Kyl Floats Short Term Debt Hike

The Hill reports:

Republicans want a short-term increase to the debt ceiling if the talks led by Vice President Biden do not produce sufficient spending cuts, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday.

Kyl, who is representing Senate Republicans in the high-level talks, said his caucus largely agrees with House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) demand that the increase in the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling be paired with even bigger spending reductions.

“As a general proposition — we haven’t taken a vote or anything in our conference — but I think everybody sees that as a minimum goal, that there has to be at least as many dollars in cuts as there are in an increase in the debt ceiling,” Kyl said.

Negotiators in the Biden talks are looking for a way to increase the debt ceiling enough so that it does not need to be raised again until the end of 2012, after the next election. Kyl said that timeline would require a debt-ceiling increase of $2.4 trillion.

But Kyl said the GOP would look to a shorter-term increase in the debt ceiling if the talks fail to produce more than $2.5 trillion in cuts.

“If we can’t get about two and a half trillion in real savings, then I don’t think there’d be much of an appetite on our side to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion,” he told reporters Tuesday.

Kyl said the spending cuts could take effect over 10 years or more.