Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum falsely reported that “if you remember correctly, last Thursday, Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling by 1.9 trillion, right, to 14.3 trillion,” and that according to a wire report, “the Treasury Department has just said that we're gonna be on track to hit that approved debt ceiling this month, in the month of February.” In fact, the Associated Press reported the same day that "[t]he Treasury Department said Wednesday it expects to hit" the “current” debt limit of $12.4 trillion and noted that “the House has yet to pass” the proposed $1.9 trillion increase.
Fox News' MacCallum just wrong that U.S. is “on track” to hit “new” debt limit “this month”
Written by Jocelyn Fong
Published
MacCallum falsely reported that U.S. will soon hit “new debt ceiling” of $14.3 trillion that Congress “approved” last week
From the February 3 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
MACCALLUM: This just crossing in the urgent wires, and get ready for this because if you remember correctly, last Thursday, Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling by 1.9 trillion, right, to 14.3 trillion. That means basically the nation's credit card had a new upper limit of 14.3 trillion. There is now a report on the wires, and we're working on this, that says that the Treasury Department has just said that we're gonna be on track to hit that approved debt ceiling this month, in the month of February.
Okay, when I first looked that this I thought they must mean next February because surely Congress wouldn't approve a new debt ceiling that they were gonna hit within weeks. So we're working on this story and if you remember it was also raised back in November, I believe, and one of the things that was discussed was that they wanted to get this debt ceiling up to a point where they wouldn't have to discuss it again until after the November elections. Well now if we hit it in February, we're gonna have to discuss it again before the November elections for sure. So this is a pretty interesting development. We're working on the details of it and we'll get you those as soon as they come in.
In fact, Congress has not yet approved new debt ceiling, Treasury reportedly said U.S. would reach current limit of $12.4T in February
AP: "[T]he House has yet to pass the measure" increasing the debt limit to $14.3 trillion. A February 3 Associated Press report stated that the Treasury Department says it expects to hit the current debt ceiling of $12.4 trillion “by the end of February,” not the proposed limit of $14.3 trillion as MacCallum falsely reported. From the AP report:
The Treasury Department said Wednesday it expects to hit the government's debt ceiling by the end of February, putting pressure on Congress to raise the limit from its current level of $12.4 trillion.
Treasury said it is working closely with Congress to raise the ceiling. The Senate has approved legislation to increase it by $1.9 trillion to $14.3 trillion, but the House has yet to pass the measure. A ceiling that high would equal about $45,000 for every American.
Congress approved a smaller increase of $290 billion in late December, allowing the government to borrow for about two more months.