WASHINGTON — Democratic Senators speaking to Raw Story made it clear that they're on board with President Joe Biden's refusal to negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling.
"It really holds Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid hostage," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said. "Over in the House they said they were going to balance the budget in ten years, and yet they're spending more money letting the wealthy tax cheats off the hook. It puts more pressure on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."
He went so far as to say that Republicans "want to kill grandma."
Wyden is referencing the funding bill that enabled the IRS to hire enough agents, customer service, and other staff to be able to handle the load. One of the larger problems explained by NPR, GQ and ProPublica is that it's a lot cheaper and easier to audit lower-income Americans who can't afford expensive lawyers and long court battles. By contrast, millionaires and billionaires skirting and paying their taxes are generally left alone out of fears that the legal battle would cost the IRS too much in court feels and lawyers. The far-right has tried to scare Americans into thinking that more IRS agents means going after everyday Americans, which the department explained isn't true.
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Wyden said that he's tried to emphasize focusing on wealthy tax cheats and that the first vote in the House this year was the perfect example of Republicans trying to throw a bone to those who don't want to pay their fair share. He said that the Congressional Budget Office scored it as costing taxpayers $100 million.
"I think they manufactured an unnecessary crisis," he continued. "And it's going to hurt the economy and hurt jobs."
He called on it to be a clean bill. "Listen, they're always talking about a regular order. if they've got proposals to cut spending, let them propose them."
The self-imposed debt ceiling has been used politically by the GOP for decades to attempt to make cuts to services to Americans. In a recent comment, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) lied about which parties have done the worst when it comes to adding to the nation's debt.
“Just in the last four years that Democrats were in the majority, they increased discretionary spending by 30 percent. When Republicans were in the majority for the eight years prior, they didn’t increase it by $1," McCarthy claimed.
The Washington Post gave it "Three Pinocchios," using their grading system of four being the top.
Biden is open to cuts in future spending, but the debt ceiling isn't about what bills may or may not pass in the future. The debt ceiling is about decisions lawmakers already made under Donald Trump, for example, and now don't want to pay for. Biden has also made it clear that he won't negotiate such cuts it at the expense of the American economy.
The debt ceiling vote is one that Republicans tend to support when their party is in the White House and they oppose when the opposite party is in the White House, the Washington Post explained.
"Remember during the Trump administration the Republicans supported raising the debt ceiling," Wyden said.
Republicans have argued that breaking the debt ceiling isn't all that bad, while Democrats and the White House follow the advice of economists and economic forecasters.
“One of the greatest threats we have to this nation is our debt,” McCarthy told the Fox network earlier this month. “We don’t want to just have this runaway spending.”
“Fiscal deadlines will pose a greater risk this year than they have for a decade,” the New York Times cited one Goldman Sachs economist.
Inevitably, the debt ceiling always gets raised, but in cases where the government is shut down over the debate, Americans end up spending more money, hurting those who rely on their paychecks from government jobs and some wouldn't get things like Veteran's assistance, Social Security checks, tax refunds and other projects.
Goldman's estimations warn that the exact date could be "thrown into flux by uncertainty over the Treasury Department’s cash flow, which could change depending on the trajectory of the economy and the fate of certain policies."