President Joe Biden is going to make House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., lay out a spending plan before Wednesday's ballyhooed negotiations on raising the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling.
"Show me your budget, I'll show you mine," Biden said Monday, according to Reuters, which reviewed a White House memo to McCarthy.
But that may suggest Biden is not ready to truly negotiate away from his desire to raise the debt ceiling to afford his administration's spending packages. Without raising the debt ceiling, the U.S. risks going into default as early as June.
"Raising the debt ceiling is not a negotiation; it is an obligation of this country and its leaders to avoid economic chaos," economic adviser Brian Deese and director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young wrote.
McCarthy is standing firm to date in seeking concessions from Biden, however.
"The first thing they should do, especially as the president of the United States: Say he's willing to sit down and find a common ground and negotiate together," McCarthy told reporters.
Republicans in the House of Representatives have said any debt-ceiling hike should be paired with spending cuts. Both Biden and McCarthy have ruled out cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the two largest government benefit programs.
"Does anyone believe there is not waste in government?" McCarthy told Newsmax's "Spicer & Co." on Monday night.
"I believe there is a lot of places we can find savings. So, no, we're not going to raise the debt ceiling without finding ways to save."
The White House says it will only discuss future spending cuts after the debt ceiling is raised.
But detailed proposals could take several weeks.
The White House has said it would release its budget proposal March 9. House Republicans, meanwhile, aim to produce their budget proposal in April, according to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.
"I hope the president meets his deadline just like we're going to work to meet our deadline," Scalise said at a Tuesday news conference.
Unlike most other developed countries, the United States puts a hard limit on how much it can borrow, and Congress must periodically raise that cap because the U.S. government spends more than it takes in.
The debt ceiling increase is usually voted in on a bipartisan basis, but Republicans have used their leverage previously to win spending cuts.
A 2011 showdown between Democrat President Barack Obama and House Republicans took the country to the brink of default and prompted a first-ever downgrade of the country's top-notch credit rating.
Veterans of that battle warn the politics and math are tougher this time around, making it more difficult to find a resolution until the government is about to run out of money — or after it has.
"I think that the possibility of miscalculation runs higher today than it did in 2011," said Neil Bradley, a former House Republican leadership aide who is now a top official at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The showdown over the growing U.S. debt threatens to roil the global economy if the United States defaults.
The Treasury Department has already started taking "extraordinary measures" to stave off a default until summer after hitting the U.S. government's $31.4 trillion borrowing limit earlier in January.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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