You mean keep a sensible budget and only buy/spend what you can afford and save the rest for a rainy day? Sounds right to me, and pretty basic too. You would think the government of the United States would realise this. Its amazing how bad spending has spun out of control.

It's not about partial shutdown, nor even about the potential damage of millions of social security recipients going without for a bit. It's about credit ratings and the domino effect. We've sustained such huge deficits because of a high credit rating and the fact that our bonds are still a very good investment.

The venom of partial default will not be about what we can't pay, it'll be the backlash of investor confidence, it'll be the fact that Japan, with very high debt themselves has a lot of their positive balance sheet sunk into U.S. bonds, or China, whose consistent growth has been helping to float the global economy through recent turmoils, who also have a rather large proprotion of holdings in bonds that may suddenly find themselves sharply reduced in value

Imagine the credit-default-swap meltdown, but played out in the treasuries of the largest economies in the world, rather than in the banking sector. I'm not saying this will happen, but this is where the danger really lies here

Which poll gives you that information? Here's a poll that gives a very different answer - only 28% of Americans support only spending cuts while 66% support a combination of spending cuts and tax increases.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/07/18/politics/main20080496.shtml

The cut, cap and balance plan is one from the extreme economic right, not from moderates, and it's proposed constitutional 'balanced budget' amendment is insanity.

@Viper1. While you're correct in saying that the government will pay interest on its debts first (as it is constitutionally oblidged to do) you're incorrect in saying that it will have to add new programs to go over its debt limit. Its costs for existing programs are above its revenues - as such things like social security might not be able to be paid until the debt ceiling is raised.

the bolded is a complete lie. aside form the fact that after we pay the interest on the debt, pay our soldier pay medicare recipients, we would still have enough to write the Social Security checks. SS payments are completely seperate from our debt and what revenue we have to pay it with. its filed completely diffferent, they have no correlation on each other, and besides, we are supposed to have a social security trust fund. or thats what politicians have been telling us since SS inception... *wink wink nudge nudge*

Well, it's not their money, so they don't give a shit what they do with it.  And really, they don't need to cut any programs like Social Security or Medicare.  All they need to do is look at "pork" spending.  It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that half of taxpayers' money is spent on Congressmen's pet projects and/or given out to their buddies as "business deals."  Let's not forget that report that came out months ago that showed government had 100's of redundant committees/agencies/programs that were given jobs/goals that were already being handled by another agency or program.  Was anything done to those redundant government bodies?  Nope.

And now we want to save money by forming and giving Congress's taxing power to some stupid committee that will probably be all show and no action.  Who wants to bet that those on the committee will also get a huge raise?  Way to save.  In the end, it's become like going to a mall and giving a huge wad of cash to a known shopaholic, then expecting them not to blow it all while you use the restroom.

I'm no expert on the matter but my understanding is that social security in the US is self funding in that the revenues exceed the outlays, nevertheless those revenues form a part of the net revenues of the US government and in the absence of being able to raise the debt ceiling social security payments may not be of high enough priority - the revenue might be routed elsewhere. I don't know what the priority of payments is (apart from interest being top priority to avoid default) but there is a real chance social security isn't up there - there are millions of people employed by the federal government afterall.