Iowa’s Ashley Hinson’s ‘dangerous talk’: anatomy of a debt misinformation campaign

As the U.S. Congress debated increasing the debt ceiling in September, Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) declared she would not be writing Democrats “a blank check to spend as much as they want, on whatever they want.”

That rhetoric is “dangerous talk,” Hans Isakson, economist and professor emeritus at the University of Northern Iowa, said in an op-ed for the Des Moines Register.

Referencing a press release from Hinson, Isakson said she “distorts the truth about the debt limit.”

Suspending the limit would not provide Democrats with a blank check. It must be done to pay for tax cuts passed by Hinson’s party, as well as fund government salaries, Social Security and “pay all the obligations already incurred by the federal government,” Isakson wrote.

The alternative to raising or suspending the debt ceiling? Loan defaults that would tank the economy.

According to Moody Analytics, a default would have caused Social Security payment delays, loss of food assistance, an unemployment rate approaching 9%, a one-third plunge in stock prices and an estimated $15 trillion loss in household wealth.

Shortly after voting against the only way to avoid a default — the short-term, $480 billion debt limit raise was signed by President Joe Biden on Oct. 14 — Hinson issued a press release accusing Democrats of “asking for a blank check book to spend as much as they want without worrying about the repercussions.”

She also said it was “critical that we don’t default on our debts.”

Her statements, including the press release, were fact checked as a bright-red “False” by PolitiFact.

“Raising the debt ceiling is an indication to countries and individuals the U.S. has borrowed from that the government intends to pay its debts back,” Iowa State University economics professor Joydeep Bhattacharya told PolitiFact.

New spending proposals must go through Congress, and the debt ceiling raise isn’t for new spending, Bhattacharya said. The raise funds programs that already exist and have congressional authorization.

Hinson lashed out at the “liberal fact checkers,” in a response to the PolitiFact article on Facebook. “Democrats tried to suspend the debt limit until 2022 to have a blank checkbook to spend your money how they want to.”

As the country ran up against a deadline for default, Hinson, apparently learning nothing, renewed her “blank check” rhetoric.

The bill “literally has a blank space for Democratic leaders to determine how much they want to raise the debt limit,” she said in a tweet accompanied by an image of that page in the bill on Dec. 7. “Speaker Pelosi and President Biden have shown they cannot be trusted with your paycheck and certainly not a blank check.”

“Hinson is trying to lie her way out of admitting an ugly truth — that she cannot be trusted by Iowa families and small businesses to look out for their interests,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Elena Kuhn said in an emailed statement.

The measure authorizing a $2.5 trillion increase cleared Congress on Dec. 14, nearly along party lines and with almost no time to spare. The Treasury Department had warned they would be unable to meet the nation’s obligations soon after the Dec. 15.

Hinson, once again, voted against that bill.