Boehner: Obama economic push a 'big set-up' for higher taxes 
 
 By Russell Berman - 
 
 Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) panned President Obama’s newfound focus on the economy, saying his scheduled series of speeches this week were merely a “big set-up” for a push for higher taxes. 
 
 The Speaker and other House Republican leaders mocked Obama for giving more economic speeches while he ignored House-passed legislation aimed at boosting job growth. 
 
 “If the president were serious about helping our economy, he wouldn’t give another speech. He’d reach out and actually work with us,” Boehner said after a meeting of the Republican conference. 
 
 Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Obama was making “his umpteenth pivot” back to jobs and the economy. 
 
 “I say to the president, you know what? Actions speak louder than words,” Cantor said. 
 
 The GOP leaders cited House legislation to approve the Keystone oil sands pipeline, reduce regulations and delay implementation of the 2010 healthcare law as proposals opposed by the White House that would help the economy. 
 
 In an address Wednesday at Knox College in Illinois, Obama is expected to take credit for an economy that has improved modestly over the last year. While the speech is not expected to include a new policy agenda, it comes as Washington prepares for fall battles over a potential government shutdown and a need to raise the debt ceiling. 
 
 “This is all about a big set-up coming in this speech,” Boehner said. “The president wants to raise taxes so he can do more stimulus spending. The fact is, if we’re going to get rid of his sequester, we’re going to have to look for smarter spending cuts in order to do that.” 
 
 The Speaker reiterated that Republicans would not simply lift the debt ceiling without concessions from Democrats. 
 
 “We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending. It’s as simple as that,” Boehner said. ||||| House Speaker John Boehner signaled a clash with the White House and the Democratic-led Senate over raising the U.S. borrowing authority later this year. 
 
 Congressional Republicans are staking their ground in fiscal negotiations that once again could pose the threat of default or a government shutdown -- the recurring theme surrounding efforts to reduce the nation’s deficit since 2011. 
 
 “We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending,” Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told reporters in Washington yesterday. President Barack Obama and Senate leaders are refusing to accept anything short of a clean debt-limit increase. 
 
 “We will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay the bills that Congress ran up,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said when asked about Boehner’s remarks. 
 
 Any discussion about raising the debt ceiling must start with the premise that “we are the United States; we do not default,” Carney said. “The president believes Republican leaders share that conviction.” 
 
 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said yesterday that Democrats are “not negotiating on the debt ceiling.” 
 
 Congress should pass a debt-ceiling increase without any “hijinks” to ensure a stable economy, Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, told reporters July 18. “Attaching other issues to the debt ceiling is playing with fire,” he said. 
 
 Photographer: Susan Walsh/AP Photo House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio arrives for a news conference on Capitol Hill. Close House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio arrives for a news conference on Capitol Hill. Close Open Photographer: Susan Walsh/AP Photo House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio arrives for a news conference on Capitol Hill. 
 
 ‘Significant Cuts’ 
 
 Boehner said Congress needs to find “significant cuts” in federal spending to replace $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending reductions over nine years. Republicans also say they’re determined to make changes to entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. 
 
 Republican leaders have weighed whether to spell out the steps and timing of a tax-code rewrite as a trigger for raising the U.S. borrowing limit. Their goal is to curb tax breaks and use the resulting revenue to lower rates. 
 
 House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, said he’s been working “for a long time” on a package of spending cuts and government overhauls to be timed with the debt-limit increase. The former vice presidential candidate didn’t provide details. A 2014 budget blueprint he proposed would balance the budget in 10 years. 
 
 Treasury Notes 
 
 Lawmakers fought for months two years ago over raising the nation’s debt limit, with Obama signing an increase into law on Aug. 2, 2011, the day the Treasury Department warned that U.S. borrowing authority would expire. 
 
 After Standard & Poor’s stripped the U.S. of its AAA top credit rating, the interest rate paid to finance the budget deficit dropped rather than rose. The yield on 10-year Treasury notes on Aug. 5, 2011, when S&P announced the downgrade, was 2.56 percent. The yield fell as low as 1.39 percent on July 24, 2012. As of yesterday, the yield had risen to 2.50 percent amid speculation the Federal Reserve is closer to winding down its asset-purchase program. 
 
 Lawmakers’ negotiations led to the Budget Control Act of 2011, which set discretionary spending caps for 10 years and created a process that resulted in the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration. The cuts started in March. 
 
 With the possibility of a fight over the debt limit after the five-week congressional recess that starts in August, Democrats said they worry about repeating the events of 2011. 
 
 ‘Drawing Lines’ 
 
 “It sure will sooner or later create a crisis situation,” Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview at the Capitol. “It’s that kind of total rigidity that makes it very difficult to get things done: throwing down the gauntlet here and just drawing lines in the sand.” 
 
 The need to increase the nation’s borrowing authority will collide with negotiations to fund the government for the 2014 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Negotiations will be centered on reducing the deficit and finding ways to replace the spending cuts. 
 
 Congress will have to first approve a short-term stopgap measure to fund the government instead of the regular appropriations bills because the work on those won’t be completed before Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. Even the short-term measure could be a heavy lift because Reid said he won’t accept a stopgap measure at the lower sequestration levels. 
 
 Senate Democrats instead want to replace the automatic, across-the-board cuts with a mix of spending cuts and tax revenue. 
 
 The White House Office of Management and Budget, which enforces the spending cuts, has projected the caps in 2014 would be $967.4 billion for security and non-security spending unless the sequester is repealed. 
 
 ‘Disaster’ 
 
 Funding at the lower levels “would be a disaster for the country, and I would do everything within my ability to oppose that,” Reid told reporters. 
 
 The economy is showing signs of generating more revenue, even if the recovery is sluggish. 
 
 Government tax receipts have climbed 14 percent above the level a year ago, according to Alex Brill, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who was interviewed by Bloomberg BNA. Economists credit economic growth as well as additional revenue from the tax increase Congress passed early this year. 
 
 The Congressional Budget Office projected in May that federal tax receipts would climb from $2.45 trillion in 2012 to $2.81 trillion in 2013, and to $3.78 trillion by 2017. 
 
 Earlier Vote 
 
 Congress voted at the end of January to suspend the nation’s debt limit until May 19, temporarily removing the risk of a default. When the ceiling was restored May 19, it increased to $16.7 trillion to reflect the government’s borrowing during the past few months. 
 
 By shifting money among government accounts, the Treasury Department can continue borrowing for several months, perhaps as late as October or November. 
 
 In May, House Republicans voted to exempt federal payments to creditors from the U.S. debt limit. The House measure would ensure that U.S. government bondholders will continue to be paid and that Social Security benefits won’t be interrupted if a standoff over the nation’s debt limit causes a cash crunch. The Obama administration would be left to decide which of the government’s other bills to pay using tax revenue. 
 
 The Democratic-controlled Senate didn’t take up the bill. 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Roxana Tiron in Washington at rtiron@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jodi Schneider at jschneider50@bloomberg.net ||||| Setting the stage for a fall showdown over raising the nation’s debt ceiling, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, renewed on Tuesday his insistence that “we're not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending. It's as simple as that.” 
 
 As President Barack Obama readies a series of speeches later this week setting the parameters for this fall’s fight over government spending, the top House Republican said his position remained unchanged. 
 
 “I believe the so-called Boehner Rule is the right formula for getting that done,” he later added, referring to the eponymous rule matching new debt authority with spending cuts 
 
 Republican House Speaker John Boehner talks about immigration reform Tuesday on Capitol Hill. 
 
 The speaker’s words make for a hard-line negotiating position for Republicans heading into yet another debt showdown with Obama. While Republicans extracted spending cuts during the initial 2011 fight over extending the debt ceiling, it produced the so-called “fiscal cliff” – a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts – with which Congress had to reckon at the end of 2012. 
 
 Lawmakers’ ability to deal with the fiscal cliff was mixed. Taxes were allowed to rise, but only on incomes over $400,000. But the automatic spending cuts, known as the “sequester,” were allowed to take effect despite dire warnings from both Obama and economists about the cuts’ effect on the economy. Though the economy has grown in 2013, and has continued to add jobs, critics of the sequester argue that growth would be more robust if the cuts had never taken place. 
 
 Whether Obama will be willing to assent to more cuts to extract an increase in the debt ceiling is an open question. 
 
 Republicans in Congress, smarting from the political fallout over the fiscal cliff at the beginning of this year, volunteered to extend the debt limit through mid-May so long as both the House and Senate produced budget proposals for the 2013-14 fiscal year. (Both chambers did just that.) 
 
 However, neither of those budget proposals have advanced because the House and Senate have refused to appoint negotiators to hash out a compromise between the two proposals. The debate over whether to proceed with these “conference” negotiations has been particularly charged in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has vocally criticized conservatives who have objected to naming negotiators. Complicating the politics, some senior Republicans like Arizona Sen. John McCain, have also criticized fellow GOP senators for blocking budget talks from going forward. 
 
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– See if this sounds familiar: The White House and House Republicans appear headed toward a standoff over the debt ceiling this fall, reports NBC News. That's after John Boehner's statement this morning: “We're not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending. It's as simple as that.” Democrats such as Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer said last week that Congress should pass an extension of the debt ceiling without strings attached, reports Bloomberg. Both sides appear to be jockeying for public opinion, with Boehner getting out ahead of President Obama's planned speeches on the economy starting tomorrow, reports the Hill. Boehner warned that Obama would be laying the ground for tax hikes. Treasury chief Jack Lew says the nation has enough money to operate without new borrowing until about Labor Day.