All Quiet on the Fiscal Cliff Front: Obama Rushes Back to No Negotiations [View all]

[TomCADem]

Source: TIME

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers are engaged in a playground game of “who goes first,” daring each political party to let the year end without resolving a Jan. 1 confluence of higher taxes and deep spending cuts that could rattle a recovering, but-still-fragile economy.

President Barack Obama returns from Hawaii Thursday to this increasingly familiar deadline showdown in the nation’s capital, with even a stopgap solution now in doubt. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday that the country appears headed over the “fiscal cliff.”

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Obama has been pushing for a variant of that Senate bill that would include an extension of jobless aid and some surgical spending reductions to prevent the steeper and broader spending cuts from kicking in.

For the Senate to act, it would require a commitment from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell not to demand a 60-vote margin to consider the legislation on the Senate floor. McConnell’s office says it’s too early to make such an assessment because Obama’s plan is unclear on whether extended benefits for the unemployed would be paid for with cuts in other programs or on how it would deal with an expiring estate tax, among other issues.


Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/12/27/no-deal-in-sight-as-deadline-for-fiscal-deal-nears/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true

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The biggest problem I have with the reporting is the repeated efforts to create a false equivalency between Republicans and Democrats, if not blame Democrats outright. Indeed, the media lets Republicans spew the talking point that Democrats must come up with a solution to their failure of their Plan B nonsense. In other words, Democrats must save Republicans from themselves.