Joe Biden will not “negotiate” with Republicans on an increase in the debt ceiling, which the US Congress must approve on pain of default by the United States, his spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre warned on Tuesday.
“We will not negotiate about this. The debt ceiling has been raised three times during the Trump presidency. It must not be different this time,” she told a news conference.
The Republican opposition must vote for this raising of the debt ceiling “unconditionally”, insisted Karine Jean-Pierre.
The American president has proposed a meeting on May 9 to the main leaders of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, to prevent the world’s leading power from finding itself unable to meet its deadlines, which could happen from the 1er June.
If Joe Biden wants to be inflexible on the debt, he intends to propose during this meeting to “launch a separate discussion” on the federal budget and on “priority spending”.
The world’s largest economy has never defaulted on its debt. Like the majority of other major economic powers, the United States, failing to “repay” its public debt properly speaking, has always been able to pay interest, renew lines of credit coming due, and finance its debt. deficit by issuing treasury bills.
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A payment default would be a completely new scenario.
Joe Biden, candidate for re-election in 2024, believes that raising the debt ceiling, a procedure specific to the United States, is a “constitutional obligation” of Congress, not to be debated.
The Republican opposition for its part, led by the boss of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, is demanding cuts in public spending in exchange for its agreement to an increase in the maximum amount of authorized debt.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned on Monday that without a green light from Congress to raise the debt ceiling, the world’s largest power will “no longer be able to meet all of the government’s obligations in early June. , and potentially from the 1er June “.
The federal government hit its cap of $31 trillion in mid-January.
So far, Washington has faced accounting maneuvers.
But from 1er June, the government should, for lack of political agreement, make drastic cuts, in particular in certain social systems – health insurance and pensions, if it does not want to find itself in default.
The American Congress must regularly vote in order to raise the federal debt ceiling, a procedure carried out 78 times since the beginning of the 1960s, most often without any particular debate.
But already under the presidency of Barack Obama, the maneuver had begun to turn into a political showdown.