What spending cuts did he offer? Be specific.
One of the big reasons the Republicans are demanding no tax increases is because they’ve seen this game played out before. A ‘grand bargain’ is reached which includes spending cuts and tax increases, but the tax increases are always specific and implemented FIRST, and the spending cuts are deferred to the next Congress or are to be decided after some commission looks at the problem and comes back with recommendations for what to cut - recommendations which are then ignored, as Obama ignored the spending cuts recommended by his own deficit commission.
The problem with that is that the tax increases get put into place, and the spending cuts never materialize. In fact, when you raise taxes and take the immediate pressure off the budget, you make it even less likely that there will be political will to make serious spending cuts.
In 1982, Reagan signed TEFRA, the “Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act.” TEFRA was supposed to result in $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases - that promise had to be made by Democrats to get Reagan to sign the bill. TEFRA raised taxes by 1% of GDP. You would expect a corresponding reduction in government spending of 3% of GDP, but that never happened. Spending just kept going up.
Republicans understand how the game is played. Do you want to ‘cut spending’? First, propose a budget that increases spending by 5% of GDP. Then negotiate a reduction of 1% of GDP in that budget, and voila! You have a 1% GDP ‘spending cut’. In the meantime, spending actually goes up.
Or, you jigger the ‘baseline’. The baseline is the spending level for the next year which is constant given inflation, population increase, etc. So if inflation is 3%, and the population grows by 1%, then the ‘baseline’ can be 4%, and if you only increase the cost of government by 3%, you can claim a ‘spending cut’. That seems fair, if the estimates are correct. But if you always estimate a little high, then you’ve got room to ‘cut’ government while still increasing it.
There are lots of other tricks like this, but the bottom line is that the only spending cut you can count on is one that’s already happened and that is definable in an unambiguous way (i.e. isn’t just a backdoor transfer from one column in a spreadsheet to another or some other obfuscation).
The same thing happened to Bush I - he also agreed to raise taxes in exchange for spending cuts. The taxes happened, the spending cuts vaporized. Hell, Obama’s health care cost estimate already includes $500 billion in ‘cuts’ to other programs that no one believes will happen (one of them, the doctor adjustment for medicare, has already been kicked down the road twice).
So many Republicans are simply saying no to more taxes, because they don’t believe the government will actually cut spending unless it’s forced to by external circumstances. Some of them even believe that in the long run a default (or the effort required to re-budget to avoid a default) will be preferable to simply allowing the government to continue growing, because in the latter case it will default anyway in a few years because it won’t be able to borrow enough money, and then the result of that default will be even more destructive. I don’t agree with that, but I certainly understand it.
I have a solution: Would you Democrats agree to a budget that had a 1:1 spending cut to tax increase ratio, with the condition that the tax increases only kick in AFTER equivalent spending cuts are made? So if you do $50 billion in real cuts next year, you get to add a $50 billion tax increase the year after that. Would that work for you? Because a proposal like that might be the only thing that will get Tea Party Republicans to accept any tax increases.
