"I don't think we need to put a formal proposal out on the table," Cole said on ABC's "This Week." "Speaker [John Boehner] has already said revenue is on the table. He has got an idea about how to get there in terms of not raises rates, but finding it in other ways through tax code reform. I think that makes a lot of sense, and that's a doable thing, but beyond that, you know, we'll wait and see how the negotiations go."
Cole also bashed the plan Geithner brought to congressional leaders this week. "I want to thank the president and Tim Geithner for re-uniting and re-energizing the Republican caucus," he said. "Because that offer -- they must think John Boehner is Santa Claus, because that is a Christmas wish list, not a real proposal."The demeaning attitude of Cole and House Republicans toward the President and Treasury Secretary Geithner shows that the GOP did not learn one lesson from the November election -- they are as arrogant as ever.
While Republicans continue to promote the wealthy, the 3rd quarter has shown that Corporate Profits Hit Record High While Worker Wages Hit Record Low. Yet we are supposed to want the wealthy to keep the Bush Tax Cuts which have all the loopholes for them including hedge fund managers? The American people spoke in the recent Presidential election but seems Republicans in Congress have cotton balls in their ears as they didn't get the message.
This article by Paul Krugman is classic on the tantrums being thrown by Republicans will probably continue until 2014 when the voters have a chance to send them to the unemployment line even in heavily gerrymandered districts and with voter suppression by the Republicans. American people are fed up with the obstructionist tactics of Republicans. It is not the Democrats this group of arrogant Republicans have to fear, it is Republicans like me who have had it with their obstructionist tactics, lies, and elitism.
Operation Rolling Tantrum
Paul Krugman, New York Times
Oh, boy. This isn’t going to end, even when or if a deal is reached on defusing the austerity bomb; John Boehner has just declared that he’s going to hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage every time we hit the debt limit. Nor will it be a case of holding the nation at gunpoint until it meets GOP demands; Republicans are signaling that they don’t intend to make any specific proposals, they’re just going to yell and stamp their feet until Obama soothes them somehow.
So this is going to be nightmarish, unless Obama surrenders — which I don’t think he will (because he shouldn’t).
And one thing to think about: if the next two years are, as they seem likely to be, one long Republican tantrum, the 2014 election is not going to be a normal midterm. It will instead be a referendum on GOP obstructionism, which may attract a lot more attention — and much higher turnout — than normal.When the facts come out, McConnell is still the arrogant, underhanded Republican leader in the Senate. Any Senator whose wife serves in the cabinet like his wife did for Bush is not someone I would trust. Personally think that should be against the rules but even then it probably would have happened as this group of Republicans in leadership do not believe rules apply to them.
Rumor has McConnell offering a major aerospace company a safe haven from sequestering if they continue to build up their presence in Kentucky. How many sole source contracts is McConnell going to promise to the same company in exchange for bringing business to Kentucky? Inquiring minds want to know what the deal was to move company resources to Lexington which make no sense. If McConnell said the sky was blue it would pay to go check.
The Full McConnell
Paul Krugman, New York Times
In his interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mitch McConnell finally mentioned a few sort-of specifics about what spending cuts the GOP wants: raising the Medicare age, charging higher premiums to affluent Medicare recipients, and changing the price indexing of Social Security. But how much does all this amount to?
I’ve already noted that the CBO has estimated the fiscal savings from raising the Medicare age at $113 billion over the next decade. A study of health care options (pdf) from a few years ago put the savings from expanded premiums at $20 billion (Option 91) – that number would be somewhat higher now, but still small.
I haven’t found a 10-year estimate of the Social Security indexing idea, but we can roll our own. The idea is to replace the CPI with a “chained” measure that typically rises about 0.3 percentage points less per year. Apply this to the CBO projections of Social Security spending under current policy and I get 10-year savings of $186 billion.
So, if we take all of McConnell’s ideas together, we get a bit more than $300 billion. Getting this would, by the way, impose substantial hardship – seniors would be forced into inferior private insurance, and there are good reasons to believe that the true inflation rate facing seniors is actually higher, not lower, than the CPI. Still, what we’re looking at overall is a saving equal to only about one-fifth of what Obama is proposing to raise by higher taxes.
And that’s it; has anyone heard even a peep from the GOP about what else they’d like to cut?Republican lies are catching up with them. Paul Krugman schools Republicans on the facts:
This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious.
What Defines A Serious Deficit Proposal?
Paul Krugman, NY Times
Just a thought: if you follow the pundit discussion of matters fiscal, you get the definite impression that some kinds of deficit reduction are considered “serious”, while others are not.
In particular, the Obama administration’s call for higher revenue through increased taxes on high incomes — which actually goes considerably beyond just letting the Bush tax cuts for the top end expire — gets treated with an unmistakable sneer in much political discussion, as if it were a trivial thing, more about staking out a populist position than it is about getting real on red ink.
On the other hand, the idea of raising the age of Medicare eligibility gets very respectful treatment — now that’s serious.So I thought I’d look at the dollars and cents — and even I am somewhat shocked. Those tax hikes would raise $1.6 trillion over the next decade; according to the CBO, raising the Medicare age would save $113 billion in federal funds over the next decade.
So, the non-serious proposal would reduce the deficit 14 times as much as the serious proposal.I guess we have to understand the definition of serious: a proposal is only serious if it punishes the poor and the middle class.When I saw this article this morning, I burst out laughing. I have discovered that I am agreeing with Krugman more and more as Republicans and their economists aka lobbyists have gone hard left libertarian with their ideas in order to protect their wealthy donors while ignoring the middle class and poor.
Paul Krugman: GOP Fiscal Cliff Offer 'Pathetic'
The Huffington Post | By Alana Horowitz
Posted: 12/02/2012 11:08 am EST Updated: 12/02/2012 12:22 pm EST
Paul Krugman offered a harsh analysis of the Republican plan to deal with the "fiscal cliff."
"This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious," he wrote on Sunday.According to Krugman, specifics offered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just aren't enough to balance the budget. They also put seniors at risk, he said.
"What we’re looking at overall is a saving equal to only about one-fifth of what Obama is proposing to raise by higher taxes," he wrote.
McConnell told the Wall Street Journal on Friday that Republicans are seeking to raise to the Medicare age and modify Social Security. In return, they'd agree to an increase in tax revenue-- but not from higher tax rates.
Republicans and Democrats are at odds over how to address the fiscal cliff. President Obama has repeatedly pushed for higher taxes on the rich. However, House Speaker John Boehner told 'Fox News Sunday' that negotiations are going "nowhere." Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told NBC's 'Meet The Press' that he expects Republicans to eventually agree to tax increases.
"The ball really is with them now," Geithner said.
Today Obama seems to understand what he is doing and will not be snowed again by Congress like he was in 2011. Most Republicans in the Congress do not have the best interests of the Country in mind but instead what will benefit their huge donors. Read the details on these people and then understand that greed is a powerful driving factor to where we are today as the wealthy have gotten richer with the Bush Tax Cuts and the Middle Class have taken a real hit with less spending power:
10 people who led us to the ‘fiscal cliff’
By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch
November 21, 2012
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — With our political leaders locked in a fiscal struggle that threatens to throw the economy off a so-called cliff and into recession, you might be wondering how we got to this place.
Remember that this supposed fiscal cliff is the direct result of two contradictory impulses in American life: Greed and guilt. Greed for low taxes, a strong military, a strong safety net and lots of government spending for everyone. And guilt that we weren’t paying our way. Read “Stop calling it a ‘fiscal cliff’”
Arthur Laffer. Laffer was the economist who proved the existence of the free lunch. His Laffer Curve showed, in theory, that cutting tax rates would actually increase tax revenue. He gave intellectual cover to those conservatives who wanted to cut taxes but who didn’t want to be seen as contributing to a big deficit. He gave them a guilt-free way to cut revenue.There’s only one problem: Laffer’s ideas didn’t pan out in practice: Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. Tax cuts are a major cause of our $16 trillion national debt.
Pete Peterson. If there’s one person who we can blame for making us feel guilty about the federal deficit, it’s Peterson, a hedge-fund billionaire who was a cabinet secretary in the Reagan administration. Peterson founded, funded or supported most of the institutions in Washington devoted to publicizing the problem of the deficit, including the Concord Coalition, the Peterson Foundation, The Fiscal Times, and the anti-deficit documentary “I.O.U.S.A.”
Without Peterson’s billions and the guilt it bought, the deficit would be a fringe issue.
Bill Clinton. President Clinton made budget surpluses look easy. The budget was in the black the last four years of his administration. What’s worse, he made surpluses look like a sure thing.
Clinton’s surpluses were partly the result of Washington going on a serious budget diet, with higher taxes paired with moderation in spending. But it was the booming economy — and higher taxes on capital income — that turned the modest deficits of the early Clinton years into surpluses.
By the time Clinton left office, politicians were beginning to talk about perpetual surpluses, in exactly the same way that hucksters on Wall Street were talking about a perpetual bull market. And with exactly the same outcome.
Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was a high priest of both guilt and greed. He had always warned Congress about the dangers of the deficits, but his biggest failure as Federal Reserve chairman was the day in 2001 he told Congress that the worst thing it could do was pay down the debt because that would destroy the Treasury market and the Fed’s power to control the economy.
That was the day he endorsed the Bush tax cuts. The Maestro’s endorsement gave intellectual cover to the conservatives who wanted to cut taxes, but who didn’t want to feel guilty.
Greenspan also catered to our greedy side as a serial bubble-blower. He inflated the housing bubble in the 2000s by keeping interest rates low and by refusing to regulate the shadow banking system.
George W. Bush . No one is more responsible for racking up our debt than Bush. He campaigned in 2000 promising to cut taxes in order to avoid paying down the national debt. And when the recession of 2001 arrived, he said tax cuts would revive the economy. And when the economy didn’t revive, he cut taxes some more. Tax cuts for all occasions. And it was all guilt-free.
Dick Cheney. While Bush was busy cutting taxes, Cheney was busy planning the war on terror. For the first time in our history, we sent our military into battle without raising taxes at home to help pay for it. It added trillions to the debt.
David Lereah. Lereah was the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors and was perhaps the most enthusiastic and public cheerleader for the housing bubble. Even after the bubble began to deflate, Lereah still insisted that real-estate investments would never lose money.
Of course, Lereah didn’t cause the bubble all by himself, but he does embody the greed that engulfed the real estate industry, the Wall Street banks that profited from it, and the homeowners who took on more debt than they could ever hope to repay.
The housing and credit bubble led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and was the direct cause of the Great Recession and the ensuing $1 trillion-a-year deficits.
Grover Norquist. As the head of a powerful lobbying and campaign-finance organization, Norquist forced almost every Republican officeholder to sign a pledge to never raise taxes under any circumstance. If anyone declined to sign or dared to violate the pledge, Norquist would back a primary challenger. The threat worked.
The Norquist pledge blocked any possibility of a budget deal between Democrats and Republicans over the past two years. Democrats insisted that any plan to balance the budget must include more revenue as well as spending cuts, but Republicans held solid against any tax increase.
There are signs that Norquist could be losing his hold on the party. Several Republicans won elections this year without signing his pledge, and several incumbents have said they don’t feel bound by the pledge any more.
Barack Obama. Obama may be the perfect representative of our age, because he encapsulates our national schizophrenia over the budget. He honors both the greed and the guilt. He presided over the largest deficits in history, including a large fiscal stimulus, bailouts of the auto industry, and an expansion of the safety net.
But Obama also lectures us about the need for the government to tighten its belt, even during a recession. He wants to raise taxes, if only on a few, and he’s expressed willingness to cut into the great middle-class entitlements. It was Obama’s administration that first suggested the bargain in 2011 that created the fiscal cliff.
John Boehner. The House speaker is trapped in Grover Norquist’s world. He’s a pragmatic legislator who accepts that the government needs more revenue, but his caucus in the House doesn’t agree. In the summer of 2011, Boehner nearly forced the nation to default on its debt because he couldn’t deliver the votes necessary to raise taxes.
In the end, Boehner was forced to punt the problem down the road. Today’s fiscal cliff showdown is the result of Boehner’s inability to lead the House Republicans to a deal.
Time for the American people to rise up with one voice and tell today's Republican Party to quit obstructing and put the American people first over their big donors. This is the most disgusting group of Republicans I have seen in Congress. They are in the hip pockets of the wealthy donors and lobbyists. How many Congressional Republicans have benefited from the deep pockets of these donors and lobbyists? It is the only explanation on how they can come to DC as middle to upper middle class and now are multi-millionaires. What is an insult to my intelligence that they only have to disclose a range of what they are worth? If we demand to see the income tax returns of our Presidential candidates, why not our members of Congress?Read more on the Fiscal Cliff at Market Watch
Now would be a good time for an investigative journalist to look into how members of Congress made their millions while saying they were serving the American people. All I know is that $1 today does not goes as far as it used to in the past. The cost of almost everything has continued to rise with corporate executives getting richer while the workers get little to no pay increases but the price for what we buy is continuing to go up. Greed has overtaken Corporate America and some members of Congress. When a member of Congress retires or is voted out of office, they should not be allowed to be lobbyists. A member of Congress should also not have his wife as a member of the President's cabinet like Sen McConnell's wife was in the Bush Administration.
Reform is needed from Campaign Finance Reform to reign in secret donations and multi-millionairs/billionairs trying to buy elections to the way members of Congress are paid including benefits to the huge increase in the number of staff in the Congress and last but not least, forbid lobbyists from writing the bills that members submit. Time for Congress to take the first action and show they are serious about the deficit by cutting their own Houses first starting with their salaries (no raises), their staffs, and benefits.
Remember what is happening right now in Congress by obstructionist Republicans -- start getting involved now in the 2014 electiona to send a message that the American people will not put up with obstructionists tactics and whichever party is in power must work for the American people. The way this group of Republicans has been acting in Congress, the Democrats deserve to take back the House and see if they can be more responsible. If they can't, then the American people will vote them out again. The grandstanding has to stop! The very idea that McCain, Graham, and Ayotte along with others run out to a microphone to spew their lies has to stop. The American people deserve better representation then what we have in Congress today. Time to vote out obstructionists in 2014!
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