This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Ever get tired of all the media coverage of the “debt ceiling?”

I do, though it could be contended, properly I submit, that the subject is worth noting because it carries so much weight for the future of the American economy.

So far, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have been unable to find middle ground because advocates on both sides don’t want to give, apparently no matter the consequences.

Beyond the daily news coverage, I did get a little respite the other day when I read an excellent column by Ben Zimmer who writes on the derivation of words for the Wall Street Journal.  This time his column appeared under this headline:  A depression-era phrase for government spending caps comes from a medieval word for putting a cover on something.

He went on:

“The federal government has been thrown into a precarious financial position as negotiations continue between President Biden and congressional Republicans over the debt ceiling, the limit on how much money the government can borrow.

“That limit is set by Congress, and when it is reached, the debt ceiling must be raised or suspended if the Treasury Department is to avoid a potentially disastrous default.

“The ‘debt ceiling’ is a peculiar metaphor, if you stop and think about it. Unlike a ceiling in a house, the debt ceiling can be raised again and again, as Congress has done in the past.  And some economists argue that the debt ceiling is merely a political distraction and should be removed entirely — not a wise move when dealing with an actual ceiling, architecturally speaking.

Zimmer asks, “how did this economic figure of speech get hoisted up in the first place?”

He answers his own question.

“It did not take long for ‘ceiling’ to take on more figurative uses for something that hangs overhead, like a ‘ceiling of stars.’

“The word ‘ceiling’ goes back to the Middle English verb ‘ceil,’ which originally referred to putting a cover or lining over something.  It likely came via French from the Latin verb ‘celare’ meaning ‘to conceal,’ though it could also be related to ‘caelare’ meaning ‘to carve.’

“To ‘ceil’ a space could mean to cover it with panels, and eventually ‘ceiling’ came to be used for the paneling itself.

“By the 16th century, ‘ceiling’ had narrowed its meaning to the surface covering the upper part of a room, consisting of boards or plaster.  The Coverdale Bible of 1535, the first complete Bible in English, referred to ‘sylinges’ made of cedar in the Song of Solomon, while a 1598 translation of a work by the Roman historian Tacitus told of three treacherous senators who hid themselves ‘between the roofs and the seeling’ of a house.

“The French metaphorical usage may have also played a role in the way that ‘ceiling,’ came to be used in aeronautics, for the maximum altitude that an aircraft can reach.”

In the 1930s, “ceiling” entered the economic realm when, Zimmer reports, it was first applied to the upper limit of prices, spending, and the like.

While Congress began imposing a limit on federal debt as early as World War I, that limit didn’t get called a “debt ceiling” immediately. The phrase first cropped up at the municipal level in a 1933 article in the Indianapolis News about what happened when “the city reached its debt ceiling” imposed by the state legislature.

The following year, an Associated Press report said the national “public debt ceiling” was “still invisible” and bound to rise as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration sought more federal spending.

In 1939, Congress began imposing debt ceiling limits, originally at about $45 billion, though, by the end of World War II, the ceiling grew to $300 billion.

How about today?

Well, the current ceiling, the one the subject of so much media, “rests” at $31.4 trillion.  Yes, that’s “trillion!”

It is hard to fathom a trillion.  Only that it’s huge.

Which leads me to two conclusions:

1. Aren’t you glad you now know more about debt ceiling than you did before you happened to read this blog?  Say yes, please.
2. And, with me, don’t you wish the leaders in Washington, D.C. – if that’s what they really are — would get about the business of reaching an agreement to save all of us from more economic travail?  Again, say yes, please.