The government has been shut down for a week and the deadline to raise the debt ceiling is only nine days away yet Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House seem to be nowhere near reaching a solution that would neither re-open the government nor raise the debt ceiling, according to the Washington Post.
While Republicans in the House continue to insist that they will not pass a bill that would raise the debt ceiling without concessions that would either cut into entitlements or defund the Affordable Care Act Democrats in the Senate have crafted a "clean" bill that would raise the debt limit with the hopes that House Speaker John Boehner, D-Ohio, would feel pressured to pass the bill prior to the Oct. 17 deadline, according to Fox News.
Senate Democrats are hoping that the bill will receive some support from Republicans in the Senate, or at the very least that Republicans will be unwilling to filibuster a bill to make it require 60 votes to pass, Fox News reports.
"We should be dismissing anything out of hand, whether it's the debt ceiling or what we're going to do with this government shutdown," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told Fox News. "We've got a situation where you've got a calendar running, you've got people who are frustrated and upset, so let's figure it out."
In a sign that a deal on the debt limit may still be a long ways away some Republican lawmakers have started to publicly doubt that a deal needs to be done by the Oct. 17 deadline, according to USA Today.
"I would dispel the rumor that is going around that you hear on every newscast, that if we don't raise the debt ceiling, we will default on our debt," Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said on "CBS This Morning." "We won't. We'll continue to pay our interest."
Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said that the government will still be able to pay its bills past Oct. 17, it's just a matter of for how long, according to USA Today.
"You'll have days, not weeks, until you deplete that money and you default," Furman said. "It's irresponsible to get to the 17th - but no, you don't fall off a cliff instantly."
Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., seems to think that reaching the debt limit would be helpful to the economy instead of hurtful, possibly catastrophically hurtful, as many have argued, according to USA Today.
"I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets," Yoho told the Washington Post.
A study by Goldman Sachs projects that if the United States were to stop making payments on its debt that the gross domestic product would plummet by 4.2 percent over a year. The report also says that the U.S. doesn't necessarily need to default in order to have an effect on world financial markets, getting close to the limit creates instability, according to the Washington Post.
"There's a modest amount of uncertainty and inconvenience associated with the shutdown," Doug Handler, chief U.S. economist at HIS Global Insight, told the Washington Post. "But that will get magnified once the debt-ceiling debates get very intense."
