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Boehner Bolts “Big” Debt Deal
On the eve of talks with with President Obama, Speaker John Boehner is pulling out of negotiations for a large-scale deficit reduction plan. His statement:
“I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.”
His new goal, $2 trillion in spending cuts.
8 Responses to “Boehner Bolts “Big” Debt Deal”
To quote Bill Clinton, “Mr. President, Don’t Blink!”
Agreed, Steve. The Republicans are just insanely absolutist on anything that would increase revenues, be it actual tax increases or the closing of tax loopholes or eliminating unneeded tax subsidies. The President and the Democrats in the Senate and House just shouldn’t cave into irrationality.
I’m actually disappointed nobody here has said Boehner has blinked.
Boehner is not the sharpest knife in the kitchen but he’s not stupid – he knows the debt limit must be raised but he’s up against the teabilly caucus who are clueless. Obama has the upper hand here – he can decide who gets paid and who doesn’t. Boehner knows this but he doesn’t have control of his own members. Newt tried the same thing and backed down when Rubin said he was going to stop Social Security payments.
Don’t y’all think that maybe it’s something more conventional (and in fact, more real), that Republicans don’t want to pay the price in 2012 for being associated with entitlement reform? (The GOP always will be viewed more harshly, even if the Dems specify every detail in an agreement with the GOP to reform entitlements.)
After all, many a swing voter as well as Dem voter won’t make any distinction between the Ryan plan and serious reform that rescues the entitlement programs and keeps them entitlements.
(or can’t make any distinction — any assault is the same)
I think there is a mixture of a lot of already mentioned good points going on here.
Boehner, not the sharpest knife, is stuck between reality and the TP. He has the 2012 elections coming down the pipe and knows, as DLS stated, that any reduction of entitlements will be seen as Rep. driven.
That being said, no one forced Reps to introduce that political bomb of a plan. They more or less put themselves in this position.
Here’s why I suspect Boehner walked.
He was probably willing to take the expiration of some tax breaks to the caucus and push it through but that’s not what the administration was willing to do. Rather, the administration’s position was a cap on individual deductions which is simply a rate increase and carries no tax simplification benefit (indeed, it makes the tax code even more complicated).
So instead of taking it’s notion of increasing receipts not rates (a somewhat technical distinction), the President was adhering to his political promise to “not raise taxes on anyone making less than 250K per year” and thus any major revenue raisers were going to be on 2% of Americans. Most here on TMV will agree with the President and even I somewhat agree. I’d be happy to raise taxes on all those people whose Federal income and payroll taxes are lower today than they were in 1970 but of course nobody else here would be. The reason is that this would result in raising taxes on the top 0.1% and the bottom 80% or so. The top 2% is neither of those things, it’s a politically motivated decision by a President running for reelection.
You can spin this anyway that you want but to say Boehner was not willing to accept any deal that involved revenues really is assuming facts not in evidence.
In any event, the fact that this is all happening in the dark just allows partisans to believe what they want to believe which is polluting any future discussions as we speak.
I’d also say that assuming they get to $2 trillion, I’ll still consider this a pretty successful outcome since 3 months ago, we were at zero (or growing deficits if you use the President’s budget).
Shannon Leee wrote:
Meanwhile, Extra for Experts: Why would Obama try to seek entitlement reform? (We don’t know all the details, and obviously we cannot presume his reforms would be sensible; we must presume they would be gimmicks or worse until proven otherwise.) Might “entitlement ‘reform’” be just finding money for more discretionary spending? It’s reasonable to suspect it of him.