President Obama calls for compromise, won't budge on tax cuts

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Source: The Hill


Days after Democrats received a self-described "shellacking" at the polls, President Obama called for an end to campaigning and an embrace of compromise.

But he signaled no willingness to bend on the first challenge likely to face him from a Republican House as he advocated the permanent extension of Bush-era tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 a year despite the GOP's resolve to extend the tax cuts for all income brackets.

In his weekly address Saturday, Obama said that Democrats and Republicans not only agree on middle-class tax cuts but the need to rein in spending, and used this to try to drive his position on the tax cuts.

"At a time when we are going to ask folks across the board to make such difficult sacrifices, I don’t see how we can afford to borrow an additional $700 billion from other countries to make all the Bush tax cuts permanent, even for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans," the president said. "We’d be digging ourselves into an even deeper fiscal hole and passing the burden on to our children."


Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/127983-obama-calls-for-compromise-wont-budge-on-tax-cuts