Topline Talking Points:

• President Biden has made clear for weeks that Congress must act to prevent default.
• Earlier this week, he met with Congressional leaders at the White House, where they agreed to move forward on a bipartisan budget framework. The President then assigned an experienced negotiating team and directed them to act in good faith to reach an agreement.
• MAGA Republicans are taking the economy hostage and pushing us to the brink of default, which could cost millions of jobs and trigger a recession after two years of steady job and wage growth.

MAGA Republicans are recycling a barely watered down version of their extreme budget proposal that would:

• Eliminate 100,000 jobs for teachers and support staff
• Cut thousands law enforcement positions
• Put health insurance coverage at risk for 21 million Americans
• Put food assistance at risk for nearly 1 million Americans

MAGA Republicans want to extend tax breaks skewed to the wealthiest Americans and big corporations even though:The debt increased by 40% under President Trump. Those tax breaks cost taxpayers $2 trillion—and would add another $3.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. MAGA Republicans still want to reward tax cheats by gutting funding for the IRS.

Any serious budget negotiation must include discussion of both spending and revenues, but Republicans have refused to discuss revenue. President Biden lowered the deficit by $1.7 trillion in his first two years in office with this balanced approach. His budget would cut the deficit by an additional nearly $3 trillion—cutting wasteful subsidies for Big Oil and Big Pharma, and asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share. MAGA Republicans are instead focused on pulling the rug out from under hardworking Americans.

There remains a path forward to reach a reasonable bipartisan agreement if Republicans come back to the table to negotiate in good faith. But President Biden will not accept a wish-list of extreme MAGA priorities that would punish the middle class and neediest Americans and set our economic progress back.

More:

• Congressional Republicans are claiming their debt limit hostage taking is motivated by concerns about fiscal responsibility. But new CBO estimates show that their plan to extend the Trump tax cuts without paying for them – which the Speaker endorsed the very same day he spoke about the debt limit at the New York Stock Exchange – would add $3.5 trillion to debt over the next 10 years.
• Prior estimates from the Tax Policy Center show that extending the Trump tax cuts would deliver an average tax cut for the top 0.1 percent of households (those making more than about $4.5 million) of $175,000 per year. The cost of these tax cuts would wipe out the savings from House Republican proposed cuts to education, law enforcement, public safety, research, and other critical areas. And the cost of extending these tax cuts is more than 300 times the savings from the House bill’s poverty-increasing work requirements proposals – showing that these proposals have nothing to do with reducing the deficit. Instead, these proposals are about achieving an extreme MAGA Republican goal that the MAGA Republicans failed to achieve when President Trump was in office and Republicans held both chambers in Congress.