrote the sentence to include the higher unemployment as well as the projected recovery per above discussion.  Sparkie82 ( t • c )  19:03, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Lead third paragraph
The third paragraph of the lead section has too many numbers. When I put on my "casual reader" hat and read that paragraph my eyes start glazing over. It needs to be simplified and made much more accessible and inviting per WP:MOSINTRO. Thoughts? --Nstrauss (talk) 20:08, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I just moved a sentence from the 3rd paragraph to the 1st, but the only number it had was to specify a date. Keeping the figures to a minimum is more important in the first paragraph than the rest of the lead, but you're right, there are a lot of detailed amounts there. Percentages are usually okay -- people can handle that, I think. Maybe that long sentence listing all the specifics about the implementation of the taxes could be made into a list and put into a box or table along the right side, under the infobox. Later, when the spending is hashed out, those details could be included in there, too.  Sparkie82 ( t • c )  01:18, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Needs updating.
This article is well-sourced, but largely speculative, which is always a bit odd for an encyclopaedia. The most of it anticipates changes that "will happen" over the next few years, albeit this was 2-3 years ago. Now that the future has largely become past, can we not 1: change the anticipatory language of the article and 2: find sources to reflect on the accuracy of all these highly intelligent sources? At least we could draw in the actual line against the predicted lines? 20040302 (talk) 14:05, 31 December 2015 (UTC)