Major Update: Gallup attempts to hide the big result in their latest survey behind a vague and useless question about “compromise”, but denial of reality only hurts those hiding behind the denial. Americans are more afraid of spending ourselves into permanent economic hell than whether the debt ceiling date passes:

Americans continue to express a strong desire that any agreement that is reached include plans for major cuts in future spending. Americans now by a 20-point margin — 55% vs. 35% — say they worry more that the government would raise the debt ceiling without plans for major spending cuts, than that the government would not raise the ceiling and an economic crisis would ensue.

This is no shock to anyone outside the Beltway Bubble. The problem of most concern is out of control spending, that is bankrupting us NOW. Forcing the government to live within its means is nowhere near as bad has tanking the world’s leading economy under a sea of liberal deficits. The people are watching and know who is heading in the direction the people want. – end update

The Tea Party has had an enormous effect on the tone and direction of debate in Washington, and today the old, tired and wasteful Political Industrial Complex is facing the first tangible results of this new movement. Today’s debt ceiling vote in the House has the old guard perplexed, and a bit scared, of the true change now possible in DC. And those who support the various Tea Parties are proud to take the blame (and credit) for where we have come:

With the breakdown of negotiations on a so-called grand bargain on the debt limit demanded by President Obama, liberal commentators have sought a convenient scapegoat to account for the impasse. Not surprisingly, they have begun by rounding up the usual suspect: the Tea Party. Its intransigence, so the line goes, has sunk this great deal.

A deal that very few outside the beltway support. Most people do not want higher taxes and larger government. The 2010 election was crystal clear on that point. It is the Tea Party keeping the fire on DC to make real, substantive change:

Without the Tea Party, there would be no debt limit negotiations going on, just as there would have been no budget reduction deal last December. Without the Tea Party, President Obama would not be posing as the judicious statesman, but would be pushing –as in truth he still is–for more stimulus and further investments in high-speed rail. Whatever pressure now exists to treat the debt problem derives directly or indirectly from the explosion of energy that has been generated by the Tea Party.

This fact is born out by the vitriol and scare tactics impotently cast by the Democrats. The 2010 elections had such force of purpose behind them that it is still amazing the levels of denial on display on the left. Today is no empty political stagecraft. It begins a long needed change in direction for the bloated and wasteful federal bureaucracy. It is time to put the beasty on a diet.

While trolling the depths of the depraved character assassination from the left on Middle America (the source of the Tea Party movement) will be interesting fodder for the history books, the current fear behind the vitriol is what is truly amazing to note:

the top Senate Democrat likening default to a “very, very scary” outcome even for those “who believe government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub.”

“What will it take,” asked an agitated Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), “for my Republican colleagues to wake up to the fact that they’re playing a game of political chicken with the entire global economy?”

Laughable, since we have already seen and experienced what Ried’s party HAS DONE to the US and World Economy. The 2009 Real Estate debacle, which brought us into this mother of all economic downturns, was caused by liberals loosening the mortgage lending requirements so anyone could own a home. Which of course created mountains of bad loans and lowered the value of everyone’s home as a result. In usual liberal screwing up in reverse, more people are now without homes than before their grand experiment was conceived.

And Obama, Reid and Pelosi will never admit their wild spending spree since that debacle – running from 2000 through the current Government Fiscal Year (GFY) 2011 – wracked up almost $6 trillion in new debt and new economic problems. In GFY 2008 (which ended September 2008, right when the markets collapsed and still under President Bush’s leadership) the total US debt accrued over its entire 229 year history was $12.54 trillion. A truly bothersome sum requiring generations to work off. But Obama, Reid and Pelosi drove that debt to what will be $18.1 trillion in the few short years they had fiscal control in DC – an even more scary result. The current, dialed-in spending now in place will double that 2008 number in 4 short years, reaching $24 trillion in 2016. (source data)

It is this looming mountain of debt that will bankrupt and cripple our economy. That is where economic hell waits.

Those are the stakes in today’s vote and the debt limit debate overall. And thankfully the Tea Party is focusing the country’s attention to this critical (and crippling) problem.

Michael Barone penned an excellent review of the stakes, something worth remembering today and into the next months of battle:

The bedrock issue is whether we should have a larger and more expensive federal government. Over many years, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of gross domestic product.

The Obama Democrats have raised that to 24 or 25 percent. And the president’s budget projects that that percentage will stay the same or increase far into the future.

In the process, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product has increased from a manageable 40 percent in 2008 to 62 percent this year and an estimated 72 percent in 2012. And it’s headed to the 90 percent level that economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have identified as the danger point, when governments face fiscal collapse.

It is not hard for voters to grasp the idea of spending more than you have, or spending yourself into bankruptcy. All the faux Chicken Little cries from the left about how avoiding such a calamity will cause a calamity are simply logically incoherent. The left may fool themselves into thinking they aren’t bankrupting the country – but the budgets and the professionals note otherwise and Middle America gets it in spades.

Finally look at the laughable Holy Grails for Obama that must be saved at all cost (and pain) – his choo-choo trains and his playing doctor kit:

In negotiations on the debt limit, Obama has fenced off several programs from any cuts at all. One is Obamacare, even though majorities in polls continue to favor its repeal.

Another is, astonishingly, the $53 billion he wants to spend on high-speed rail projects. To call high-speed rail a “boondoggle,” as does House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, is to engage in considerable understatement.

These projects include $715 million for construction of 100 miles of track between the small towns of Borden and Corcoran in California’s Central Valley.

They include a train from Iowa City, Iowa, that will take longer to get to Chicago than already existing bus service and a train from Minneapolis to Duluth, Minn., that will average 69 miles per hour — about what you could average on the parallel Interstate 35.

Obama has rhapsodized about the pleasure of walking to a train station and taking a high-speed rail trip to another city. But the great majority of Americans don’t live within an easy drive of a train station.

I understand Californians have now named their “train to nowhere” the High Speed Air Mover. Concise and accurate. If built it will be a national monument to stupid and wasteful government. And it will be tied to one Barrack Obama for all time.

When the House passes something tangible there will be some angst out there because we will be set to head on a new path.

But there will also be relief that someone finally decided to turn off the DC auto-pilot to economic hell and take control. The Tea Party movement is about real leadership and doing the right thing despite the political risks. That is its power in the minds of Americans. It is untested and could produce some real turkeys, but if it succeeds the change to the new path will be complete. And once it becomes the politically popular path, watch out!

Update: A sad testament to the Democrats’ failures on the economy as Borders Books is set to go bankrupt and shutter its doors for good. The price of uncontrolled government is more of this – and it is too high a price.