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Just breaking news from the NYT for now.
UPDATE: CARNEY DENIES NYT REPORT: "THERE IS NO DEAL"
President Barack Obama’s spokesman and House Speaker John Boehner said there is “no deal” on raising the U.S. debt limit as all sides said they still lack a consensus on spending cuts and tax revenue.
“There is no progress to report,” Carney said at a briefing in Washington. He said the administration is “absolutely confident” an agreement to avert a default can be reached before an Aug. 2 deadline.
Originally posted by SmedleyBurlap
Defaulting on the national debt is a great idea! When the retired baby boomers and aged hippies can't get their social security, when the poor can't get their social assistance, when the average American worker can't pay any of their bills because of soaring interest rates, but the corporations and ultra wealthy are insulated by their massive wealth; then a real socialist revolution can finally happen!
Well, it looks like there will be no debt ceiling hike enacted prior to August 2 at which point the money really does run out. From The Hill: "The No. 3 Republican in the House said Thursday night that he didn’t expect any surprises in the deficit debate over the weekend. “I do not see something springing this weekend,” Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. McCarthy pooh-poohed reports that the White House and Republican leadership are closing fast on a deal on the budget deficit and raising the debt ceiling. “There is no deal,” McCarthy said
Now the reason why this is bad is because as Stone McCarthy calculates, "we expect Treasury to have less cash in early August than we thought previously." And here is where it gets very tricky since the money generating machinery won't be in place on time: "we now show Treasury with a negative cash balance of $15.5 billion on August 15, which implies that Treasury wouldn't have the resources to pay $30.6 billion in interest on that day."
Finally, if Congress hasn't increased the debt limit by August 2, Treasury Secretary Geithner would be on solid ground in extending the length of the Debt Issuance Suspension Period (DISP), which would allow Treasury to make further use of the CSRDF. Declaring that he expected the DISP to last another month, for instance, would provide Treasury immediately with another $6.0 billion in borrowing authority.
In sum, Treasury is going to start August with less cash than we thought previously. We still think Treasury could probably pay its obligations through August 15, but it's become a much closer call.
No deal... for now. From Reuters: "Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner told fellow Republicans on Friday there's still no deal to avert a debt default, but that talks continue, a senior party member said. Boehner's message at a closed-door House Republican meeting was: "There's no deal, and we'll continue to work to get resolution to the problem," said Republican Congressman Tom Latham." They have less than 14 hours now.
Originally posted by SmedleyBurlap
reply to post by hawkiye
The real theft program would be
1) take a large portion of millions of Americans' lifetime earnings, for social security
2) let the interest collect on the national pension funds
3) loot social security to bail out your corporate buddies
4) maliciously claim that the reason social security is empty is that it was always a scam, not that you and your friends stole it all for corporate welfare checks
On the discretionary spending front, both sides had "identical offers," said one of the officials. There would be $1.2 trillion in cuts over the course of ten years;
$1 trillion in savings that would come from the draw-down of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq;
and $250 billion in savings in Medicare over the course of 10 years.
Both sides had also agreed to attach a second piece of legislation, to be decided via the reconciliation budget process, that would have changed the retirement age for Medicare and changed the premium structure for Medicare Part B and D, while eliminating certain kinds of supplemental insurance. That bill would also contain changes to the way Social Security benefits were paid starting in 2015, with buffers put in to protect the lowest-income beneficiaries.
Do any of the default cheerleaders actually understand what will happen when America decides not to pay bills it has already enjoyed the services for?