This is a paper for my Economic Fundamentals class. For the first half of the term we watched a movie called ” Inside Job.” This movie showed a closer look about what caused the financial meltdown. While watching the movie I came up with notes, questions, and ideas. I began to form a question that I was interested in finding an answer to. My question had to do with the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling was a term that came up in the movie and in the news. So I started gathering information, facts, graphs, and other data to help me answer the questions ” Why raise debt ceiling if we are going to keep breaking it?”
This is my introduction:
When you were younger your parents probably use to tell you “I draw the line here”, and they don’t expect you to cross it. So, if every time you wanted to cross it, you ask them to move it, what would be the reason in drawing the line in the first place. This is the current problem today. Congress attempted to manage and regulate the federal debt in 1917. It started with th Second Liberty Bond Act that helped with funding World War I. The federal government job was to hold keep down interest costs. Congress regulated the choices of the Treasuries debt instruments. The problem is every time Congress set that ceiling and the economy gets close to passing it they raise it and now we are head over heels in debt, houses are being foreclosed, and people are loosing jobs. This study will examine the cause and effect of the Great Depression (1920′s- 1930′s) and compare it to the Great Recession (2001-2011).
Please refer to this link for my full paper: