Damages from Harvey hurricane are approaching $ 100 billion

According to some estimates, the aid needed by Harvey victims in Texas and Louisiana reached $ 150 billion, and the White House announced that it would soon be sending the Congress to approve the funds needed to assist flood victims.

Trump's administration will send Congress a request to secure funds to help victims of the Harvey hurricane, which caused devastating floods, White House Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert said, and the request, he said, is likely to be addressed in several phases, About damages caused by floods.

Trump has prepared a request for an initial 5.9 billion assistance to be sent to the Congress, said the administration official.

The amount that will be needed to recover the damage caused by this hurricane is likely to come close to the $ 110 billion rate released in 2005 after the hurricane Katrina.

The necessity of providing quicker assistance to the affected areas of Harvey could cause problems in fiscal policy at the end of September. At a time when Harvey struck Texas, Congress and President Trump had already clashed over resolving the problem of reaching the upper limit of public debt, and by the October 1st, they must approve the provisional budget.

Finance Minister Steven Mnuchin told CNBC that due to the costs caused by Hurricane, the deadline for raising the state's upper limit could be shifted in a few days, reiterating that the limit must be increased by September 29th.

Financial markets want to avoid raising borrowing limits because it would have an impact on the economy around the world.

The Trump administration official and prominent lawmaker in the Congress believe that funding for aid to victims of the hurricane should not be linked to the government's borrowing limit.

Bossert said the administration wants financial aid to victims to be "clean" additional measures, unrelated to raising public debt limits.

Republican lawyer Mark Meadows told Washington Post that linking aid with raising the country's government debt would be "a terrible idea ... that would merge two totally different topics."

"It is not disputable that we will provide funds for assistance, but I think it would be wrong to link it with raising the debt limit," he said.

This leaves the possibility of the assistance to the affected areas to be linked to a larger, short-term measure that must be accepted by October 1.

• 1 Sep, 2017
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