Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Andrea Tantaros argued that if House Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling, the resulting default is nothing to be afraid of because, according to Tantaros, the country needs “to feel a little bit of pain.”

Congress is currently facing a fast-approaching deadline to increase the nation's borrowing authority and approve funding to run the government beyond September 30. Failure to raise the nation's debt ceiling would cause the U.S. government to default on its legal obligations by the middle of October.

Thus far, House Republicans have indicated they are unwilling to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats acquiesce to a slew of demands, including, as The New York Times explained, “a one-year delay of the [Affordable Care Act], a tax overhaul and a broad rollback of environmental regulations.”

Fox News has spent this week downplaying the urgency of the upcoming deadline. But two Fox hosts have now taken it further, arguing that failure to raise the debt ceiling wouldn't be so bad and endorsing the resulting default.

On the September 26 edition of Hannity, host Sean Hannity and The Five co-hosts Bob Beckel and Andrea Tantaros discussed whether Republicans would ultimately agree to raise the debt ceiling. When Beckel argued that the Republicans' gambit was too risky because it “puts the full faith and credit of the United States currency in jeopardy,” Tantaros disagreed:

TANTAROS: We hear this every time, that a default would be terrible. And it would be. But what's the alternative? To keep spending? That would be terrible as well ... There's part of me, Sean, that does want us to feel a little bit of pain.

Hannity shrugged off Beckel's concern that a US default could “wreck the monetary system of the world”:

HANNITY: You know what Bob, I think you overstate -- It sounds a little bit like sequestration. Predictions of doom and gloom, and none of it ever happened. The world isn't collapsing ... I'm really not that afraid of it. It may be naivety.

It would be catastrophic for the United States to follow the Fox hosts' logic and default on our debt. If the debt ceiling is not lifted by October 17, the United States government will be unable to finance the payment of its pre-existing expenses through the continued sale of Treasury bonds. Economists across the board agree this would send the global markets into chaos and send interest rates skyrocketing. Domestically, money for government employees, the military, Social Security, Medicare, food safety inspections, and much, much more could cease or be delayed.

According to The New York Times, the Treasury makes more than 80 million individual payments each month, and, once funds freed from “extraordinary measures” were exhausted, it would miss nearly one-third of those regular payments until the debt ceiling was lifted.

What's more, the last legitimate Republican threat to refuse to raise the debt ceiling resulted in the first ever downgrade of the U.S. Department of Treasury bond rating -- from AAA to AA+. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, this downgrade will cost taxpayers an additional $18.9 billion over the coming decade.

All this risk is over what has been a routine Congressional task. As CNN explained, “Since March of 1962, Congress has enacted 74 measures altering the federal debt limit, according to analysts from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. The ceiling was increased under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, with much less angst and outrage than we're seeing today.”