The catastrophe passed very close. In the United States, the maximum amount of federal government debt, the famous debt “ceiling”, had to be raised at all costs by December 15 at the latest, otherwise America was no longer in danger. able to honor its payments to its creditors and had to start slashing its spending. With only one Republican support, the Democrats elected to the Senate and then to the House approved shortly after midnight on Wednesday a bill that will allow the United States to honor their payments until the beginning of 2023. The threat of a default of payment of the world’s leading economic power is therefore ruled out.
This unprecedented situation would have plunged American finance and economy into the unknown, but also, by extension, international ones. At the risk of causing a recession. “The American people can breathe: there will be no default,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The text approved Tuesday in both chambers of Congress, the result of several days of negotiations, was unveiled only a few hours before its adoption by elected officials of Congress. He plans to raise the country’s debt limit to just over $ 31 trillion. It only remains for Joe Biden to promulgate the text.
A social and ecological plan before Christmas?
Raising the debt capacity of the United States is usually a formality, but this procedure had been the subject of very difficult negotiations in Congress in recent months, with Republicans deeming that it would amount to giving the President a blank check. , at the very moment when they accuse it of contributing to galloping inflation. “The rampant spending of the Democrats has already led to historic inflation, which is equivalent to a tax for all Americans,” denounced the elected Republican Elise Stefanik to justify her opposition to the measure.
And the Democrats retort that raising the debt limit is used to repay sums already borrowed, including trillions of dollars spent under the Trump presidency. The Republican opposition ultimately allowed them to employ a complex parliamentary procedure, whereby Democrats only needed their voices to raise the debt “ceiling”.
The adoption of this new maximum level of debt is a huge relief for Joe Biden, who faces in parallel other dangers in Congress: his gigantic social and ecological component of 1.750 billion dollars, on which he is betting to “rebuild the ‘America better’ and save its popularity ratings, has remained in parliamentary limbo for months. The head of the Senate promises to pass this plan, which is still the subject of intense negotiations, before Christmas, which promises the next heated negotiations on Capitol Hill.
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