President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are to meet face to face on Monday after a weekend of on again, off again negotiations over raising the nation’s debt ceiling. Their meeting comes mere days before the government could reach a “hard deadline” and run out of cash to pay its bills. The two sides are working to reach a budget compromise before June 1. McCarthy and Republicans are insisting on spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit; Biden has come to the negotiating table after balking for months but says the GOP lawmakers will have to back off their “extreme positions.” “Under a default, the government would continue running, but it would only have be able to pay the money, the amount of money that it has coming into the Treasury. It would be very difficult to prioritize who would be getting that money,” Associated Press reporter Kevin Freking said. Default, he says, is different from what happens when the government goes into a shutdown. “When you have a shutdown, Congress has not approved spending for that particular fiscal year. Those normally have been and they've been partial shutdowns. Our military people continue to work and people in critical positions continue to work. But many employees are not allowed to come into the office.” Freking emphasizes that default is much more problematic for the country and could send ripples around the globe if it were to come into fruition. “You know, if a default were to occur, interest rates would immediately spike and the US would be viewed internationally as a less safe place to invest. Bond interest rates to pay our debts into the future would most certainly skyrocket. And there's little doubt that the economy would suffer,” he said.
