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janet yellen
Treasury Chief Warns US Could Hit Debt Limit in Mid-January
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen implored Congress to "protect the full faith and credit of the United States" or face imposition of "extraordinary measures."
Dec 27, 2024
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Congress on Friday that—absent imminent action to raise or suspend the nation's debt limit—her agency would likely have to take "extraordinary measures" as soon as January 14 to avert hitting the debt ceiling.
"As you know, the debt limit is the total amount of money that the United States government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments," Yellen wrote in a letter sent to congressional leaders. "In June 2023, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 was enacted, suspending the debt limit through January 1, 2025."
DEBT LIMIT: New letter this afternoon from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen projects debt limit will be reached a bit later than the earlier projection of Jan. 1; new limit to be reached between Jan 14-23 at which point Treasury will have to take extraordinary measures
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— Jane Norman (@janenorman.bsky.social) December 27, 2024 at 1:53 PM
Yellen continued:
On January 2, 2025, the new debt limit will be established at the amount of outstanding debt subject to the statutory limit at the end of the previous day. However, on January 2, the outstanding debt subject to the limit is projected to decrease by approximately $54 billion, mostly due to a scheduled redemption of nonmarketable securities held by a federal trust fund associated with Medicare payments. As a result, the debt is currently projected to temporarily decrease, and accordingly, Treasury does not expect that it will be necessary to start taking extraordinary measures on January 2 to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations. Treasury currently expects to reach the new limit between January 14 and January 23, at which time it will be necessary for Treasury to start taking extraordinary measures.
"I respectfully urge Congress to act to protect the full faith and credit of the United States," Yellen added.
Recent past extraordinary measures—which are invoked by the U.S. Treasury Department to prevent a binding debt limit—have included the declaration of a debt issuance suspension period, suspension of new investments, and suspension of reinvestment of certain securities.
Yellen's admonition comes less than one month before Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Both Trump and Yellen have called for the elimination of the debt ceiling. The end-of-year spending bill signed into law last week by U.S. President Joe Biden did not include Trump's demand to raise or suspend the debt ceiling.
According to USDebtClock.org, the nation is currently more than $36.2 trillion in debt—or more than $107,000 for each of the country's more 346.3 million people.
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Biden Urged to 'Follow the Facts' as Study Shows LNG Emissions 33% Worse Than Coal
"The science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals," said one campaigner.
Sep 12, 2024
More than 125 climate, environmental, and health scientists and researchers on Thursday implored the Biden administration to "follow legitimate science and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs," pointing to a new study showing liquefied natural gas has a 33% greater greenhouse gas footprint than coal.
"As U.S. scientists and researchers we are closely following efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Treasury to develop greenhouse gas analyses of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and hydrogen, and implore you to use the best available science when conducting this analysis," the scientists wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
"The stakes could not be higher," the letter asserts. "The choices that you make relating to modeling assumptions for the heat-trapping potential of natural gas will determine if the federal government will make decisions based on climate science or wishful thinking."
The scientists continued:
The main constituent in natural gas is methane, a powerful climate-disrupting pollutant that traps more than 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years, the relevant timeframe in which we must act. We agree with President [Joe] Biden's declaration to world leaders that this is the decisive decade. As the climate crisis becomes more urgent, we are rapidly approaching planetary thresholds that, once breached, cannot be reversed.
The fossil fuel industry wants you to distort the scientific evidence and asserts, falsely, that decisions to expand natural gas production and consumption are consistent with U.S. and global climate goals. They are advocating for flawed modeling assumptions that would hide the true climate impact of gas. It is imperative that the Departments of Energy and Treasury reject these efforts.
The letter's signers cite a study published this month by Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth which—when properly accounting for LNG's full life cycle, including extraction, liquefaction, transportation, and end-source combustion—found that the fracked gas has a 33% greater greenhouse emissions impact than coal.
"An abundance of scientific evidence now shows that natural gas is at least as damaging to the climate as coal and may be worse due to inevitable leaks and disproves the claim that natural gas can serve as a 'bridge fuel' while renewable energy sources ramp up," the scientists wrote.
Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch, said in a statement that "the science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals."
"This administration must ignore industry propaganda, follow legitimate science, and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs like LNG exports and gas-sourced hydrogen," Walsh added.
Noting that "over 20 years, methane is a far more powerful climate villain than ever previously appreciated," Science & Environmental Health Network senior scientist Sandra Steingraber said that "methane is the Houdini of greenhouse gasses, escaping into the atmosphere from all parts of the natural gas system at a pace that far exceeds earlier estimates."
"Taken together, these findings mean that the stakes for the modeling assumptions chosen for estimating the climate impacts of LNG and hydrogen fuels could not be higher," Steingraber stressed. "It's imperative that our Departments of Energy and Treasury base their climate modeling assumptions on the abundance of scientific evidence and not the distorted claims and wishful thinking of the fossil fuel industry."
Despite campaign pledges to center climate action—including by banning new fossil fuel drilling on public lands—Biden oversaw the approval of more new permits for drilling on public land during his first two years in office than former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, did in 2017 and 2018.
The Biden administration has also held fossil fuel lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and has approved the highly controversial Willow project and Mountain Valley Pipeline. Biden also increased liquefied natural gas production and export before pausing LNG exports earlier this year.
Despite the pause—which activists are calling on the Biden administration to make permanent—the president has also overseen what climate defenders have called a "staggering" LNG expansion, including Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana and more than a dozen other projects that, if all completed, would make U.S. exported LNG emissions higher than the European Union's combined greenhouse gas footprint.
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'Grave Mistake': Yellen Under Fire for Opposing Global Billionaires Tax
"To reject the very idea of a global minimum tax on billionaires is to cede control of our economies and our democracies to oligarchs and plutocrats," warned one progressive critic over the U.S. Treasury Secretary's position.
May 21, 2024
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is being taken to task by progressive critics after coming out Monday in opposition to a proposed global tax on billionaires at an upcoming Group of 7 nations meeting where the measure is on the agenda.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Yellen told the newspaper that while the Biden administration broadly supports more progressive taxation, in which those at the top of the income and wealth scale pay higher rates, the U.S. will not back a plan—put forth by Brazil and backed other G20 leaders earlier this year—that would set a minimum international rate for the planet's ultra-wealthy.
In her remarks, Yellen said the "notion of some common global arrangement for taxing billionaires with proceeds redistributed in some way—we're not supportive of a process to try to achieve that. That's something we can't sign on to."
The proposed 2% global tax on the assets of the world's billionaires, backers of the idea argue, would be a way to curb the international race to the bottom on taxation by hampering the ability of those with vast fortunes to move their money from bank to bank and nation to nation as a way to avoid paying their fair share into public coffers.
The EU Tax Observatory, which helped formulate and backs the proposal, estimates that the 2% levy on the billionaires would raise $250 billion in annual revenues.
Given President Joe Biden and Yellen's support for a global minimum corporate tax and recent political messaging on the need to compel corporations and the wealthiest to pay higher taxes domestically, Morris Pearl, chair of the advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires, said opposition to a global billionaire tax was confounding.
"We are mystified by Secretary Yellen's comment suggesting she has rejected the G20 proposal for a global minimum tax on billionaires," Pearl said. "Her comment is starkly at odds with President Biden's stated goal of compelling billionaires to pay their fair share; it is at odds with the growing consensus on taxing the ultra-wealthy; and it is at odds with her own history of being a champion of international cooperation on tax matters."
Successful implementation of a billionaires tax, reports the WSJ, "would allow countries to raise more in tax revenue to finance other priorities and use the tax code to reduce income inequality, which has widened sharply in recent decades."
Floating the idea back in January, Brazil's Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said, "In a world where economic activities are increasingly transnational, we have to find new and creative ways to tax these activities [and] thus direct the revenues to common global endeavors such as ending hunger and poverty and fighting climate change."
According to Pearl:
Secretary Yellen's statement seems to stem from concerns that the revenue from such a tax would be"redistributed." However, the proposal would not institute a global tax that is then globally redistributed. The blueprint for this proposal is the OECD agreement for a global corporate minimum tax that she herself championed, which enables individual governments to determine how the taxes collected within their borders are spent.
If her concerns are simply about redistribution, she should clarify that ahead of her meetings later this week. But to reject the very idea of a global minimum tax on billionaires is to cede control of our economies and our democracies to oligarchs and plutocrats. In short, a wholesale surrender to the political influence of the ultra-rich would be a grave mistake.
Oxfam International calculated earlier this year that a 5% wealth tax targeting multimillionaires and billionaires in G20 countries could raise around $1.5 trillion a year in revenue globally. Such funds, the group said, would be "enough to end global hunger, help low- and middle-income countries adapt to climate change, and bring the world back on track to meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)—and still leave more than $546 billion to invest in inequality-busting public services and climate action in G20 countries."
Over the weekend, economist Gabriel Zucman, one the key architects behind the billionaires tax proposal put forward by Brazil, said "the super-rich will fight" such measures "tooth and nail," but "yes—we will have, one day, a coordinated minimum max on the super-rich. And perhaps sooner than you think!"
If he's correct, it doesn't look like Secretary Yellen or President Biden have received the memo.
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