This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Not that fiscal responsibility is often thought of as the federal government's long suit. But the increasing level of muttering on Capitol Hill that Congress might hold the necessary raising of the federal debt limit hostage to some as-yet-unnamed plan to cut federal spending amounts to mass hysteria.

Mass, in that, according to a recent poll, only 16 percent of the American people realize that the debt ceiling must be raised.

And hysteria, in that anything that even threatens to cause the United States Treasury to default on its current debt, or be unable to sell the bonds necessary to keep the government going after the middle of next month, would portend an economic meltdown that would make the recession of 2007 seem like the good old days.

Yet even some Democrats in the Senate — the crowd that became the closest thing we have to responsible budgeters since the ruinous Bush tax cuts were passed — are now making noises about how they might oppose a clean vote on raising the debt limit. Otherwise rational senators such as Colorado's Mark Udall have been heard to echo the calls from other Democrats, most of them facing tight re-election fights, to pair the necessary hike in the debt limit to another round of symbolic budget cutting.

It seems that Congress has failed to learn much from the recent round of budgetary brinkmanship. That would be the one a few weeks ago that almost shut down the federal government before the two parties arrived at a shameful deal that harmed some Americans who can least afford it, while making no real dent in the long-term federal debt.

Real progress on the debt won't happen without major changes in the way the government does business, now and for years to come. Those changes will involve reforms to our basic, but expensive, entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Congress and the president will also have to engage in a massive rethink of our military-industrial complex, which even the Pentagon has taken to describing as so unsustainably expensive as to constitute its own threat to national security. And they must address the last decade's folly of lowering the federal tax burden to levels that are both the lowest in more than 30 years and the lowest of any nation we would consider the least bit civilized.

Untying this Gordian knot is necessary, but not quick. Holding the debt limit hostage to some delusion that it can be done easily will only increase the chance of the very fiscal disaster that the budget hawks claim to want to avoid.