How much is enough?

Call us Scrooges if you like, but we believe that a $12.1 trillion debt limit is more than enough leeway to run the United States federal government.

Yet, this past week Congress was discussing ways to raise the national debt ceiling the amount government can legally borrow by nearly $2 trillion to a more politically accommodating $14 trillion.

The same week, according to CBS News, the national debt as posted by the Treasury Department already had surpassed the statutory limit approved by Congress. At the time, it showed the nation’s debt at nearly $12.135 trillion, which would be illegal. (That means each citizen’s share of the debt is $39,459, if you’re counting. And we are.)

Fortunately, some moderate Democrats decided this was too much for them and balked at a long-term increase, instead supporting a short- term raise of $300 billion to $12.4 trillion, which allowed Washington to fund existing budgets and revisit the issue at a more convenient time namely, after the mid-term elections in 2010.

A group of moderates also demanded, in exchange for their vote, that a bipartisan commission be set up to look at various tax increases and spending cuts that would help get control of the federal deficit.

One suggestion was to create legislation that would force new spending on federal government programs to be offset by cuts in other government spending or increases in taxes. Creating a bipartisan commission to investigate ways to reduce spending also makes sense to us, since the crushing debt we wrestle with was created with bipartisanship support.

President Barack Obama has spent more than any first-year president in history. In fiscal 2009, the budget was $3.52 trillion with a $1.4 trillion deficit which is $1 trillion more than last year. But, as Sen. Mark Udall pointed out in last Sunday’s Post, the current administration inherited a chunk of this year’s deficit from the previous one.

However, Democrats also were the ones running Congress for the past two years, and since 2007, the federal debt limit has climbed by 39 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal.

So there is plenty of blame to go around. We, in fact, supported spending that contributed to this problem the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP as a necessity to help avoid a more serious financial crisis. But with the continued level of spending in Washington, something clearly needs to be done.

— The Denver Post