The day after a vote on the measure failed in the House, President Barack Obama sits down with Republican leaders to discuss raising the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion.
After the meeting, a reporter asked House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) about accusing the president of not showing leadership on budget issues. “It’s not exactly what I said,” Ryan clarifies, “I just said we’ve got to take on this debt and if we demagogue each other at the leadership level, then we’re never going to take on our debt.”
House Speaker John Boehner says the meeting was an opportunity to meet directly with the president about their ideas to get the economy going again, create jobs, and solve the debt problem.
Meanwhile, Ryan told reporters that he used the opportunity during that meeting at the White House to defend his Medicare proposal. “I simply explained what our plan it, how it works. It’s been misdiscribed by the president and many others, and so we simply described to him precisely what it is we’ve been proposing so he hears from us how our proposal works so in the future he won’t mischaracterize it.”
Democrats have called Ryan’s Medicare plan a “voucher” program that would harm senior citizens.
With an August deadline right around the corner, there’s no resolution in site to raise the legal limit on government borrowing from $14.3 trillion to $16.7 trillion.