The Obama administration will now hit the government’s borrowing limit Nov. 3, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a letter Thursday that gives Congress less than three weeks to approve more red ink.
Mr. Lew said government finances have suddenly turned worse than he’s predicted, so he’s had to move the potential default date up, putting even more pressure on Republicans who were already faced with a stacked calendar, including picking a new speaker in the House, and holding a major hearing with testimony from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The secretary said the blame will lie entirely with Congress if lawmakers don’t give him permission to borrow more.
“The creditworthiness of the United States is an essential component of our strength as a nation. Protecting that strength is the sole responsibility of Congress, because only Congress can extend the nation’s borrowing authority,” he said.
Total federal debt stands at about $18.2 trillion and has been frozen there since March, when the last debt holiday expired and Mr. Lew had to begin using extra borrowing tools to avoid going over the limit.
Nearly $8 trillion of debt has been added to the government’s tally sheet since President Obama took office in 2009 — by far the largest increase of any administration.
Of the total debt, some $5.1 trillion is the government borrowing from itself — and particularly from the Social Security trust funds. But the other $13 trillion is debt held by public lenders.
Debt is the total accumulation of how much the government owes to creditors. Deficits are the annual tally of spending subtracted from tax revenue.
Even though the debt total is high, the rate of increase in the debt has been slowing as deficits have dropped.
Without a debt increase the Obama administration would face a stark choice: default on debt payments, or else suspend more than 10 percent of other usual government spending. The Obama administration says there’s no precedent for how to make that choice.
Some Republicans had questioned Mr. Lew’s math, wondering whether he wasn’t being too pessimistic about the target date for running out of cash in order to force a crisis. But the Congressional Budget Office this week backed the administration up, saying it concurs that borrowing room is likely to run out in the first half of November.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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