Justin Wolfers, NPR All Things Considered: "Just like your family has to live within a budget, you might say you want Congress to live within a budget, but defaulting on the debt does not reduce our spending. It just means we stiff our creditors. So we default. That will teach them. That confuses who gets hurt."
"And that's when the financial system freezes up. That means there's no more borrowing. Businesses stop investing. The markets go absolutely haywire. And so that's the sense in which all of this could very quickly look, in many respects, like the financial crisis of 2008. Well, the only thing that's different is that the self-inflicted shock."
