Introduction: The debt ceiling has been raised more than 90 times since the 1940s. This report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan non-profit group educating the public about fiscal policy, details the legislative history of the debt limit in the U.S. The report also looks at the ways in which the debt limit has been used as a mechanism to focus Washington’s attention on our fiscal challenges.
An excerpt from the report:
In this paper, we show that Congress and the President have wrestled with increasing the debt limit many times over the past several decades. In some cases, the Treasury Department has resorted to extraordinary measures such as redeeming certain investments in, and suspending new investments by, federal employee retirement and disability funds in order to delay the increase; and in many cases the increase was tied to other policies, including deficit reduction measures or budget enforcement mechanisms. Although the need to increase the debt limit has led to many tense situations that were not resolved until the last moment, the limit has always been raised in time to prevent the federal government from defaulting on its obligations.
Read the full report here.