As President Joe Biden meets with congressional leaders Tuesday about raising the debt ceiling, Republicans, led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, insist they are serious about negotiating a deal. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, told “Fox News Sunday” that Biden “negotiated as vice president and as a senator. We’re just asking him to be a responsible leader and do that again.” In a letter to the president, 43 Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, declared themselves “united” behind their House counterparts, who have “taken a responsible first step in coming to the table with their proposals.”
If more than a handful of Republicans really want to compromise with Biden, it would be a first. There’s a simple test, though, to determine whether the GOP is negotiating in good faith — and it can be found in the president’s budget proposal to repeal Trump-era tax cuts. If Republicans agree that any deal will include raising taxes on the wealthy and/or corporations, then a solution might be possible. But in the more likely scenario that they say tax increases are off the table, it would confirm beyond any shadow of doubt that McCarthy’s own debt limit bill isn’t an invitation to negotiate. It’s a ransom note.
At the outset, Biden should ask a simple question: “Are revenues on the table?”
As Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told the Senate Budget Committee last week, the debt can’t be lowered without crashing the economy just by reducing government spending. More revenue would also be needed. “We can’t do it with one [and] without the other,” Zandi said. “Both have to be done.”
Biden’s budget provides a template for the revenue side: repealing the 2017 Trump tax cuts for those making more than $400,000 a year, increasing capital gains taxes on millionaires and closing the “carried interest” and “pass-through” loopholes, which…
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