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Obama Calls Democratic, GOP Leaders To Debt Talks

President Obama invited Democratic and Republican congressional leaders to the White House for face-to-face meetings on the budget Thursday.

"It's my hope," Obama told reporters at the White House on Tuesday, "that everybody's going to leave their ultimatums at the door, that we'll all leave our political rhetoric at the door, and we're all going to do what's best for our economy and do what's best for our people."

The president would like to reach an agreement within two weeks, which would leave time to raise the federal debt ceiling before an Aug. 2 deadline.

At the same time, the financial world remains skittish, and investors are on alert. They're still recovering their confidence from some pretty hard shakes in 2007 and 2008. Now they're watching other countries, especially Greece, deal with the effects of too much government debt built up over years of spending.

And then they look at the U.S., where the federal government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends. The debt tops $14 trillion, and the benefits the government has promised to people who are retiring cost a lot more than it can afford.

Investors see serious work that needs to be done, but members of Congress don't necessarily seem to be acting so serious.

"That is almost so irresponsible that it is frightening," says former Rep. John Tanner, a Democrat from Tennessee. He finds it jaw-dropping that some lawmakers continue to say the U.S. can just nip and tuck here and there or find some easy solution and things will be just fine.

"This debt ceiling business is a live-fire exercise — they're not shooting blanks," Tanner adds.

At the Concord Coalition, a fiscally conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., Chief Economist Diane Lim Rogers says lawmakers may actually be making the problem worse with their rhetoric.

"All show, a lot of theatrics, a lot of hype — it doesn't help the cause because it makes the American people think, 'Oh, it's just politics,' " Rogers says.

It's not politics, she says — it's real. If lawmakers can't get together and fix this problem, the U.S. could lose its status as the most stable of the world's economies. That would hurt everybody in the country.

Rogers says the Democrats think "maybe we can just tax rich people, or evil corporations, or maybe we don't have to cut major benefit programs — maybe we can just cut waste, fraud and abuse."

On the other side, Republicans say, the only solution they'll accept is spending cuts, and they will not consider ending tax breaks for corporations or raising taxes of any kind.

None of this sits well with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who was chairman of the House Budget Committee when he balanced the budget with President Clinton in the 1990s.

Kasich told CBS that lawmakers must drop all the posturing and ideological orthodoxy: "At the end of the day, you look yourself in the mirror, and you say to yourself, 'Did I do what was right for families and for children, and if I paid a political price, so what?' "

That's the kind of attitude the president wants in his meeting Thursday. Come to the White House, he says, but leave your rhetoric at the door.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Andrea Seabrook covers Capitol Hill as NPR's Congressional Correspondent.