US Vice President Joe Biden and top lawmakers on Thursday faced an impasse on taxes and healthcare as they worked on a deal to tame the US’ debt and increase its borrowing limit.
Republican and Democratic negotiators briefly discussed health costs, a major driver of the national debt, in a fourth round of talks that lasted a little more than an hour. The normally voluble Biden left the meeting without comment.
“We’re not doing a lot of talking for obvious reasons,” said Republican Senator Jon Kyl, a member of the group.
The group said it could agree on more than US$1 trillion in deficit savings over 10 years, but aides said a fundamental stumbling block remains: Democrats will not consider cuts to health benefits until Republicans consider tax increases.
With next year’s election season already under way, political pressures could push a deal out of reach as both sides turn their disagreements into campaign slogans.
The congressional calendar poses another hurdle as the House of Representatives and the Senate will be in session at the same time for only four of the coming 10 weeks. Kyl said the group could hold a telephone conference next week and staffers could look at specific ideas in the meantime.
The group is trying to hammer out a deal that would give lawmakers political cover to raise the US$14.3 trillion debt ceiling — a limit on the federal government’s borrowing set by Congress — before an Aug. 2 deadline.
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who participated in the talks, has warned the US could face a catastrophic default that would roil global markets if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2.
In a letter, 17 Republican senators said that Treasury could avoid a default if it prioritized debt service over other spending after Aug. 2.
“Even if the debt ceiling remains where it is, there will be more than enough money in the Treasury to make the government’s debt payments,” the letter said.
US President Barack Obama’s former budget director, Peter Orszag, warned that a crisis of confidence in the bond markets will be needed to spur Congress into action.
Finding common ground could be difficult.
Democrats say the Republican plan to save trillions of dollars in coming decades by scaling back the Medicare and Medicaid health coverage programs for the elderly and the poor is unacceptable and see a chance to score gains in the presidential and congressional elections by campaigning against it.
“Public sentiment is everything, and the public sentiment is to preserve Medicare,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said at a news conference.
Public unease with the Republican plan will give Democrats a chance to win back the House, said Representative Steve Israel, the lawmaker in charge of that effort.
Republicans won control of the House last fall on a promise to slash government spending, but polls show voters oppose their plan to revamp the two popular programs, which account for one-quarter of government spending and are expected to eat up a growing portion of the budget in coming decades.
Republicans sought to shift the conversation to their plans to create jobs by cutting taxes and reducing regulations.
They said Democrats were more concerned with winning next year’s election than solving the country’s long-term fiscal woes.
“The Democrats’ plan is to do nothing,” House Speaker John Boehner said. “Doing nothing means that the Medicare plan will go bankrupt and seniors’ benefits will be cut.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS