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In a welcome change of pace from what we saw on the Sunday shows and on his own network last week, guest host Ezra Klein took the Last Word viewers through what we could actually expect to happen if our politicians were irresponsible enough to allow the United States to default on our debt.

This is what would happen if we breach the debt ceiling:

Want to make sure your calendar is clear when we hit the debt ceiling? Then don’t schedule anything between Feb. 15 and March 1.

That, according to a new analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, is the likely range for debt-ceiling doomsday: The day when the Treasury Department runs out of room to maneuver and we actually begin to default on obligations. Either Congress figures out the debt ceiling before that date or things get very bad, very fast.

Imagine we hit the debt ceiling Feb. 15. The BPC’s analysis suggests that federal spending over the next month will be about $450 billion. Federal revenues will be nearer to $277 billion. That means that the government will have to default on about 40 percent of its obligations.

The choices it will face quickly become stark. It can cover interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, education, food stamps and other low-income transfers, and a handful of other programs, but doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else. The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease.

This is the difference between a debt-ceiling shutdown and a government shutdown. As Shai Akabas, a research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, puts it, “in a government shutdown, the government is shutting down future obligations. With the debt ceiling, They’ve already obligated the money. They owe these people the payments now, and they can’t make them.”

Then, of course, there’s the financial-market chaos. Trillions of dollars in derivatives and other financial products are based on the interest rate that the federal government pays when borrowing. U.S. government debt is, after all, supposed to be the safest investment in the world, and so it’s used to “benchmark” all other sorts of debt. A spike in the Treasury rate would mean a spike in credit card rates and mortgage rates, not to mention all manner of more esoteric financial derivatives. The damage to the economy would be tremendous, and it would occur at every level, from individuals looking for a loan to buy a house to hedge funders trying to play the markets. Read on...

Ezra needs to send his post over to the other hosts on MSNBC like David Gregory and Joe Scarborough so they quit lying to their audiences about the consequences of default and pretending that it would only be a partial government shutdown.

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After first allowing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to use the lie that people are living longer as a reason to raise the retirement ages for Medicare and Social Security and to push means testing for future beneficiaries, Meet the Press host David Gregory then allowed McConnell to play the same dangerous game that's becoming far too common these days -- downplaying the consequences of defaulting on our debt and conflating it with a government shutdown.

I watched CNN State of the Union host Candy Crowley do the same thing during her interview with Lindsey Graham and This Week host George Stephanopoulos pulled the same number on his show as well. And as Brian Beutler at TPM noted a couple of days ago, we had Senators Pat Toomey and John Cornyn using the same language earlier this week: GOP Senators: Not Raising The Debt Limit Might Not Be So Bad:

During the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, and continuing through today, Republicans have attempted to falsely portray President Obama’s insistence that Congress increase the debt limit as a demand for unlimited power to spend money.

Now that the tax issues at stake in the fiscal cliff negotiations have been addressed, the GOP is once again contemplating not raising the debt limit. And just as they misleadingly describe the nature of borrowing authority, they’re now also suggesting that not raising the debt limit might not be such a bad thing.

“We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown -which is what that could mean,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) on MSNBC Wednesday. “A temporary disruption because we have to furlough the workers at the Department of Education, or close down some national parks, or not cut the grass on the Mall, that’s not optimal, it’s disruptive, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the path that we’re on.”

In a Friday Houston Chronicle op-ed, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a member of GOP leadership, used the same language.

“It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country,” he wrote.

The goal is to present to both the public, and perhaps rank and file Republicans who don’t fully understand the nature of the debt limit threat, that the consequences would be fairly modest — to foster a climate in which raising the debt limit without legislative concessions from Democrats will be impossible.

But for two years now, experts — from academia to the Treasury Department to the Congressional Budget Office — have warned in plain terms that the actual consequences would be much worse: a recessionary drop in spending at best and a calamitous debt default at worse.

A government shutdown, like the ones Republicans precipitated in 1995, occurs when Congress fails or refuses to appropriate funds for government operations. Because the executive branch lacks the power to raise and spend money on its own, government functions cease until the political pressure builds on Congress to pass appropriations and then those operations resume.

Not raising the debt limit, by contrast, leaves the government far short of the money it needs to execute the spending Congress has told it to undertake. That would be unprecedented, and put the executive branch in legally uncharted territory: unable legally to borrow the money needed to pay all of its bills, but still required by law to pay them. It would impact services in a chaotic and unpredictable fashion, while removing tens of billions of dollars a month from the economy — many times the contractionary effect of the fiscal cliff’s sequestration provisions.

It’s likely that the government would eventually fail to service all of its debt, damaging U.S. credit and touching off a major financial catastrophe.

Toomey, along with Reps. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, played a similar role in 2011 debt limit fight, arguing that breaching the debt limit for a brief amount of time would be relatively harmless.

History’s repeating itself. Read on ...

With the help of the likes of David Gregory and his ilk in the media. And for more on why means testing and raising the retirement age is a bad idea, go read here and here and here.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Tea party backed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Sunday insisted only Democrats were threatening default on the debt even though he has vowed not to raise the debt ceiling until Congress passes a balanced budget amendment.

"Let me be very clear about this," Cruz told Fox News host John Roberts. "I do not support default on the debt. We should never default on the debt, and the only players on Washington who are threatening default on the debt are President Barack Obama and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid."

"In any given month, federal tax revenues are approximately 200 billion a month, interest on the debt is 30 to 40 billion dollars a month," the Texas Republican continued. "There is plenty of revenue to service the debt. And any responsible president would have stood at that podium and said, under any circumstance -- whatever happens with the debt ceiling -- we will always pay our debt, we will never default on the debt."

"And the reason the president isn't doing that is he's trying to scare people, he is trying to raise the spectre of a financial apocalypse."

A petition on the Ted Cruz for Senate campaign website calls on Congress to "hold the line" and prevent any debt ceiling increases without a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. constitution.

"I will stand with conservatives across the country in telling Congress not to raise the debt ceiling without a Balanced Budget Amendment," the petition states.

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Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) says that his party should agree to raise taxes on the wealthy before January because Republicans can force cuts to earned benefits like Medicare and Social Security next year by holding the debt ceiling hostage.

"I do think it's time for the president -- he knows there's a growing body of folks who are willing to look at the rate on the top 2 percent but that's only -- it could be $400 billion, it might be $800 billion, depending on how you deal with that," Corker told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. "Many of us that are fiscal and conservatives are beginning to see that we could end up with a lesser revenue increase by agreeing to that."

"The shift to focus in entitlements is where we need to go," the Tennessee Republican added. "And again, it's a shame that we're not just sitting down and solving this, but Republicans know that they have the debt ceiling that's coming up right around the corner and the leverage is going to shift as soon as we get beyond this issue."

Corker pointed out that Republicans could use the debt ceiling to "do the same thing we did last time."

"If the president wants to raise the debt limit by $2 trillion, we get $2 trillion in spending reductions. And hopefully this time it's mostly oriented towards entitlements," he insisted.

Speaking to business leaders last week, President Barack Obama said that he would refuse to let Republicans use the debt ceiling in budget negotiations this time.

"I will not play that game," the president explained. "Because we've got to break that habit before it starts."

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Nothing like more threats from House Speaker John Boehner on whether they'd agree to pay for the debt incurred under his and the Republicans watch during these "fiscal cliff" negotiations. Boehner: Debt Limit Will Have ‘Price Tag’:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) affirmed that if a deal to avert the fiscal cliff includes raising the debt limit, then it must come with a "price tag," at a news conference Thursday.

"If we're gonna talk about the debt limit in this, then there's gonna be some price tag associated with it," Boehner said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said that raising the debt limit must be part of the deal.

As Jed Lewison explained, there are some alternatives to Boehner's hostage taking:

The good news here is that there will only be another debt limit crisis if the White House and Congress want there to be one—and we've seen no indication that the White House wants one.

In 2011, most people assumed that congressional failure to raise the debt limit would automatically force default and financial apocalypse would soon follow. But as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin argued, that was a bad assumption. If Congress were to fail to lift the debt limit, the administration would still have several options to avert catastrophe. One such option would be to essentially ignore the debt limit because it conflicts with congressional statues appropriating funds beyond that limit. Another option would be to mint a trillion dollar coin and deposit it in the Federal Reserve.

And as Ezra Klein wrote today, the Republicans are demanding that the Democrats make cuts to the Medicare program, but because their only policy on this has been premium support, which is a non-starter, they don't have any proposals of their own, so they're trying to get President Obama and the Democrats to give specifics: The GOP’s Medicare confusion:

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Sunday challenged House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to bring middle-class tax credits up for an immediate vote to prove they wouldn't be "held hostage" to tax cuts for the rich.

"I challenge the Speaker right now to bring the middle income tax cuts to the floor," Pelosi told ABC's George Stephanopoulos, agreeing with Boehner that budget discussions shouldn't wait until after the election.

"Bringing middle-income tax cuts to floor now, passing those would help our economic recovery, would be a clear signal that the upper-end tax cuts for the wealthy will expire because middle-income tax cuts would not be held hostage to those."

Pelosi also said that the Speaker's threat to allow the government to default by blocking increases to the debt ceiling in order to force the Obama administration to accept deep budget cuts were "over the edge."

"Here we go again," she warned. "Last year, the threat of not lifting the debt ceiling caused our credit rating to be lowered. This is not a responsible, mature, sensible place for us to go. We all know we have to reduce the deficit. We have to do it in a balanced way. The Speaker wants to go over the edge."

(h/t: National Journal)

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More fearmongering on the Super Committee failing to reach a deal to avoid the automatic triggered cuts that will come if the committee can't reach agreement soon. If you knew nothing about what the Republicans latest offer was and were just watching the segment above, you'd think both sides were being terribly unreasonable and wondering why, oh why that silly John Kerry won't give in and let the Republicans have what they want and that the Democrats had been offered some sort of "balanced" deal.

From Dave Dayden over at FDL News Desk, here's what the Republicans were offering today -- Republican’s Latest Super Committee Offer is a 181:1 Ratio of Spending Cuts to Tax Increases.

Whoo boy that's some real balance there. Why won't those silly Democrats agree to that very "serious" plan? I can't imagine. Here's more from DDay.

Republicans apparently just submitted a last-ditch effort to get agreement on the Super Committee. It was a $545 billion proposal, less than half of the minimum requirement to avoid all of the automatic trigger cuts. And it included $3 billion in tax increases.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s a ratio of about 181:1.

Democrats rejected it.

It’s almost getting fun to watch the catfood commission fail so thoroughly. If we’re already submitting proposals of less than half the minimum requirement, then there’s nothing left to fear from this thing. It’s also good news that the unbalanced proposal was rejected, because that probably included a lot of cuts already offered in past proposals by Democrats.

It will be fun to watch Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and David Walker and Maya MacGuineas and all the rest whine and cry next week when this thing gets a real Viking funeral. What they know, but won’t tell you, is that simply doing nothing would lead to $7.1 trillion in deficit reduction. In other words, just offsetting any changes to current law will accomplish about twice as much as their alleged goal for cutting deficits. They won’t tell you this because it comes primarily from letting tax cuts expire. [...]

The point is not to let all of this happen; the point is not even to pay for all the fixes to this, necessarily. The point is to show that the medium term budget is ALREADY in primary balance, and that just relatively following that guide path – even while allowing for targeted measures to improve the economy – is completely sufficient, rather than cutting everyone’s Social Security and Medicare benefits.

181:1, and host Erin Burnett and her panel of Jim Bianco, John Avlon and David Gergen were allowing the viewers of CNN to think the Democrats were being offered anything they should have taken seriously. We need to just let these Bush tax cuts expire and put an end to this saber rattling over austerity measures, but the Villagers in the corporate media are desperate to continue to push the narrative that there are no solutions for this other than inflicting pain on the majority of the electorate rather than ask the richest among us to pay any more taxes.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman warned Sunday that proposed spending cuts in a deal to raise the nation's debt ceiling would end up hurting the economy.

"From the perspective of a rational person, we shouldn't even be talking about spending cuts at all now," Krugman told ABC's Christiane Amanpour. "We have nine percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment... If you have a situation in which you are permanently going to raise the unemployment rate -- which is what this is going to do -- that's actually going to reduce future revenues."

"These spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. Then on top of that, we've got these budget cuts, which are entirely -- basically the Republicans [saying], 'We'll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what you want' and the president said, 'Okay.' That's what happened."

"We used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade. We're going to look to them as a role model. They did better than we're doing," he added. "There is no light at the end of this tunnel. We're having a debate in Washington which is all about, 'Gee, we're going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent the Republicans' terms or 100 percent the Republicans' terms?' The answer is 100 percent."

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Fox News contributor Bill Kristol said Sunday that by not overselling the debt deal, Republicans could later use it to win the White House.

"Assuming [the deal] happens, I think Republicans will have to say to their constituents and the country, you negotiate the debt ceiling agreement with the president you have," he told Fox News' Bret Baier. "This is the best we could get and the responsible thing to do, but they should not oversell it."

"It is not a great deal in my opinion. It's an adequate deal, perhaps, if defense spending isn't cut too much. And it certainly doesn't fundamentally deal with the debt problem we have or the economic problems we have," Kristol added.

"So, I think Republicans should probably take the deal that is being negotiated today, but they should not make it seem as if this is some great victory. They need to say, we need a different president in 2013."

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As unhappy as I am about how this whole debt ceiling hostage taking is going and wondering what we're in for after we get more details on what's being agreed to right now, I was glad to see someone finally push back at this Republican talking point I hear them repeat day after day, week after week -- Democrats never passed a budget and so that makes the horrid Ryan budget passed by the House somehow "responsible."

Sen. Dick Durbin finally shot that one down on Fox News Sunday this morning and explained why they never got anything passed -- 60 votes -- or in other words, Republican filibusters and obstruction.

BAIER: Senator Kyl, when you hear the president say this no way to run the government, you know, that we'll likely also face another standoff at the end of September when the continuing resolution runs out and government funding -- you know, we're up against another government shutdown. You know, former White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once famously said, "Never waste a crisis."

Do Republicans now risk become the -- becoming the party that's always pushing up to the cliff, always using that cliff to try to extract concessions? I mean, do you fear the American people will have crisis fatigue, if they don't already, and that it will hurt your party?

KYL: You mentioned the possibility of a continuing resolution. Why would Congress have to pass a continuing resolution? Because the Senate Democrats now, for the third year in a row, will not have passed a budget. That's their job.

The House Republicans have passed a budget. Senate Democrats said no to that budget. So I think it's very unfair to suggest that Republicans are responsible.

We don't have the votes in the U.S. Senate. But where they do have the votes, in the House of Representatives, they've done their job.

BAIER: Senator Durbin, why haven't the Senate Democrats passed a budget?

DURBIN: It's called 60 votes. And what it boils down to is this: we have 53 Democratic senators.

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