President Barack Obama and Republican lawmakers plan to meet this week about the addressing the coming “fiscal cliff” of thorny budget matters that include the scheduled start of $500 billion in across-the-board defense cuts in January.
Obama indicated at the White House last Friday, during his first public remarks following his reelection last Tuesday, that he is willing to compromise with Republicans who want to enact comprehensive tax reform–changes that likely could not be made by the end of this year.
Some pundits took Obama’s speech to indicate he is amenable to delaying the start of decade-long “sequestration” cuts, instead of insisting on approving a plan this year to outright replace them. The president previously had called on Congress to present him a new full-blow deficit-cutting plan to replace sequestration–$1.2 trillion in longterm defense and non-defense cuts–before it is slated to start in January. The politically unpopular sequestration cuts are part of the fiscal-cliff matters Congress hopes to address by year’s end.
However, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)–whose support Obama needs to change sequestration–said last week that he doesn’t foresee a full-blown sequester-replacement plan emerging during the lame-duck session of Congress that starts this week and could run until the end of the year. Boehner, though, gave Democrats hope when he said last Wednesday, the day after the election, that House Republicans are willing to accept some additional revenues in a new deficit plan. Those revenues would be through tax reforms such as closing loopholes, he said.
Boehner reiterated to reporters last Friday that he would not agree to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans as part of a new sequestration-replacement deal.
“Raising tax rates will slow down our ability to create the jobs that everyone says they want,” Boehner said at the Capitol.
Later that day, Obama said at the White House that if politicians are “ serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue, and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes.”
Obama said he is open to finding more government savings in areas such as health care, and said he is “not wedding to every detail” of his plan to reduce the deficit.
“I’m open to compromise,” he said. “I’m open to new ideas. I’m committed to solving our fiscal challenges. But I refuse to accept any approach that isn’t balanced. I am not going to ask students and seniors and middle-class families to pay down the entire deficit while people like me, making over $250,000, aren’t asked to pay a dime more in taxes.”