CNN 2011-06-05

Hi, I'm Carl Azuz. And this is CNN Student News. It's June 2nd, and in our penultimate program of the school year, we're starting things off on Wall Street.

Talking about the stock market and yesterday was not a good one. Experts used the Dow Jones Industrial Average to get an idea of how stock market is doing. The Dow dropped 280 points yesterday. That is the worst drop since last August.

Next up today, northern Africa where Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces are fighting against rebels in the civil war. Other countries are involved in this too, the US, Britain, France. They're part of a military coalition 1 that's being led by Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The goal of that coalition is to protect Libya's civilians 2 during the civil war, and Nato says it is extending that mission for another 90 days. A lot of what the coalition has been doing is carrying out air strikes like these. They are targeting Colonel Gaddafi's forces, his compounds and trying to limit his military resources. The conflict in Libya has been going on since February. Recently, several top officials have left Gaddafi's government that includes some generals in the Libyan army. One official who left the government yesterday said it's in shambles 3.

Turning to the US government now, where a big topic on Capitol Hill is the country's debt ceiling. That is the amount of debt that the government is allowed to have. President Obama wants the ceiling raised. Republicans and congress say they won't do that unless the government make some cuts in spending. In fact on Tuesday, the US House of Representatives voted against the idea of raising the debt ceiling without making spending cuts. Christine Romance is here to help us get a better picture of what's going on. Christine, let's start off with the question, what exactly is the debt ceiling.

It's basically America's credit limit. (Uh) Congress sets the cap on how much money the country can spend to pay its bills, and to pay our interest payment. The debt ceiling is a sort of like the credit limit on your credit card bill, only much much bigger. And think it of this way, if you're running a $3,000 balance on a $10,000 credit limit, the US government, we run right up to our credit limit over and over again, and then that's the paying it off, we just raised the debt limit. How big is this pile of debt, $14.3 trillion, more precisely 4, $14,293,975,000,000. This is money the government has already spent. Stack on top of each other. This is just to give you an illustration, $14 trillion would reach from the earth to the moon more than 4 times. Your share of this pile of debt, is about $47,000 for every man, woman and child in America. We hit our debt ceiling, the debt limit on May 16th. How are we operating now? The Treasury 5 Secretary is juggling 6 the bills that are coming in to keep the country from defaulting. He says we can go until August 2nd. After that, the situation he says is critical. Secretary Geithner says not raising the debt limit so America can pay its bills would be quoted "catastrophic". It's like being, he says, a home owner with only enough money to pay some of the bills. You'd pay the mortgage or you pay the credit bills, which one are you gonna pick, and the government would like to pick and choose ，would have to pick and choose what to pay, Geithner says some bills won't get paychecks to millions of Americans like social security, perhaps, would have to stop. Republicans say he is wrong. The US won't default so long as we keep making interest payments on our bonds are all of it big, politically big now, but here you go you guys Congress has raised the debt ceiling 74 times since 1962, 10 times just since 2001. This is the first time it's been so critical, politically and turned into such a big ideological 7 fight.