The Democratic president said he would tell congressional leaders when he meets with them on Tuesday that they should “do what every other Congress has done, which is to raise the debt ceiling and avoid defaults.”
Congressional Republicans are demanding that Biden agree to a significant reduction in budget spending initially, before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, a move that will allow the government to borrow more money.
And US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in early May that the US, the world’s largest economy, was threatening to default on its debts, starting in early June, if the issue of raising the debt was unresolved.
This poses a great risk to the United States, which has never defaulted on its debt.
Raising the debt ceiling is generally routine and adopted without controversy.
Biden said at an economic meeting on Friday that Republicans are “trying to hold the debt hostage to push us to accept some unfair cuts.”
And the president, who is preparing to run for a second term in the White House next year, has stressed that he is ready to discuss imposing certain restrictions on the budget, provided that raising the debt ceiling is not hostage to it.
“We can discuss what we can cut, the amount of expenditure, but not under threat of default,” he said, adding, “So we have a budget track to discuss publicly.”
He stressed that his administration “is ready for this discussion, but the last thing the country needs after everything we’ve been through is a manufactured crisis, and that’s what we’re facing: a manufactured crisis from the start. at the end”.
The administration warns that failure to raise the public debt ceiling will lead Washington to default on its $31.4 trillion debt, in historic precedent that would shock the United States and the world.
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