The US debt ceiling crisis will be solved with an "11th-hour" deal because neither side wants a government default, an economist says.
Republican House of Representatives speaker Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, held talks with President Joe Biden last week but failed to strike a deal.
Attorney Steve Gill told Sputnik that Americans were "not putting enough blame on Mitch McConnell."
"McCarthy and the House Republicans have actually passed legislation that would avoid the default and cut spending. It's a reasonable, detailed package, and the White House hasn't put anything forward," he said.
But now McConnell is "sitting back, trying to give Joe Biden another win," Gill accused. "I'm not sure who is more addled and incapable of mental competence, McConnell or Biden at this point."
"If McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate held tough, held together, they would pull [Democrat senator] Joe Manchin to their side" Gill argued. "They would pass the House bill and it would all be on Joe Biden. And Joe Biden would be forced to blink to actually cut spending and avoid the default that Democrats are screaming about."
While Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the government won't be able to pay its bills or federal employees' wages unless the debt ceiling is raised before June 1, Biden has been blasé about the risks.
"Joe Biden is not taking this seriously," Gill underlined. "There are 16 days approximately left until the default deadline. He's going to spend eight of them out of the country overseas."
Mark Frost told Sputnik that the two parties were playing a "game of chicken."
"A great analogy would be like if you are across the street from me and my house is burning down and you're like: 'Mark, get out of your house!' And I'm like: 'Oh, don't worry about it. I got two more hours'."
Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans "have no choice but to come to a deal," regardless of "whether they call it a deal or whether they call it something else."
"They'll come up with some justification for what they're doing," Frost assured. "And the only thing that matters is do they or do they not default on the debt? And I see no evidence whatsoever that they're going to default. Neither side wants to do that."
The economist agreed with a comparison of the situation to the First World War stalemate in the trenches.
"People can get themselves into political situations where they can't extricate themselves out of it and save face," he told
"At the 11th hour, good sense will prevail because the the cost of it not prevailing is prohibitively high to all the players except the anarchists," Frost stressed. "If you're an anarchist, if you're an anarcho-capitalist libertarian, you got your popcorn right now, you're waiting for the whole structure to crumble down so you can have your nation of the individual, the smallest political unit. But it's not going to happen."
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