President Obama formally entered debt talks Monday with a pair of Oval Office meetings with Senate leaders, hoping that face-to-face talks could set the stage for detailed negotiations seeking more than $2 trillion in federal savings in exchange for continued Treasury borrowing to finance government operations.
With just five weeks to go before the federal government would begin defaulting on some of its debts, Obama hosted Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in separate hour-long meetings.
The leaders remain divided over hundreds of billions of dollars in proposed spending reductions and also the key issue of whether to include increased tax revenue to fill up some of the savings.
While no immediate breakthroughs were reported, the talks were meant to signal Obama’s increased personal involvement in the issue after the dissolution last week of a group led by Vice President Biden and congressional leadership deputies. With anywhere from $500 billion to more than $1 trillion in spending cuts tentatively agreed upon, Obama and the top leaders will now work to iron out the most contentious issues left: tax increases, entitlement spending and Pentagon funding.
“Neither party should confront this crisis alone, and no one will be successful unless we confront it together,” Reid said in a speech on the Senate floor after his late-morning sit-down with the president. Reid wants a deal that would include new investments to jump-start job creation and close tax loopholes and subsidies that benefit the wealthy.
White House press secretary Jay Carney reiterated Obama’s call for a “balanced’’ approach focusing on increasing revenue into the Treasury through adjustments to the tax code. “It’s the only way to get it done if you want to do it right,’’ Carney said.
Those proposals, however, drew a sharp rebuke from McConnell before he joined Obama for a 5 p.m. meeting, insisting that tax increases and new spending could never pass Congress and calling on Obama to lay out a strategy for reaching a compromise that includes neither.
“Let’s move past the tax hikes and talk about what’s actually possible,” McConnell said. “This much is clear: If government spending were the answer to an economic slowdown, we’d be in a boom time right now.”
Read more at The Washington Post.