U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Monday urged Congress to raise the national debt limit, now at 8.965 trillion dollars, saying the country may be unable to pay its bills this fall.
"I am writing to request that Congress raise the statutory debt limit as soon as possible," said Paulson in a letter to Congress. He estimated that the government is likely to bump into the statutory debt limit in early October.
The national debt limit has been boosted several times since President George W. Bush took office in 2001. The last time was in March 2006 when Congress agreed to raise the debt ceiling by 781 billion dollars.
Paulson did not say how much more borrowing authority the government needs.
The Treasury Department has resorted to numerous accounting maneuvers to pay its bills while the government waited for Congress to expand its borrowing authority.
In February last year, for example, the Bush administration said it had begun to use a government employee pension fund to avoid hitting the then national debt limit of 8.184 trillion dollars.
However, such measures "would create unnecessary uncertainty for the financial markets and result in costs to the government," Paulson argued.
Such actions "should be reserved only for extraordinary circumstances, and should be avoided," he said.
Source: Xinhua
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