On The Money — Democrats set up chaotic end-of-year stretch

by Naomi Jagoda and Aris Folley - 10/11/21 5:05 PM ET

Happy Monday and welcome to On The Money, your nightly guide to everything affecting your bills, bank account and bottom line. Subscribe here: digital-stage.thehill.com/newsletter-signup.

Today’s Big Deal: Democrats are facing a challenging remainder of the year as they seek to pass key economic priorities. We’ll also tell you about calls for overhauling the debt limit and this year’s winners of the Nobel prize in economics.

For The Hill, we’re Naomi Jagoda and Aris Folley. You can reach Naomi at njagoda@digital-stage.thehill.com or @NJagoda and Aris at afolley@digital-stage.thehill.com or @ArisFolley. You can also reach our Finance team colleague Sylvan Lane at slane@digital-stage.thehill.com or @SylvanLane.

Let’s get to it.

Lawmakers face busy three months

Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) holds up ten fingers in relation to Senate Republicans as he addresses reporters after the weekly policy luncheon on Tuesday, October 5, 2021.

Democrats are facing a daunting stretch as the party struggles to get beyond internal battles to win approval of President Biden’s agenda — and deal with other crises that have effectively been punted to the Christmas season.

Democrats are entering the home stretch of the year with four big priorities: funding the government, raising the debt ceiling and passing both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and a sweeping social spending measure.

It’s a stretch that could make or break Biden’s agenda and will surely set up battles for next year’s midterm elections.

Disagreements persist between progressive and centrist Democrats over the size and the policy deals of the social spending measure.
Government funding is set to last through Dec. 3, meaning Congress will need to pass legislation by that date to prevent a shutdown.
Congress may also need to raise the debt limit again in December. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is pledging to pass another debt limit increase without using budget reconciliation, but GOP senators are insisting that Democrats pass the next increase on their own using the budget rules.

The Hill’s Jordain Carney has more here.

LEADING THE DAY

Growing number of Democrats endorse abolishing debt limit altogether

The House is scheduled to pass a short-term debt limit increase on Tuesday, after the Senate passed the measure last week. Some Democrats are calling for taking the debt limit out of Congress’s hands going forward.

The calls are coming from prominent voices such as House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who want to eliminate the debt limit in its current form.

They argue that members of Congress should not be able to use the threat of a debt default as political leverage ever again — an approach that would respond to GOP stonewalling by playing some hardball of their own.

Yarmuth last week joined Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) in introducing a bill that would transfer the authority to raise the debt limit from Congress to the Treasury secretary.
Yellen came out in support of getting rid of the debt limit in testimony last week before the House Financial Services Committee, arguing that it’s impractical to limit the Treasury’s ability to pay for spending already enacted by Congress and the president.
It’s not clear that Democrats would be entirely unified about overhauling the debt limit, given that some fiscally minded centrists are skittish about making major changes to precedent or appearing dismissive of the national debt.

Read more here from The Hill’s Cristina Marcos.

EYES ON THE PRIZE

The 2021 Nobel Prize for economics was awarded on Monday to three U.S.-based economists, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

Half of the prize was awarded to David Card, a Canadian-born professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for his contributions to labor economics. The other half of the prize was awarded to Joshua Angrist, an American-born professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Guido Imbens, a Dutch-born professor at Stanford University.

Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee, said the three prize winners’ research “has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit to society.”