Obama and Boehner couldn't agree on which GOP budget plan they liked better

[kpete]

Obama and Boehner couldn't agree on which GOP budget plan they liked better
Posted by John Aravosis (DC) on 7/23/2011 11:55:00 PM

Jonathan Cohn at TNR:

The main difference, as both sides acknowledge, was over the size of the new revenue. They’d basically settled the basic principles of how to get the money: By closing loopholes, broadening the base, and lowering rates overall. Boehner had offered $800 billion, or roughly the equivalent of letting the upper income tax cuts expire. Obama had counter-offered $1.2 trillion. But even the $1.2 trillion Obama was seeking – and remember, this was a proposal over which the White House says it expected to keep negotiating – was still far less than the revenue either the Bowles-Simpson chairmen or the Senate’s Gang of Six, two bipartisan groups, had recommended.

Or, to put it more simply, both proposals were far more tilted towards the Republican position, of seeking to balance the budget primarily if not wholly through spending cuts. When this debate started, liberals like me were advocating a balance of spending reductions to new revenue of roughly one-to-one, which is what the Bipartisan Policy Center’s report by Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin had recommended. But the president had been offering, right up through the end of these negotiations, plans that had ratios of roughly three-to-one or maybe worse.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/92539/obama-boehner-debt-ceiling-press-conference-concessions-revenue
http://www.americablog.com/2011/07/obama-and-boehner-couldnt-agree-on.html

[Name removed]

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[kath]

2. Tell me again how the Prez is a Democrat? A real man of the people?

Not a Trojan horse?

Yeah. Right.