The Debt Ceiling: The Rise of the Machines

Get ready for the economy Terminator to hit on August 3, 2011. The rise of the machines may not react positively to to debt ceiling deal that appears, thank goodness, to have fallen apart this weekend after Obama decided he was going to aggressively raise taxes.

It appears the computers and not Congress will have the last say about the debt ceiling. Reuters reports:

If Treasury were to decide to delay payments, it would need to re-program government computers that generate automatic payments as they fall due — a massive and difficult undertaking. Treasury makes about 3 million payments each day.

Considering the massive size of government and this is less than a month away, this appears next to impossible, which means we are going over the debt ceiling whether we like it or not.

That’s a near-impossible task, and as Felix Salmon points out:

Realistically, then, the government is likely to breach the current debt ceiling no matter what Congress agrees. A failure to lift it would be a bit like an edict to a steaming supertanker that it had to stop dead: no matter how much force of law that edict has, sheer momentum is going force many basic operations of the public fisc to continue for some period of days or weeks.

SKYNET HAS TAKEN OVER THE GOVERNMENT

America under Barack Obama's leadership sounds like America has been taken over by Skynet in its first stages. The Washington Examiner writes:

It’s quite a picture: we’ve got liberty-threatening legislation signed by presidential Autopen, an illegal war fought by remote-controlled robot assassins, and out-of-control spending on autopilot. If only FedGov followed the First Law of Robotics.