So, Basically, They Think We Can Just Pay the Minimum On Our Credit Card Balance?

Someone, not me, should do a critical analysis of what the Republican Senators and House members think money is, or know about the Economy. Because I'm getting the sense that they don't know much. This is not, actually, the confusion they usually display between the Nation's Budget and a Household Budget.  That's bad enough.  Its rather that they think that the money they ordered spent (the actual budget needs of the country that they already voted to fulfill) somehow can both be paid for and not paid for when the interest on the debt comes through.  They seem to think that the interest on the debt, and our debt to ourselves, can be paid off partially--like there's an actual single credit card company out there which will accept a "minimum payment." Granted they at least theoretically accept the notion that if you were to default entirely on the US obligations that would be bad--perhaps they even acknowledge that the rate of interest would bounce up quite severely, thus costing us money we didn't need to be paying.  But I get the sense from the rote way they are repeating the line "we take in X and we only have 20 billion in payments to service the debt so, no problem!" that they have actually all received the same lecture from the same source--and that source is wrong too.  For this, too, we have to fault Boehner and the older heads on Capitol Hill--this isn't just the fall out from popular cultural understandings of money gone wrong. This is a deliberate policy of wilful ignorance. Rand Paul and the others are simply blindly repeating something they have been told during one of those closed door meetings.