President Joe Biden sounded “hopeful” enough on Friday afternoon and said he hoped “by tonight we’ll be able to see if we can make a deal.”
Prior to Biden’s remarks, a source close to the discussions said, “We are closer (to an agreement), but that has not happened yet,” questioning the possibility of announcing an agreement on the same day, according to an AFP report.
For his part, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, one of the heroes of this financial political series, spoke of progress. But he said, “Nothing is certain until everything is agreed upon,” in an effort to maintain pressure on the president.
There is no shortage of pressure on this hard-to-understand issue outside the United States and more generally outside the Washington bubble.
A major sticking point has been Republican insistence that those who receive government aid, such as food aid, must work for it.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Republicans are prepared to jeopardize “more than eight million jobs if they cannot get bread out of the mouths of hungry Americans.”
At the same time, the date on which the US Treasury will find itself unable to meet its financial obligations has been revised to June 5 after it was June 1, which provides a longer deadline.
“hostage”
“Based on the latest available data, we now estimate that the Treasury Department will not have sufficient resources to meet government obligations if Congress does not raise or suspend the debt ceiling by June 5,” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a letter to members of Congress on Friday.
And she added that more than 130 billion dollars allocated to pensions and health, especially for veterans, must be paid in the first two days of June, explaining that this “will make the amount of resources in the treasury very small.”
The challenge is to get Congress, both the Republican House and the Democratic Senate, to vote quickly on raising the public debt ceiling, otherwise the United States may be in a state of default, an unprecedented situation with potentially catastrophic economic, financial and social repercussions.
This parliamentary maneuver has always been a bipartisan formality. But this time, the Republicans are demanding, in exchange for their agreement to raise the debt ceiling, a reduction in public spending.
Officially, Joe Biden refuses to negotiate this, stressing that he is a “hostage”.
But in reality, the advisors of the two camps have been continuing non-stop talks for days, according to US media, and have agreed on some main lines.
The New York Times and the Washington Post reported, for example, that the agreement would freeze some expenditures, but without prejudice to the budgets allocated to defense and veterans.
A two-year delay will be allowed, until after the next presidential election, at risk of default.
reduce debt
Each camp wants to limit the damage at the political level.
And Kevin McCarthy, who needs to strengthen his position as Speaker of the House of Representatives, can say that he has made the budget more stringent, while the Democrats can say that they have protected social privileges and major investment projects.
Biden, who is running for a second presidential term, said Thursday that the discussions are taking place between “two conflicting visions.”
He presented himself as a champion of social and financial justice. However, the media reported that Biden (80 years old) waived in these negotiations any increase in the means allocated to combating tax evasion.
And if an agreement is reached, it is supposed to be approved by the Senate, in which the Democrats enjoy a slim majority, and the House of Representatives, where the conservatives enjoy a fragile majority.
But the congressional program is compressed. Many of its members have returned to their strongholds, where they will spend a long weekend on Remembrance Day.
On the other hand, some progressives within the Democratic Party and some Republican Party parliamentarians threatened not to ratify a text – or to delay it as much as possible – that includes exaggerated concessions to the opposition camp.
Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said Friday that finding a solution is “crucial” for the global economy, stressing that the United States must do “more to reduce public debt.”
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