Yet Mr Blair has a grievance too: that the budget negotiations, which are meant to set spending ceilings from 2007 to 2013, have omitted the biggest item: the CAP.That is because, in October 2002, Mr Chirac got first Germany's Gerhard Schröder and then other EU leaders to agree to keep CAP spending unchanged until 2013.
After certain technical adjustments prescribed in the law, this ceiling cuts spending for NDD to about 80percentt of the real per capita spending that was available a decade ago during the Bush administration.
"Then we need to get this debt ceiling and spending piece done.
In the US, the recovery is being challenged by negotiations over the debt ceiling, and spending cuts associated with the fiscal cliff.
They agreed Friday to postpone their showdown with President Obama for three months after initially vowing there would be no deal on raising the debt ceiling without spending cuts.
The Florida program, likely to be a model for many other states, shifts from Medicaid's traditional "defined benefit" plan to a "defined contribution" plan, under which the state sets a ceiling on spending for each Medicaid recipient.
Even if a deal can be reached and a shutdown averted, the two parties will then move on to potentially bigger fights over raising the national debt ceiling, cutting spending for next year and addressing the long-term growth of entitlement programs — a topic the House Budget Committee plans to put on the front burner in coming weeks.
There is a $5.3 million ceiling on spending in the primary, so the decision by Mr. Morris, a highly sought political consultant, to donate his services -- and the fact that he is running Mr. Hevesi's campaign with a skeletal staff out of his firm's headquarters -- would seem to give Mr. Hevesi an important advantage over his more free-spending rivals.
Without raising the debt ceiling, federal spending would need to be cut by about 40percentt immediately to avoid an instantaneous default on government debt.
And there's always the chance that, at any time, another disaster relief bill could plop down and make it easier for Republicans to pass debt ceiling or spending deals without making sops to Democratic priorities.
