US Congress ‘is playing with fire’
“Congress is playing with fire,” Lew said on CNN’s State of the Union. “If the United States government, for the first time in its history, chooses not to pay its bills on time, we will be in default, there is no option that prevents us from being in default if we don’t have enough cash.”
Lew is projecting that the US will exhaust its “extraordinary measures” to stay under the $16.7 trillion federal debt limit no later than Oct 17. By that time the US will have about $30bn in cash, which will be short of expenditures that can reach as high as $60bn in subsequent days. About 800,000 federal employees have been furloughed since Oct 1.
