The "fiscal cliff" is a confluence of three legal changes taking effect Jan. 1: the expiration of a payroll-tax cut, the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, and the advent of mandatory spending cuts known as "sequestration."Fiscal Cliff 101: 5 Basic Questions Answered. What's Happening: Fiscal Cliff Explained
The Long Treacherous Climb Up The Fiscal Cliff. The so-called fiscal cliff is one of those rare issues where everyone has an incentive to predict the worst. Barack Obama thinks it will force Republicans to accept higher taxes on the rich, Republicans think they can back him into a corner and force him to cave to their demands as they did two years ago, and businesses and consumers are wary that the still-fragile economy may take a nosedive. Figuring out how this will play out is Washington’s favorite parlor game right now, so let’s play.What will happen now? Obama pushes for stimulus in fiscal cliff deal. 10 easy way to avoid the fiscal cliff. Three Votes Could Make Or Break Fiscal Cliff Deal. Lobbys, like the AARP, the IFA, and various unions, are gearing up. One paper predicts 'lower GDP and higher unemployment' if no deal is struck. The Weekly Standard says Obama's Plan Will Raise Taxes On Small Businesses, Lower Them For Corporations. The White House is apparently worried there won't be a deal by 2013, since prominent politicians like Senator Alan Simpson and Senator Erskine Bowles say falling off fiscal cliff is 'likely.' But perhaps the President should reassure Americans they will survive the fall. But what does the public really want? To "cut military waste, not charitable deductions"? How Obamacare Came To The Fiscal Cliff and The Grand Cynicism Of The Grand Bargain. A failure to reach a bargain may spur 'bond vigilantes' to move, but that may not be a bad thing. Will the Romney-Ryan plan live on? Perhaps a Obamney plan? Of course, the military-industrial complex will be largely spared.
Mel Brooks predicted thisMel Brooks may have predicted it but your clip leaves off the most important moment.
Fiscal cliff drama in Washington coinciding with strikes and work stoppages among America’s lowest-paid workers, at Walmart and fast food restaurants, is no coincidence. If Congress goes over, these are the people who will feel the pinch.Everything is connected.
To a great extent, the underdevelopment of the private sector in the city (in response to New York's acute "labor problems") had been in operation for many years: about half-a-million manufacturing jobs were relocated out of the city from 1950 to 1975, and more than 650,000 jobs of all kinds "disappeared" in the seven years following 1969.(1) What is unique about this current crisis is that it concerns the finances and functions of the State and that its leading actors have been, on the one side, the State's managers and creditors, and on the other, its employees and its "clients." It has been through the underdevelopment, the impoverishment of New York's public sector that those in power have sought to end the working class raid on the treasury. Our aim in this article is to recount and analyze both of the processes — the growth of wage struggles against the city administration in the 1960's and capital's imposition of austerity as a means of undermining that struggle — not for the sake of history, but in order to see how we might once again regain the offensive and subvert the "fiscal crisis."Austerity In Uniform, or, why the military-industrial complex is the last to get cut.
Republicans had better wake up and realize that their negotiations with the White House aren’t so much about how to avoid the looming “fiscal cliff” as they are about President Obama’s attempt to cement his historical legacy as a great liberal hero by forcing them to repudiate their anti-tax pledges.Want to Solve the Fiscal Crisis? Expensive oil weighs down the economy.
In addition, there is a simple way to avoid spending more money on oil when oil prices skyrocket: Use it more efficiently. Currently, the transportation sector relies on oil for about 93 percent of its total liquid fuel consumption. The development and adoption of new technologies can allow us to meet our energy needs while increasingly reducing our consumption of oil. Diversifying the fuel base of the transportation sector is one way of achieving that goal.posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:39 AM on December 3, 2012
This afternoon Republicans came back[PDF] with a counteroffer: No pony, no income tax rate hikes, but they could perhaps agree to $800 billion in new revenue to be generated by tax reform as laid out last year by Erskine Bowles, the co-chair along with Alan Simpson of the president’s own deficit reduction commission.Erskine Bowles on the GOP's 'Bowles Plan' Offer: That's Not My Plan!
The Bowles proposal was a modified version of the original Simpson-Bowles plan, lighter on new tax revenues and somewhat heavier on spending cuts. Here’s Politico’s summary of the proposal that Bowles alone made to the debt-reduction Supercommittee—not to be confused with the original presidential debt commission—at the end of 2011:
The GOP's offer letter described the "Bowles plan" as "exactly the kind of imperfect, but fair middle ground" the might allow the two sides to come to a deal and avert the fiscal cliff.GOP 'fiscal cliff' counteroffer: What's in it?
Democrats didn't like Bowles' proposal all that much when he delivered his testimony last year, and weren't likely to find it much improved since.
But now the idea has a notable new detractor: Erskine Bowles, who distanced himself from the GOP's offer late this afternoon.
After all, there is no fiscal cliff, or at least there was none - until the two parties built it. And yet the pit exists. It goes by the name of "austerity". However, it didn’t just appear in time for the last election season or the lame-duck session of congress to follow. It was dug more than a generation ago, and has been getting wider and deeper ever since. Millions of people have long made it their home. "Debtpocalypse" is merely the latest installment in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the dispossession of American working people.posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:49 AM on December 4, 2012 [2 favorites]
The Simpson-Bowles Commission was a perfect example of what went wrong with the first Obama Administration. The notion that what we needed to solve the economic damage done to the country over the previous decade was a gathering of Wise Men led by a prickish member of the Republican Undead and a charter member of the Democrats For Plutocrats Club. It was another attempt at bipartisanship for its own sake and an attempt at a deal for a deal's sake and it was shot through with the kind of political naivete and magical thinking that drove people — well, me — crazy over the way the president did things. You could see what was coming from a mile away. Even though the commission failed utterly, its obvious bipartisanish Beltway green-room cred guaranteed that "Simpson-Bowles" would become a fetish object within the political elite and the courtier press. And that is exactly what happened. The thing has hung around the president's neck for two years.posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:56 AM on December 4, 2012 [1 favorite]
“They’d rather win the political victory on this. How can we fight back against that and how can we make that point and how can we message that we’re the party of small business owners and we’re not defending the rich?” asked a meeting participant.I present without comment.
Recent news reports indicate, however, that Republicans have become uncomfortable with allowing the scheduled tax increases and spending cuts to take effect as planned at the beginning of the New Year. Instead, they are now openly threatening to create another contrived political showdown over the debt ceiling. Even though last year’s debt ceiling debacle is part of what led to the current political standoff, Republicans are apparently maneuvering to get the spending cuts that they want—and avoid the tax hikes on the rich that they abhor—by refusing to increase the limit on the national debt, which would make it impossible to accommodate spending and tax cuts that Republicans have already approved.Don't Fear The Debt ... Just Yet
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What should President Obama do? Republicans think that they can force him to cut spending, in order to avoid breaking through the debt ceiling. The President, however, has several options. And, as I will explain below, none of those options will be appealing to Republicans who imagine that they can put Mr. Obama in a corner.
Talk to smart folks in Washington, and here’s what they think will happen: The final tax deal will raise rates a bit, giving Democrats a win, but not all the way back to 39.6 percent, giving Republicans a win. That won’t raise enough revenue on its own, so it will be combined with some policy to cap tax deductions, perhaps at $25,000 or $50,000, with a substantial phase-in and an exemption for charitable contributions.But why should the Dems deal at all? Why not hold the line and let the Reps sink?
Talking to plugged-in Republicans over the weekend, I got a couple overarching impressions. The first is a real, and not merely theatrical, pessimism that lawmakers in Washington are going to be spending Christmas with each other, and that we very well may go over the “fiscal cliff.” Republicans see in these negotiations an asymmetry of incentives. It’s not simply that President Obama has more leverage than House Republicans, or that he “holds all the cards,” or that he’s willing to go over the cliff. It’s that Obama wants to go over the cliff. He gets what he’s after with no resistance: more revenue, cuts to defense, and entitlements untouched.posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:16 AM on December 11, 2012
Fed Announces Bombshell New Stimulus Policy, Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo, 12 December 2012
John Boehner's Career Sank Last Nightposted by tonycpsu at 10:35 PM on December 22, 2012 [6 favorites]
There is no possible definition by which the Republicans can be considered an actual political party any more. They can be defined as a loose universe of inchoate hatreds, or a sprawling confederation of collected resentments, or an unwieldy conglomeration of self-negating orthodoxies, or an atonal choir of rabid complaint, or a cargo cult of quasi-religious politics and quasi-political religion, or simply the deafening abandoned YAWP of our bitter national Id. But they are not a political party because they have rendered themselves incapable of politics.
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He had to have watched what happened thereafter, when the president put a deal on the table in 2011 that made him look like Dwight Eisenhower on a bad day, and Boehner couldn't sell it to the vandals in his caucus. He had to have watched as a vulnerable Democratic president got re-elected with ease, and brought a more liberal Democratic senatorial majority along with him, largely because the Republican presidential primary field was such a carnival of the politically insane that it even made an useless windsock like Willard Romney look like the wildest hair across Barry Goldwater's ass.
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He is Speaker because somebody has to be, and he may not be Speaker for long, because it doesn't matter who is.
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He couldn't do it because he is a Republican pretending to be a fanatic who went hat in hand to a bunch of fanatics pretending to be Republicans.
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There is no deal the president can offer that Boehner can sell. If he stays, he's impotent. If he goes, he will be replaced by someone infinitely worse.
It was going to be people making over $250,000 a year. That was the line in the sand. You couldn't go 15 minutes at an Obama rally anywhere in America in the year about to pass from us without his expressing an ironclad committment to that number.posted by tonycpsu at 1:25 PM on December 31, 2012
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Little did I know that the line in the sand was adjustable by 60 percent. Personally, I'd like to welcome every one of you making over $400,000 a year to The Middle Class. Never thought we'd see you all around here. (Nice shoes. Payless?) C'mon over and bowl a couple of frames, will you? Next bucket of Buds is on you, by the way. We got room in the RV when we go to Talladega next summer. You in? This old thing? Hell, Costco, $8.95. Pass me the cheese fries, will you, Trip? And, for Chrissakes, loosen your tie.
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Whatever happened to The Deficit, by the way? Anybody see it recently? Did it fall behind the couch?
Harkin is right. In this deal, everything that benefits the middle-class as would be defined by common sense has a sunset date, while everything that benefits the Beltway's endlessly negotiable definition of middle-class is made permanent.
fullerine:I think the piece of the puzzle you're missing is that a not insignificant proportion of the people who vote for the "economy crashing dudes" think, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that the tax that they pay goes mainly to "encouraging dependency" among the "undeserving poor" and that the "economy crashing dudes" will implement "spending cuts," viz. put an end to government payments to the "welfare queens", the "47%", and those to whom President Obama has "given gifts." That these are the same people who misunderstand the nature of the federal budget and its relationship with the debt ceiling is not an accident.And the economy crashing dudes are winning?
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posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:33 AM on December 1, 2012 [3 favorites]