By Gerald Helguero: Subscribe to Gerald's RSS feed
April 12, 2011 8:55 AM EDT
The Obama Administration is trying to balance keeping spending up in certain areas while cutting federal deficits and may be open to striking a deal with Republicans to raise the debt ceiling above its current $14.3 trillion levels.
Obama on Wednesday is set to unveil his long-term plan to reduce budget federal deficits.
David Plouffe, President Barack Obama's senior advisor, noted that the Republican leadership and the President are in agreement that the debt ceiling needs to be raised. The Obama administration has been calling for a rise in the debt ceiling to avoid the specter of the U.S. government defaulting on its obligations.
"Well, the speaker of the House himself said we need to act like adults in this. Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, all the leaders have said we have to raise the debt limit, so we're going to," Plouffe said on NBC's Meet the Press.
House Speaker John Boehner said on Saturday at a fundraiser that lawmakers in the House of Representatives would not pass a bill that would allow the government to raise the debt ceiling only, a so-called "clean bill."
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He said "there's no plan to deal with the debt we're facing."
"There will not be an increase in the debt limit without something really, really big attached to it," he said.
Obama's Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner said last week in a letter to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid that the U.S. would hit the $14.294 trillion debt limit by May 16 and said the Treasury could take extraordinary steps to postpone the date the U.S. would default on its obligations until July when there would not be "no headroom" to borrow within the limit.
On Sunday, Plouffe called raising the debt ceiling a process.
"[I]n that process we should be able to reduce the deficit," he said. "So we should not be playing brinksmanship with the full faith in credit of the United States of America."
On the same program, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI, who also serves as Chairman of the House Budget Committee said he noticed a shift in the administration's stance.
"I'm pleased with what David Plouffe just said because I think that was a policy change," Ryan said.
"Tim Geithner has always been saying he wants just a standalone debt ceiling increase. We've never been in favor of that. Now he's saying things can go as a part of this. So, we believe, accompanying any debt ceiling, you need real fiscal reforms. Real spending cuts and real spending controls going forward so we can deal with the debt in the future."
The Republican proposal for the 2012 budget unveiled last Tuesday would spend $3.559 trillion, compared with Obama's mid-February $3.729 trillion proposal, a difference of $170 billion.
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