WASHINGTON — A day after debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Joe Biden appeared to have broken down, the White House announced that President Barack Obama would intervene in the negotiations, beginning one-on-one meetings with key lawmakers next week.
Obama will start by meeting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Monday.
Speaking Friday at Carnegie Mellon University before the announcement, Obama said that although the government must cut spending to reduce the deficit, it is also crucial to invest in new technologies that would create jobs and keep the United States economically competitive.
“I have a larger vision for America . . . where we work together, Democrats and Republicans, to live within our means, to cut our deficit and debt, but also to invest in what our economy needs to grow,” Obama said to a crowd of professors, business people and local officials on the Pittsburgh campus.
The parties face an Aug. 2 deadline set by the Treasury Department to raise the debt limit before the country risks defaulting on its debt obligations.
A quick compromise seemed unlikely Friday. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, reiterated his pledge to oppose any comprehensive deficit-reduction deal that increases taxes. The issue of tax increases is one of the fundamental philosophical differences between the parties that the congressional negotiators this week tried to address in the Biden talks.
“The president and his party may want a debt- limit increase that includes tax hikes, but such a proposal cannot pass the House,” Boehner said in a statement Friday morning.
Boehner said any deal to raise the country’s $14.3 trillion debt limit by the deadline must include spending cuts that exceed the amount of the debt-limit hike and budget reforms that will restrict Washington’s ability to spend in the future — not tax increases.
On Thursday, congressional Republicans abruptly pulled out of debt-reduction talks with the White House. Senior Republicans said negotiations led by Biden had ceased making headway as Democrats pressed for as much as $400 billion in new taxes on corporations and the nation’s wealthiest households.
McConnell on Friday called on Obama to take tax increases off the table at next week’s meeting so that the two could engage in “a serious discussion about our country’s economic future.”
“It is my hope that the president requested this meeting in order to finally explain what it is that he’s prepared to do to solve our nation’s fiscal crisis,” McConnell said in a statement.
Speaking at an event in Richmond on Friday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., accused the Republicans of “playing political games.”
