Obama urges lawmakers to start talks on budget
Baku, March 3 (AZERTAC). President Barack Obama urged Congress to begin immediate talks with senior administration officials over a deal to fund the US government for the next seven months, after lawmakers voted to postpone a potential federal shutdown, but only until March 18.
“We cannot keep doing business this way. Living with the threat of a shutdown every few weeks is not responsible and it puts our economic progress in jeopardy,” said Mr. Obama, who asked both parties to start discussions with a White House team led by Joe Biden, the vice-president, Bill Daley, the chief of staff, and Jack Lew, the budget director.
“This agreement should be bipartisan, it should be free of any party’s social or political agenda and it should be reached without delay,” said Mr. Obama.
The Senate on Wednesday approved a budget extension that averts a government shutdown at the end of this week by an overwhelming margin of 91-9. The House of Representatives passed the same measure - which includes $4bn in cuts to government programmes - on Tuesday. As the legislation moved to Mr. Obama for his signature, Republicans and Democrats began staking out their positions in advance of the next round of budget negotiations.
But finding a path to a political consensus on a budget for the rest of this year, let alone a plan to redress America’s strained public finances over the next several decades, will be exceedingly difficult. Republicans are pushing for aggressive spending reductions of $61bn over the next seven months, which Democrats and the White House have objected to on the grounds that it would damage the economic recovery.
The biggest factor arguing in favor of a deal may be the uncertainty surrounding the political impact of a shutdown, despite tough talk from both sides. A poll by the Washington Post released this week showed that Americans are equally divided on who should be blamed for a closure of non-essential federal services this year, with 35 per cent pointing to Republicans and 34 per cent to the Obama administration.
“This time around it may not include everything Democrats want or everything the Republicans want, but we need to have a compromise,” said Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader.
And yet both parties may be reluctant to make significant concessions. The $4bn in cuts in this week’s stopgap measures reflects the same pace of reductions proposed by Republicans and, having arguably won the first round, they may be unwilling to settle for anything less over time.
Meanwhile, Democrats and the White House will be pushing for less drastic cuts and may try to extract an increase in America’s $14,300bn debt ceiling from the negotiations, which many Republicans, especially Tea Party-backed conservatives, have vowed to resist.
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