Obama demands quick action to raise US debt limit

The president also said he will soon ask Congress to enact new gun legislation after the shootings a month ago that left 20 elementary students dead in Newtown, Connecticut. Facing stiff opposition from the National Rifle Association, he conceded lawmakers may not approve everything he wants.

On the debt ceiling, Obama said Republicans who want to dramatically cut spending in return for raising U.S. borrowing limits “will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the economy.”

“The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip. And they better decide quickly because time is running short.”

“We are not a deadbeat nation,” he declared.

In the final news conference of his first term, the president said: “The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip. And they better decide quickly because time is running short.”

He further said he was not willing to continue facing prolonged and bitter debates on the debt, a current reality that he says are hurting the U.S. recovery from the Great Recession.

“I don’t think anybody would consider my position to be unreasonable here”.

Until the partisan fight over the debt ceiling broke out in 2011, the limit on borrowing had been increased by Congress as a matter of course.

But with a surge in Tea Party Republicans elected to the House of Representatives in 2010, the opposition party has sought to use the power over the debt to enforce its desires for smaller government and spending cuts.

The president also said he will soon ask Congress to enact new gun legislation in the wake of the shootings a month ago that left 20 elementary students dead in Newtown, Connecticut. Facing stiff opposition from the National Rifle Association, he conceded lawmakers may not approve everything he asks for.

Obama said he was willing to consider future deficit cuts, but only if they are done independently from a vote to raise the $16.4 trillion debt limit.

In a blunt rebuttal to Republicans who say they will not agree to any more tax increases, the president said taxes and spending both must be on the table.

He said he is “open to making modest adjustments to programs like Medicare to protect them for future generations,” and wants to close tax loopholes at the same time.

Obama spoke less than a week before his inauguration for a second term, and several days after he signed legislation that narrowly averted a “fiscal cliff” of automatic spending cuts and across-the-board tax increases.

Combined with other bills he signed earlier in the term, he said he and Congress have reduced deficits by about $2.5 trillion over a decade, somewhat less than the $4 trillion he said is necessary to get them down to a manageable size.

“I’m happy to have a conversation about how we reduce our deficits in a sensible way,” he said, but added repeatedly he wasn’t willing to let congressional Republicans use the debt limit as leverage in negotiations over spending cuts.

Failure to raise the debt limit would put the United States into a first-ever default, a step that Obama said could “blow up the economy.”

Congressional Democrats have recently urged the president to lift the debt limit unilaterally. He said — as he has before — that he won’t do it, that Congress had voted for the spending that resulted in federal borrowing, and should now agree to pay the bill.