HATFIELD, Pa. — House Speaker John A. Boehner declared Friday that talks to avert the year-end austerity crisis have reached a ‘‘stalemate,’’ as President Obama insisted that tax rates on the wealthy must rise as part of a deal with Congress.
The president traveled to a toy factory here to follow up his pledge to lobby the American people for his proposals, which include an immediate freeze on tax rates for most Americans while allowing tax cuts benefiting the wealthy to expire.
Comments
The Republicans are wasting their and the public's and the country's time by hanging compromise up on glib talk of Obama "not being serious". Let's just stop wasting time and go over the cliff. Then, afterwards, Obama and the Democrats can check again if the Republicans want to do any compromising. The economy will survive. Time for Obama to let a little of the steel show from behind the velvet glove. Also, time for everyone to stop using the word "entitlements" promiscuously. How is a program that one is FORCED to pay into for their whole life, and that is the only pension many people will get, an "entitlement"? If you use words in an imprecise, specious way it affects your thinking and that affects judgement. Calling Social Security an "entitlement" is actually less accurate than calling Defense Spending an "entitlement". People don't individually pay into Defense Spending year after year and yet, when looking for cuts, it never seems to much come into focus.
Interesting point on defense spending. Times have changed and so must the government and the defense department in the way it spends money to defend this country. Had Romney been elected he had said he wanted to ramp up production of three attack subs a year. Why? Since he wasn't elected this isn't on the table but there's likely those in power who still think similar to this. Plus, many jobs hinge on the production of weaponry so that influences decisions. Time to cut back and invest in defense wisely. It's one of the few tangible things that can impact the budget.
time to make some cuts here, things a re getting way out of contol. The CBO says by 2017 the government will be spending 4.5 trillion every year, no tax hike in the world will cover that, talk about going over the cliff...
The reason that you hear about potentially cutting "entitlements" all over is that it sounds inherently like a good thing (after all, people with a sense of entitlement are often arrogant; another example, doesn't it sound wrong to be against women's "right to choose:" -- psychologically, that's leveraging off of a women's right to choose -- her clothes, job, boyfriend, husband). The politicos think that if the dialog is kept focused on entitlements then cutting Defense won't occur to people. Do you think Defense should not be cut, given that we send 10 TIMES MORE FOR DEFENSE THAN THE NEXT BIGGEST SPENDER?
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