The U.S. government will exhaust its borrowing authority between mid-February and early March if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congress in a letter on Monday. The nation nudged against the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling just before the New Year. Geithner has since been...
Politico writes, “The looming debt ceiling fight may look like a classic “who will blink first” Washington debate, with a ticking time bomb waiting at the end. But for lawmakers like Pat Toomey, Steve Scalise and Daniel Webster, there’s no reason for Republicans to blink — because the time bomb...
Monday was Obama’s 21st full White House news conference and 108th time taking questions from the press, according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller, who tracks these statistics. The President repeated his call for deficit reduction but warned against the potentially catastrophic effect on the economy by tying cuts to raising...
Wonkblog Ezra Klein NO PLANTINUM COIN writes, “The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it. That’s the bottom line according to Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department.” “Neither the Treasury...
National Journal writes, “New York will always be bigger. Connecticut’s richer. But if there’s one lesson from the Hurricane Sandy debate, it’s Don’t Mess With Jersey. A chippy Chris Christie set the tone early when the New Jersey governor warned fellow Republicans on Monday that they’d picked “the wrong state”...
As USA Today writes, “President Obama unveiled the most sweeping set of gun-control proposals in two decades on Wednesday, a package that includes universal background checks on all gun buyers and a renewed ban on ‘military-style’ assault weapons.” … “The beauty of a second term presidency, at least for the...