So not more than a couple of weeks ago, JB accused the President of being irresponsible because the President said he was prepared to go off the cliff.
Tu quoque: Now it seems JB has essentially done the same thing.
What’s his angle here? Do you think JB has some sort of leverage we’re not privy to? Does he have some support from the left? What gives?
He did seem rather emphatic in the press conference.
His angle here is to separate spending cuts and tax revenues. Boehner wants to extend the Bush tax cuts for nearly everyone, then wait for the automatic spending cuts to take place.
When it comes time to raise the debt ceiling in January or February, Obama will have already gotten his tax hikes on the rich. Boehner would then have all the leverage, because Obama would be essentially negotiating for more government spending compared to the sequestration levels coupled with an increase in the debt ceiling.
It is a ploy to shift the debate from “the problem is the deficit will shrink too fast!” to “the President wants to spend a LOT more money than we already are!”
I don’t know, every opinion poll shows that people are going to blame the GOP house if they don’t reach an agreement. If I had to guess I’d say he can’t get any other agreement from his own caucus.
Question: where is Pelosi and Reid in all of this. Is the President negotiating with Congress in a vaccuum?
Here’s where I’m a little confused: the Daily Kos and its bloggers are all saying that Obama’s already caved, and is going to cut Social Security. This sure doesn’t sound like a deal has been made. I think they argue that this is all just political theater to provide cover for revealing the already-made deal, but is there any evidence of this other than “it’s happened before, so I know it’ll happen this time”? Because I sure haven’t seen any.
The Democrats in Congress are pretty much guaranteed to vote support any solution that has Obama’s approval. So the obstacle to getting a deal done is securing enough Republican votes in the House.
You’re forgetting that middle-class taxes will also go up should we go over the fiscal cliff–something that the public would blame on the Republicans if the polls are correct. Obama, quite naturally, will then call for an “Obama tax cut” for the middle-class. Think any Republican would dare to oppose this, even if it also contains spending increases for Medicare or extension of unempolyment insurance?
And I’m not sure, exactly, how the Republicans will be able to push for more spending cuts in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling, given that the sequestration just instituted the spending cuts they supposedly wanted.
Republicans have boxed themselves in with the fiscal cliff, and it is to Obama’s advantage to go over it because it gives him two things his caucus wants (increased taxes on the wealthy and an otherwise unthinkable cut in military spending), puts the Republicans in a negotiating bind (by having to oppose middle-class tax cuts in future negotiations), and allows him to paint the GOP as “yet again” putting party over country.
I for one am glad the Tea Party caucus is still driving this on Boehner’s side; they’re too dumb to realize just how good the deal Obama is offering is.
The latest offer from the White House includes: raising rates for taxpayers over $400k, changing COLA for SS to chaining CPI, capping deductions at 28% of AGI (this part is only sort of rumored), changing estate tax to $3.5m exemption and two years of automatic debt ceiling hikes.
So Social Security cuts are very much part of any visible compromise at this point. A bit of irony is that now the GOP is claiming those cuts don’t really count as deficit reduction since Social Security is on a different budget. Not the same tune they’ve sang in the past, but politics is interesting.
This is, to my mind, pretty much exactly where I thought we’d end up, and far better than the GOP might have feared going in (and way better for them than going over the cliff). Obama should not go much, if any, further just to avoid the cliff.
This Plan B Boehner came up with is pretty decent politics, but actually rather unworkable as an actual compromise. It will never pass the Senate, and Obama has already vowed to veto it.
I’m just wondering at the idiom “drawn a line in the sand.” Growing up in Texas, I had a bunch of Texas History in school; and, of course, I read Texas History Movies.
Famously (and apocryphally), William Barrett Travis drew a line in the sand of the Alamo with his sword & asked all those willing to die for Texas to cross over to him. Everyone but Moses Rose did so. Jim Bowie was deathly ill & asked to be carried over in his cot. It did not end well.
I’m sure Boehner’s actions are being compared to some other historical event.
But what’s more famous than the Alamo?
Ah, okay, I hadn’t heard about that. Well, the selfsame people I just talked about don’t think that any compromise is necessary, that the fiscal cliff isn’t all that bad, and going over it would hurt Republicans. Ergo, they don’t like any of this.
I’m not sure if that’s a separate thread, but are they right? Outside resources okay if this is off topic.
Oh, yeah, and what does the topic of this thread (see, getting back to it) mean in regards to Obama’s offer and how they see it?
Well, that’s obviously a multi-faceted question. Politically it’s probably OK for Obama and the Democrats if the country goes over the cliff, depending on what happens between now and then. I don’t think the Boehner plan will significantly sway public opinion, which has been pretty clearly blaming the GOP for the lack of a deal.
Fiscally, the cliff would cause some pain, perhaps quit a bit of pain. I think the economy is doing well enough that it probably won’t cause a recession, just a slow-down of an already slow recovery. But you could probably get as many opinions as you could find economists.
I’m really not sure what this quick-shift to Plan B from Boehner means. There are a few options I can think of:
a) He doesn’t have the votes for a compromise along the lines of what he and the President have almost reached - a basically 1-for-1 plan with a debt ceiling hike and the only entitlement reform being chained-CPI in SS. He wouldn’t get anything near the majority of his caucus, so it would pass with predominantly Democratic votes. And then the GOP would elect someone else Speaker.
b) He thinks this plan give him enough leverage to get one more big concession out of Obama - maybe moving the rate hike higher than $500k, or getting the capital gains/dividend rate down.
c) He thinks that Plan B might get enough Democratic votes in the House to make it hard for Reid to kill it in the Senate, and very hard for Obama not to sign it. Basically he thinks it reverses the political pressure.
I think (a) is the most likely - the Tea Party wing wants far more than chained-CPI before they take their finger off the debt-ceiling trigger. They want, at a minimum, Medicare reform. Then (b) is second-most likely, but I think Obama has moved just about as far as he is willing to (or should) - at some point it’s better for him to just go over the cliff and then pass a big fat round of tax cuts in the next Congress. I think that Pelosi has too good a grip on her caucus (and Reid doubly-so) for (c) to be reality, nor do I think that the public will be swayed by this. Like it or not most people realize that folks making over $400k are rich, and threatening middle-class tax hikes to protect them is not a political winner, IMO.
I’d be more worried about the impact on the markets more than the actual economy - and then the reaction of business. The Dow has been going up on reasonably good news and the perception that a deal is in the works - watch for a big crash on Jan. 2 if it falls through. As you said, the middle class tax cut will get extended. But there will be a lot of chaos as they put things back together again. If it gets fixed fast enough it might not be serious.
I agree with your option a. But Boehner might not lose his job. If the polls show that the country is happy with the deal, and there is no really plausible Tea Party candidate for Speaker, they may keep him. If not, I doubt the new Speaker would be able to hold the more moderate faction in line, so there might be a coalition to pass some reasonable stuff. The Dems wouldn’t need that many votes if they sweeten the deal enough for those representatives who see the tide turning.
There we go - Texas exceptionalism again 
(didn’t you lose that one?)
Yeah, but it was a TEXAS SIZED slaughter.
I think both sides have drawn lines in the sand a few times. Realistically the biggest difference to me seem to now be the income level at which the Bush tax cuts are phased out. Obama is saying $400k, Boehner is saying $1m. That’s significant progress over where they started and while maybe this is an indication Boehner is done negotiating I think it much more likely he’s just trying to wring as much as he can out of the deal.
I think Boehner’s Speakership is pretty safe, he purged some hardcore conservatives out of committees awhile back without significant rebellion in the ranks. I also think Boehner knows he can get a deal…he only needs like 35 of his party to go with him, and most likely whatever deal gets out of the House you will see only a minority of the GOP vote for it…that was the case with the fiscal cliff deal in 2011 that got us to this point.
This isn’t Boehner’s first rodeo, he recognizes that unlike in prior situations being obstinate is lose-lose here without equivocation. If he does nothing all the tax increases go into effect regardless, so his best hope going into this was to minimize tax increases as much as he could, and get as much spending reduction as he could to try and placate the Tea Party wing.
You’re calling the wrong person a dick there.
Saint Grover is giving his blessing to Boehner’s Plan B, so that should relieve some pressure on the anti-tax wing of the GOP caucus:
On the other side, the Progressive caucus–a ragtag collection of 75 low-wattage congresspersons–has come out against chained-CPI, so Boehner is probably going to need more like 80-90 GOP votes to pass his bill, and it’s almost certainly dead in the Senate.
Chained-CPI is being sold as a kind of accounting gimmick, but in reality it’s just a way to cut SS benefits and raise taxes generally without coming out and saying you’re doing that (besides COLA for SS the CPI is used to set tax brackets; thresholds would go down). It’s brilliant politically, but there’s a reason why SS is called the Third Rail of politics; I have no doubt should this pass (even though it’s a GOP plan and probably will never make it out of the Senate), the Republicans would pillory Democrats in 2014 for trying to cut SS.
So if Grover is giving his OK to Plan B, based on the fact that it’s just letting a tax cut expire, isn’t he opening the door to eliminating the Bush tax cuts entirely?
Here’s an interesting chart showing the practical deficit difference between the two plans of Boehner and Obama:
I especially like the tagline: “A battle over nothing.”
Too bad neither the President nor Congress has the guts to acknowledge the obvious.