Simon said that after paying rent, bills and buying groceries, she’s lucky if she has $100 left for her family. “All I can say is, try to put something to the side because you never know when this day is gonna come.” “I can’t let us go without food because of their mistakes.” I can’t buy toilet paper because I got to buy eggs,” she said. “I can’t buy soap because I got to buy rice. One plaintiff, 55-year-old Glennice Simon, said she’s been supporting her and her son in Brooklyn using her Supplemental Security Income check since their SNAP benefits were cut in October. Of those, 5,711 were overdue cases date as far back as September. The lawsuit points to city data that shows more than 28,000 applications for SNAP and cash aid were overdue as of December. Under federal law, anyone eligible for the SNAP program must receive benefits within 30 days. Over half of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applicants in December were left waiting longer than a month for benefits, according to the class-action suit filed in Manhattan federal court. “Yeah, I don’t think she’s playing games,” Zandi concurred in an interview last week.New York City officials left tens of thousands of New Yorkers scrambling to buy groceries without their food stamps, a federal lawsuit filed on Friday claims. Akabas said Yellen’s warning is consistent with how the Bipartisan Policy Center is analyzing the situation, however, noting that “no risk is too small a risk to flag.” The Biden administration has refused to negotiate, vowing to keep government funding on a separate track.Ī number of Republicans aren’t feeling the pressure either, viewing Yellen’s early June projection as nothing more than a political ploy aimed at squeezing the GOP to swallow a clean debt hike. The distress signals from government and outside forecasters have done nothing to jumpstart talks between the White House, which is insisting on a “clean” debt limit increase, and Republicans, who are demanding spending cuts in exchange for lifting the borrowing cap. He added that Yellen’s early warning of June 1 is also very possible, as is a “best case scenario” of Aug. Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, told senators during a Budget Committee hearing on Thursday that the X-date could fall on June 8. would officially default - thanks to the often unpredictable nature of federal cash flows.Īfter Yellen issued her warning last week, the independent Congressional Budget Office also said it sees “a significantly greater risk that the Treasury will run out of funds in early June.” Other estimates that point to a potential debt catastrophe in early June also underscore that considerable variability in the X-date will remain - until perhaps just days before the U.S. economy in the coming weeks stems in part from a disappointing tax season, mixed with delayed tax filing deadlines for residents of states like California that sit in designated disaster areas, Akabas said. The Treasury cash crunch that could cripple the U.S. “I still don’t think now is the time for panic, but it’s certainly time to start getting concerned,” Akabas said, noting that Treasury “is skating on very thin ice” next month due to low cash flows. The coming weeks will offer more clarity about whether Treasury can make it to mid-June and give Congress and the White House a longer ramp to negotiate a debt limit deal, said Shai Akabas, BPC’s director of economic policy. If Treasury can hold off a default until the end of June, it would be able to tap into about $145 billion in new “extraordinary measures,” buying the government a little more borrowing power into the summer. ‘This puts additional pressure on us': Yellen updates default deadline What remains unclear, though, is whether the Treasury Department can limp along paying the bills until June 15, when quarterly tax receipts would provide a cash infusion and likely stave off default through the end of next month. The think tank’s new projection piles further urgency onto Tuesday’s debt limit meeting at the White House, despite slim prospects for a major breakthrough between Democrats insisting on a straightforward hike and Republicans pushing for major concessions in return for their debt votes. A more likely scenario, in the event of a default, is that Treasury would choose to delay all bills, waiting until there’s enough revenue to cover all payments for any given day, the Bipartisan Policy Center said. The Biden administration has already dismissed the untested idea of paying some bills but not others, arguing that it would be unfair to average Americans, cause widespread economic disruption and prove logistically impossible. And those hugely significant payments are just a few that could be affected, the Bipartisan Policy Center cautioned, and don’t represent an “exhaustive” list “of all cash flows on a particular day.”
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