Posturing escalates before work begins on "fiscal cliff"

Before negotiations are set to begin, President Obama will be working to enlist support from key constituencies to back his views on solving the fiscal crisis.

Updated 11:30 a.m. ET

Talk tough but don't box yourself in. That seems to be the strategy that both sides are taking regarding the debate over taxes and the "fiscal cliff." The two main players, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, traded barbs - albeit soft barbs - ahead of their first face-to-face meeting on the issue scheduled for Friday.

"Listen, there are a lot of issues on the table that have to be resolved by the end of the year. I think I've laid out a reasonable framework where both parties can work together and I am looking forward to running down to the White House on Friday and beginning that conversation," Boehner said Wednesday shortly after House Republicans reelected him as Speaker of the House.

Boehner's framework rejects the president's central tenet: raise taxes on the wealthy. In Mr. Obama's first news conference since Election Day - and his first since March - the president offered a solution Wednesday to temporarily preventing the fiscal cliff: extend the expiring tax cuts on those making less than $250,000.

"Step number one that we can take in the next couple of weeks - provide certainty to middle class families, 98 percent of families who make less than $250,000 a year - 97 percent of small businesses - that their taxes will not go up a single dime next year. Give them that certainty right now," Mr. Obama said.

If the president's plan passed, tax rates would remain the same for most Americans, but for those in the highest tax bracket, rates would raise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.

Leaving subtleties behind, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor Thursday morning to slam a proposal recently floated by the White House that would increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations by $1.6 trillion.

"And let's be clear, an opening bid of $1.6 trillion in new taxes just isn't serious. It's more than Simpson-Bowles or any other bipartisan commission has called for," McConnell said. "It's twice as much as the white house seemed ready to agree to during last summer's debt ceiling talks."

"Listen, there are ways to put revenue on the table without increasing tax rates," Boehner reiterated.

As the country faces deep, automatic spending cuts that would cut social programs and defense and steep tax increases, Washington has less than two months to prevent the bottle neck of policies set to go into effect at the beginning of the year.

But central to the discussion is revenue. Republicans maintain their insistence against raising taxes on anyone but have conceded that the federal government can find additional revenue in other areas of the tax code, perhaps through closing loopholes and deductions. Democrats, meanwhile, insist that the massive deficit can not be closed without increasing taxes on the wealthy.

In an effort to put pressure on Republicans to move toward his position, Mr. Obama and his advisers have spent a better part of the week gaining consensus on his tax proposal. They have met at the White House with groups outside of government and leaders in the business community.

"If the last debt ceiling discussion was playing with fire, this time they're playing with nitroglycerin," Honeywell CEO David Cote told CNBC. But as a benefactor of lower taxes, he did not offer any specifics on what policies he and other CEOs would get behind or oppose.

The president also met with progressive and labor leaders earlier in the week who are aggressively pursing higher taxes on the wealthy.

"Our millions of members are fired up and ready to go, and are taking the fight to Republicans who are holding middle class taxpayers hostage to win another tax cut for the rich," Moveon.org Executive Director Pedro Morillas.

Advisers to the president are meeting with a coalition of self-described millionaires today, several of whom are prominent Democrats, who are advocating on the side of higher taxes. And Vice President Biden is meeting with a dozen mayors from across the country today whose cities would be impacted by the fiscal cliff.

The first leg of formal negotiations begin tomorrow when House and Senate leaders travel 16 blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House for a bipartisan meeting.

While Mr. Obama and Boehner publicly stand by their demands, they are both simultaneously offering willingness to negotiate.

"There's all kind of information and data, but getting into specifics of that at this point would not be conducive to trying to get an agreement with the White House," Boehner told reporters Wednesday.

"This is just a matter of whether or not we come together and go ahead and say Democrats and Republicans, we're both gonna hold hands and do what's right for the American people, and I hope that's what happens," the president said.

[DJ_32_1205]

TimeToEvolve replies:
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The fools who voted for Robbed Me or any other Republicon failure must be really kicking themselves now.
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No, just the idiots such as yourself who CAN'T figure things out. Those are the ones we are kicking

[diddy_back_again]

Mr. President, I see you learned well from Saul Alinsky and Karl Marx.

[HackeyDad]

The debt is like a cancer and it just keeps growing. The plan to "tax the rich" is like prescribing a baby aspirin for cancer pain. It may have a placebo effect at first, but the pain will still be there and the cancer will continue to grow.

[DJPEsq]

Child's Play

This is not the cliff, my friends ...

The USA shall be broke, insolvent, bankrupt sometime in 2024 ...

Now, that's a cliff ... a whopper of a cliff ... the fall will be thrilling

[mturner1938]

Our dysfunctional Federal Government at work.

[wljj1515]

Amazing, the automatic spending cuts (one trillion)over ten years equates to one hundred billion a year. No one is serious about controlling the out of control deficit spending in excess of one trillion A YEAR. The politicians cannot even come up with or allow one billion to be automatically cut (as a result of the 'debt ceiling deal') passed by the same self serving individuals in 2011.

[magnumdr]

This comment has nothing to do with this story. I just had to tell everyone how the people in the USA are disrespecting the office of the President Of The USA! When we have an elected President everyon should support Him and show great respect for this Office. We must look like clowns the way we are treating this office and disrespecting it in the news. Our Country has to work at doing a better job by showing more respect for this office and the person in it. I am ashamed of how some people critizise the man in the highest position we have here. It is time to stop with all of the negative comments and show more rspect for this office and also let other Countries we can and will respect this position! After it is the most powerful office in our World today.

[TomR1045]

Some of us feel that we can't support a man who has lied to the public throughout his 1st term, and continues to do so today.
Remember how he said he was going to Unite? Or how his was going to be the most transparent administration ever? Start with health Care reform, all hearings on CSPAN, didn't happen. Put into law without even being read, and absolutely no input from any Republican.
The list goes on and on, and now we have Benghazi. You think he told the truth on that one?
Sorry guy, nothing good to say about this guy.

[chevyhotrod]

As Americans, 'We Have a Right to Debate and Disagree with Any Administration'

Do you say the same thing when Senator Obama's was going after the Bush administration for partisan gains?

Was it for political advantage that he called a sitting president "unpatriotic" for borrowing at a rate of about a fourth of what Obama himself would later embrace? As I recall the political discourse just a few years ago, a "jobless recovery" in 2004 was defined as one of around 5.5 percent unemployment; Herbert Hoover was invoked to cite the "unprecedented" supposed loss of net jobs; spikes to $3-a-gallon gas were due to rapacious Halliburton oil men in the White House; and questioning the commander-in-chief was patriotic dissent (Hillary Clinton: "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, 'We are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.'")

[TimeToEvolve]

I guess we need one more election for the entire Republicon Party to be rendered irrelevant like in California. People elsewhere are just a little slow.

Now we have to work with the right of center Obama and Democratic Party to start doing really progressive stuff. Cut the military in half and cut the crap with the fake and fraudulent and failed free trade agreements. Repeal the Reagan tax cuts and create massive green jobs to stop fracking and the accelerating man made global climate change.

[TomR1045]

Man, you need some serious help!

[wfw3536]

Well now that the election is over I see the unemployment rate jumped to 439 thousand. Isn't is amazing that all of sudden the numbers are going north. I guess Obama plan isn't working after all. How sad the liberal media isn't covering this story.

[TimeToEvolve]

The media is wholly owned and run by extremist right wing wackos, let's face it.

[olyboy]

What a sad thing to re-elect someone who has such a low opinion of americans. He continues to harp on the "tax cut for the wealthy" when it isn't a tax cut at all, but a tax increase that he is proposing. Add to that the fact that he's spending over a trillion more per year than he's taking in and that the proposed tax increase only produces $82 billion of additional revenue (if that -- people tend to change behavior when their wealth is threatened) and what you have is an intentional play on class envy. That should appeal only to the lazy and the victim class, and neither contribute anything to our society. However, we've created an entire class of lazy thinkers (government employees make up a large percentage) and they blame others for their failures. Frankly, allowing people who have been on welfare for generations vote is anti-american -- this is the land of opportunity, not the land of leaches.