On the US Debt Ceiling crisis, Associate Dean (External Relations) of the SMU School of Social Sciences Associate Professor John Donaldson said, “These days it has become a political tool to threaten not raising the debt ceiling which will lead to an American Government default on its debts. If you’re dissatisfied with policies and you threaten whatever you need to threaten, even such a dangerous brinksmanship is not off the table in order to gain what you want in Washington. Adjunct Faculty Joergen Oerstroem Moeller commented that the US does not want to pay for the cost of running the US. “If you do not want to pay taxes for the things you acquire, the only way to do it is to borrow, and this is what they have been doing for 50 years, and that action means that debt has accumulated…The debate in the US is not about not about how do we actually solve the fundamental basic problem of financing the US, but how do we raise the debt ceiling so we can continue to go on borrowing. This is actually a catastrophe. They should say the problem is how do we raise taxes or cut expenditure.”