just as the ceiling is the highest you can jump before you bang your head.
Budget Ceilings
Also known as a budget constraint, a budget ceiling represents that maximum point of a budget, or its cap. When a project reaches its budget ceiling, funds are depleted. Two types of budget ceilings exist: those imposed by some sort of authority as a means of controlling expenditure within a certain sector, and those imposed by extenuating circumstances such as the state of the global economy. The former type of budget ceiling occurs deliberately, when a governing body decides to cap expenditure. The latter type of budget ceiling occurs as a result of a series of external economic forces beyond the control of any one person or group of persons.
Raising the ceiling is allowing the government to borrow more funds, i.e. the ceiling limiting the stack of money is moved up.
No, it is not a due date. The only thing the date to do with it is that is the point when the maximum amount of money allowed has been borrowed.
No, because the ceiling and the budget are two different items. Realistically, there should not be a debt ceiling at all, since the government should be authorized to pay its debts. It was created so Congress could use some voodoo explanation at how they were saving money.
Money was being sequestered by using across the board cuts.
Sequestration
Under sequestration, an amount of money equal to the difference between the cap set in the Budget Resolution and the amount actually appropriated is "sequestered" by the Treasury and not handed over to the agencies to which it was originally appropriated by Congress. In theory, every agency has the same percentage of its appropriation withheld in order to take back the excessive spending on an "across the board" basis. However, Congress has chosen to exempt certain very large programs from the sequestration process (for example, Social Security and certain parts of the Defense budget), and the number of exempted programs has tended to increase over time -- which means that sequestration would have to take back gigantic shares of the budgets of the remaining programs in order to achieve the total cutbacks required, virtually crippling the activities of the unexempted programs.
Congress is, indeed using real words with real definitions.
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