Senators meet in effort to avoid fiscal cliff
This week, a bipartisan group of eight senators is meeting to try to keep the nation from going off the "fiscal cliff" at the end of the year.
The three days of meetings will take place from Tuesday through Thursday at Mount Vernon in Virginia, a Senate source confirms to CBS News. They will involve four Republicans and four Democrats. The Republicans are Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Mike Johanns of Nebraska. The Democrats are Michael Bennet of Colorado, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Mark Warner of Virginia.
Warner is hosting the meeting for the group, which was known as the "Gang of Six" before the addition of Johanns and Bennet. Alan Simpson, who was co-chair of The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that released a debt reduction plan in 2010 (also known as the Simpson-Bowles commission), will also attend the meetings.
Separately, Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has been meeting on the side with Bennet to work toward a solution.
The most recent iteration of the Gang of Six worked last year to move Congress toward a deficit reduction deal, but was unable to craft an agreement that the parties could agree to. It came up with a $3.7 trillion deficit reduction plan based on the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission, but left many of the details to congressional committees and never submitted final legislation.
The new, extended meetings are an opportunity for the senators to dig deep into the issues at hand while the Senate is out of session, according to Senate sources. In the past, the group's meetings have lasted for only an hour or 90 minutes before lawmakers had to break for votes or other obligations. These meetings are designed to allow for more time for discussion. The senators do not expect to emerge from this week's extended meetings with a proposal, but they hope to create a framework for the exceedingly difficult task of getting a deal through a polarized and contentious Congress after the November elections.
Congress' failure to come up with a deal last year helped create a major component of the "fiscal cliff" - which includes the so-called "sequestration" cuts set to go into effect at the end of the year. Back in 2011, the parties were engaged in a standoff over raising the debt ceiling. Republicans would only agree to raise that debt ceiling in exchange for a deal to significantly reduce the deficit.
Since they were unable to come up with a deal in the short term, lawmakers instead came up with a plan: Set up a bipartisan, 12-member "supercommittee" made up of House and Senate members to find $1.2 trillion in additional cuts. (This group, confusingly, is separate from the Gang of Six.) Lawmakers mandated that if they failed, nearly across-the-board cuts would kick in at the end of the year. The idea was that because both parties did not want that to happen, they would come to a deal.
They didn't. Now the United States faces the prospect of $500 billion in defense cuts as well as major, non-targeted cuts to education, medical research and other domestic programs.
And that's just one part of the cliff. There's also the scheduled expiration of tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush, and the expiration the payroll tax holiday enacted under President Obama. (Those are the big expiring tax breaks, but there are others set to expire too; the specifics are detailed here.) According to the Tax Policy Center, going off the cliff would affect 88 percent of U.S. taxpayers, with their taxes rising by an average of $3,500 a year. Many economists, as well as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, say the combination of spending cuts and tax hikes that are set to take effect would tip the economy into a new recession.
Discussion of the fiscal cliff is expected to dominate Congress during the lame-duck session following the presidential election. The "Gang of Eight" now starting to meet is keeping its deliberations largely private in an effort to minimize outside pressure.
It faces an uphill battle. Even if the group, which has no direct power over its colleagues, manages to craft a deal that gets through the Senate - no easy task when it takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster - it also must pass through a Republican-dominated House that has shown an aversion to compromise, particularly when it comes to raising taxes. (The White House, of course, also has to be on board.) Democrats generally want to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for all but the highest-income Americans; Republicans generally want to extend them for everyone, including the highest earners.
House Speaker John Boehner said last week that he is reticent to get behind a sweeping deficit deal during the lame duck session, arguing that "I'm not sure it's the right thing to do -- have a lot of retiring members and defeated members voting on really big bills." The most likely scenario at the moment seems to be that lawmakers will craft a short-term deal to avert reaching the cliff for a few months - and then hope they can hammer out some sort of agreement during the new Congress, possibly with the help of the Gang of Eight.
With reporting by CBS News Capitol Hill Producer John Nolen.
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1. A staff of 40 people for the First Lady??? Seriously?
2. A retirement system that PAYS for the REST OF HIS?HER LIFE after only 8 hours a Senator serves?
3. Wasteful spending on star searches and how many frogs it takes to run out of lily pads?
Crap spending is CRAP SPENDING. Any one who has ever lived on a budget can tell you the ONLY way to have a more financially secure life is to STOP WASTING MONEY! When WANT out weighs NEED in your spending, you're sunk.
I think all those 'research' projects we pay for are great! So do a lot of other people or we wouldn't be doing it. BUT... why does the government have to pay for them? Why can't the people, who think they are so important, pay for them? Ever heard of FUND RAISERS? Because we want our cake and to eat it too... unless you live under the sovereignty of Bloomberg.
Frogs need FUND RAISERS. NOT SCHOOLS!!!
ALL of the tax increases that are getting ready to happen are not going to happen to just the "RICH" that live in this country as Obama keeps referring to them, unless you agree a salary of $15,000 a year constitutes rich.
No rich person has to depend on Earned Income Credit, or worry about having to claim Student Loan and Scholarships as income. No rich person will have to claim the balance on his foreclosed home as income for tax purposes!!
WAKE UP!
CALL your senators, your representatives and MAKE them listen! YOU are their BOSS. They are NOT yours.
Call is what you want, but TAXMAGEDDON is upon us all!!
WHEN WILL WALL ST INVESTMENT BANKER/FINANCIERS BE PROSECUTED INSTEAD OF REWARDED?
A:
When our politicians who legislate our laws, legislate for the populace and for PRODUCTIVE working Americans, stop functioning in their regular and customary dishonest ways of being paid off, and by having access to their nearly unlimited abuse of power curtailed.
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What does that mean? Do you realize that GW Bush's administration took away more freedoms than Obama could ever think of.
For this to have not been repaired by any Congress since 2006 the result is pure criminal negligence by the hands of every Congressman/woman and both Presidents. When the junior Senator from Illinois, Barrack Hussein Obama, himself was on the senate sub-committee that investigated the first major price spike of oil and determined then that it was speculation and our government does nothing to disprove the lies upon lies portrayed as reasons to justify the fuel prices (might as well include electricity in there as well) for at least four years shows that they are all corrupt and complacent.
Return the trading of commodity futures for oil, gas and electricity to where it was before. Now. Before, one had to have a vested interest (i.e. airlines, oil and gas distributors) and 50% payment up front in order to buy any of these six months before taking delivery. Now anyone can sit at home in their drawers and buy as much as they want with only 5% up front. And the primary benefactors of all this besides the politicians that receive massive amounts of campaign donations(PAYOFFS)? The largest criminal enterprise the world has ever known, Big Banks such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citi, and Merrill/Bank of America who are all in some part owned by OLD MONEY with the Rothschilds as the leader. The same banks that received all that bail-out money. Genius!!
This is basically no different than the Sci-Fi movies that depict alien races coming to earth to strip all the natural resources from the planet and let it die. Old Moneys' goal in a nut-shell is to strip the wealth of the world into the hands of a few no matter what the cost. They own the media and 99% of the population are nothing more than cattle because they choose not to educate themselves and believe any smoking mirror lie that is thrown at them.
So, if you love paying twice the real price for a gallon of gas....just keep on sitting there with your mouth shut and let's see where that gets ya. Or educate yourself and let your Congressman know that the lies have to stop. Or....just go on being....cattle lead to the slaughter!
Have a good day.