The debt ceiling looms.

Here's what I don't understand: why don't the Republicans face reality and allow for the raising of taxes on the billionaires and a few multi-millionaires? Do they honestly believe their own ridiculous rhetoric about taxes hurting the economy? As if defaulting on our loans to China, causing a global financial meltdown and destroying the entire infrastructure of the U.S. economy will help boost the GDP.
The decades in which our country enjoyed the largest growth for the middle class and the most accessibility to the American Dream have been the decades in which taxes were significantly higher than they are now. Eisenhower's 1950s and Clinton's 1990s were very good decades for middle-class Americans. (It's funny how Republicans never mention Eisenhower in their list of great [Republican] presidents.)
I did actually hear a soundbite the other day of Speaker Boehner saying "we cannot accept taxes on job-creators." I don't know if he's noticed lately, but as far as I can tell no one's creating any jobs. At least not for Americans. It seems likely that either the boneheads who we've elected to Congress will allow the U.S. economy to catastrophically fail, or they will accept some form of tax revenue in the new budget deal that they are demanding.
In the past, when we got close to hitting our debt ceiling, Congress would just pass a resolution to raise it. That's it. This time around, in the hopes of torpedoing a presidency which for whatever reason is viewed as a threat to them (read: uppity negro), the Republican-controlled House has demanded that the raising of the debt ceiling be tied to a budget which will compensate for the increase in debt. This, they snickered to themselves, will force spending cuts in all those horrible government programs that help the sick and poor and elderly.
They failed to take into account that another way the budget can cover an increase in debt is my increasing revenue. So the House Democrats have said, we'll cut $4 billion in programs, but we want $4 billion in tax revenue including an increase on the top 1% of earners, and a tax on private jets, and while you're at it, close all those corporate loopholes that allow BP to earn $5 billion in 2010 and pay $0.00 in taxes. We could have used that cash. And John Boehner and Eric Cantor and all their friends are crapping their pants because now they have to choose: TAXES or DEFAULT.