Crunch time looms as Biden-led budget talks resume
Monday, June 20, 2011
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's getting down to crunch time for Vice President Joe Biden and a bipartisan band of lawmakers trying to craft a deal to slash the federal budget and raise the debt limit.
There's a growing sense of urgency for the group to start making the politically difficult trade-offs required to generate deficit savings in the trillions of dollars.
Negotiators have snapped up easy-to-pluck savings, but agreement is lacking on the types of controversial big-ticket items that would produce major deficit cuts of the size sought by negotiators.
The hope is to produce more than $2 trillion in deficit cuts over the coming decade or so, to be paired with a commensurate increase in the government's ability to borrow to avoid a first-ever default on U.S. obligations.
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