Until recently it was doubted whether Biden would travel to Japan in Hiroshima to attend the G7 summit, but the president still hasn’t skipped it. After that, he planned the first-ever visit by a US president to Papua New Guinea and then a flight to a meeting of heads of state of the Quadripartite Security Dialogue (Australia, India, US, Japan) in Sydney, Australia. But the day before, the White House had confirmed that Biden would refuse these visits because of a more pressing problem of public debt.
The move was announced after Biden’s meeting with congressional leaders and, most importantly, House of Representatives Leader Kevin McCarthy, representing the Republican Party, failed to deliver meaningful progress on the issue of public debt. The White House is calling for a “clean” increase in the borrowing limit, that is to say without additional conditions. Republicans, who control the lower house, are insisting on a bill approved within it, which, in exchange for an increase in the national debt ceiling, provides for a reduction in public spending.
Judging by the cancellation of Biden’s trip and his statements, he will have to agree on raising the ceiling on the American public debt under the terms of the Republicans.
However, although concrete steps towards a compromise have yet to be announced, militancy in party statements has declined over the past two weeks. The White House press office released a statement after the talks, saying Biden is “optimistic” and admits the parties “won’t get everything they want.” According to him, “there is still a lot of work to be done on a number of complex issues”. Additionally, the White House chief sent two advisers for daily talks with Republicans, which he had previously declined. So Biden, according to US media, has admitted that his opponents have a negotiating position he will have to reckon with. “I think there was a consensus in today’s meeting that default is not an option for us,” Biden said, noting that such a scenario would lead to a “recession, to the destruction of retirement savings, to a higher cost of credit, to massive job losses”.
McCarthy, who previously accused Biden & Co. of not wanting to “do their job by threatening to take our country to the first default in history,” has now said that “it is possible to reach an agreement of ‘here the end of the week’. “It’s not that difficult to reach an agreement,” he said, but serious disagreements remain.
According to The Washington Post newspaper, close to the White House, the strength of McCarthy’s negotiating position is indicated by Biden’s partial refusal of the trip, and the fact that the negotiations are more about the Republican bill, not on those accents that are important to Democrats. .
Meanwhile, disputes over public debt could affect US aid to Ukraine. As Politico recently reported, of the $43 billion approved by Congress in December for this purpose, there is now about $6 billion left, which will last until about July. Congress is unlikely to allocate new funds until the national debt issue is resolved.
In general, the willingness of the United States to allocate more and more money to Ukraine is beyond doubt. Despite some resistance to this in the ranks of the Republican Party, the number of opponents of support for Kiev has been measured by four to five dozen members of Congress, which is clearly not enough to block the decisions of the House. representatives of 435 seats. Yes, and his spokesman McCarthy, who previously said he was unwilling to send ‘open sum cheques’ to Kiev, recently made it clear he was in favor of increased support for Ukraine. . But it cannot be completely ruled out that the delay in the negotiations on the state debt could create temporary difficulties for the approval of new aid to Kiev by the United States.
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