That sound you hear coming out of Washington is the clock ticking on a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling so the country doesn’t default on its obligations.
Federal lawmakers have a little more than a month to, as President Obama put it Wednesday, “get it done.”
To that end, we are glad to see U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall of Colorado engaged in an effort to assemble a bipartisan group of lawmakers to support a compromise, and that Senate leaders canceled the chamber’s July 4 recess in order to work on the difficult task of coming to consensus.
It’s clear that lawmakers have vastly different ideas as to how they would structure a deal that would not only increase the borrowing limit for the short-term, but also include dramatic budget revisions to address the federal debt on a longer-term basis.
Broadly speaking, Republicans oppose tax increases and Democrats have offered only anemic plans to reduce spending. Both sides are going to have to give.
We hope the Bennet/Udall group, whose members haven’t been disclosed, are serious about potentially voting on a deal that includes elements they may find distasteful.
If Congress fails to approve an increase in the borrowing cap — something that has happened 102 times in the nation’s history — experts have predicted calamitous economic reverberations.
But complex deals require time to put together and to be studied by those asked to vote on them. Waiting until the 11th hour is not an intelligent option.
In his Wednesday press conference, the president used his harshest language yet to lambaste Republicans for refusing to consider tax increases as part of a debt ceiling deal. We understand Republicans’ reluctance to raise tax rates, but if they’re going to defend every tax break as part of their no-tax-increase pledge, then compromise will be impossible.
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, former chief of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, urges Republicans to give up some tax breaks “if we simultaneously make current tax rates permanent — or, better yet, if we lower rates, as the Bowles- Simpson commission suggested.”
Yet while it is true that most Republicans have stubbornly opposed tax increases and publicly abandoned debt negotiations, Democrats have not done nearly enough to pitch a plan with more meaningful spending reductions.
House Speaker John Boehner has said any increase in the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling must be accompanied by spending cuts in excess of the debt limit increase.
“The longer the president denies these realities, the more difficult he makes this process,” Boehner said in a prepared statement after Obama’s news conference. “If the president embraces a measure that meets these tests, he has my word that the House will act on it. Anything less cannot pass the House.”
The president reportedly remains open to a deal that would encompass $4 trillion in savings over the next decade, but said Republicans must accept revenue increases.
This is chasm that must be bridged — and time is growing short.
