Obama's Debt Ceiling Compromise Wise Move? GOP Brand Damaged FOREVER!!

Did Obama capitulate — or is this a cagey move?

It was President Obama’s bottom line, a position he repeated in every recent public utterance on his debt-ceiling talks with Congress: Any deal must be “balanced” with spending cuts and tax increases.

But in his eleventh-hour stare-down with tea party-infused Republicans, with a possible government default on the line, Obama blinked.

The deal to trim the federal deficit by more than $2 trillion and increase the government’s borrowing limit contains no guarantee that tax increases will be part of the equation.

After weeks of presidential demands for sacrifice by corporate jet owners and hedge-fund managers, those taxpayers and others can rest easy — at least for now.

Liberals were furious as the terms of the agreement came into focus Sunday, and yet another capitulation by Obama on economic policy threatened to further dampen enthusiasm among the core Democratic voters he will need to win reelection next year.

But for a White House eager to improve its standing with centrist independents who have been fleeing Obama, even a losing deal can be a winning strategy.

Most important for the president, the agreement struck Sunday averted a government default — an outcome that probably would have hurt the U.S. economy and added to voters’ frustrations with Obama’s leadership.

The deal also allows the president to avoid another politically painful fight over lifting the debt ceiling before the 2012 election, with Republicans giving up their insistence on a second vote before then.

And Obama, branded a socialist by many Republicans for his big-spending stimulus program and his health-care overhaul, can declare himself a deficit hawk as he courts the political middle.

As he put it in remarks late Sunday praising the agreement, the result of his negotiations would be “the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.”

An administration official told reporters later that “it’s important to show the American people we are serious about deficit reduction.”

Even an apparent capitulation by Obama helps present him to voters as a reasonable compromiser doing battle against rigid ideologues, his aides say.

“In the short term, everyone suffers politically,” Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod said in a recent interview. “In the long term, I think the Republicans have done terrible damage to their brand. Because now they’re thoroughly defined by their most strident voices.”

Obama and his aides insisted Sunday that the president has not given up his fight on taxes.

The creation in the agreement of a bipartisan committee that will recommend the bulk of the deficit reduction later this year gives the president more chances to apply public pressure for tax increases on the wealthy.

Obama will take his case to the public, perhaps even harnessing his reelection campaign apparatus to target lawmakers, as he began doing this past week via Twitter. A July Washington Post-ABC News poll found that most Americans, including most Republicans, support some tax increases to reduce the deficit and oppose cutting programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

“Over the next few months, I’ll continue to make a detailed case to these lawmakers about why I believe a balanced approach is necessary to finish the job,” the president said Sunday.

Obama’s big compromise on the debt-ceiling deal was agreeing to a “trigger” forcing across-the-board spending cuts — including to Medicare and defense — should the committee process not work.

Many Democrats will be relieved to learn that the automatic cuts would not apply to Medicaid, Social Security and certain programs for low-income families. But liberals had hoped the trigger would include taxes. Instead, by late Sunday, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) declared a total victory on that front — telling his colleagues, “The White House bid to raise taxes has been shut down.”

A White House official argued Sunday that the president had another trump card to play: the scheduled expiration of the George W. Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012.

Obama would block extension of the reductions, either as a final act in office after losing the November 2012 election or after winning a second term. At a minimum, the issue gives him leverage for this year’s deficit battle.

The trouble for Obama is that presidents generally do not want to turn their reelection campaigns into crusades for higher taxes. Polling data may show voters siding with Obama on the details, but in general Democrats lose when Republicans paint them as tax-and-spend liberals — which explains why the White House was so eager to avoid another debt-ceiling vote.

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said the ongoing debate over taxes and spending would take Democrats, and the president, away from addressing voters’ larger concerns about how to create jobs and stimulate the economy.

“Everyday Democrats aren’t talking jobs is a less-than-optimal day for us,” Mellman said.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and the creator of the no-new-taxes pledge signed by most Republicans, was ebullient Sunday at the substance and political implications for the deal.

Obama may declare victory, he said, but after relenting on taxes, “he’s playing hurt.” Norquist said Republicans next year can make a case that the 2011 deal would have been far bigger had the GOP controlled the Senate and the White House. And they will argue that when it came to spending cuts, “Obama fought us every step of the way.”

Norquist added that he was “pleasantly shocked” that Obama had not sought a debt-ceiling increase last year, when the president struck another deal with the GOP extending the Bush tax cuts — given that the president had far more leverage at that point.

Some Democrats, too, turned Sunday to questioning Obama’s negotiating skills — asking if he could have avoided the current crisis altogether and maintained a stronger political position.

Obama, after all, could have accepted earlier GOP plans that included additional tax revenue — including one that he was negotiating with Boehner. The speaker, who seemed willing to allow $800 billion in additional revenue, walked out of the talks when Obama asked for more.

Now, according to Democratic critics, the poor and the middle class are at greater risk from cuts.

One senior Senate Democratic aide said that averting a default was a victory of sorts for Obama, “but when you look at the emerging details, spending cuts and triggers with no revenue, the president got rolled.”

Asked if the deal was balanced, as the president had required, former Obama White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein said, “Not by any stretch of the imagination.”

Sources: C-Span, Washington Post, White House, Youtube

Tea Party Won Debt Ceiling Fight? Perhaps Yes For Now (Decision 2012)

How the Tea Party ‘hobbits’ won the debt fight


The Tea Party came under fire from all sides Friday after House conservatives nearly brought down Speaker John Boehner’s debt-limit bill. John McCain went to the Senate floor to mock Tea Partyers as “hobbits,” and Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen said Tea Party Republicans “are unfit for governing.”

What a difference a weekend makes. The reported debt-limit deal appears to be a victory for the Tea Party. It includes around $1 trillion in spending cuts and creates a special committee of Congress to recommend cuts of $1.2 trillion more. If Congress does not approve those additional cuts by year’s end, automatic spending cuts go into effect. The package sets an important new precedent that debt-limit increases must be “paid for” with commensurate cuts in spending. According to Sen. Rob Portman, a former White House budget director, if we cut a dollar of spending for every dollar we raise the debt limit, we will balance the budget in 10 years — something that even the Paul Ryan budget would not achieve. And all this is accomplished with no tax increases.

The devil is in the details, of course. There are troubling reports that the agreement may disproportionately cut defense spending. Conservatives should ensure that the final deal, which is still being hammered out at the time of this writing, does not gut defense. They should scour the legislation to make certain it lives up to its billing. If it does, the Tea Party has won.

To appreciate the scope of the Tea Party’s victory, consider: When Barack Obama came into office, he went on a bender of government spending. He signed an unprecedented $821 billion stimulus spending bill. His first budget increased federal spending to 27 percent of gross domestic product — the highest level as a share of the economy since World War II. He then proceeded to ram through Congress Obamacare, a massive government intervention that adds $1.4 trillion in new spending over the next decade alone. Democrats openly talked about passing a “second stimulus.” And five months ago Obama submitted a budget to Congress that tripled the national debt, raising it by $10 trillion over the next 10 years.

Today, no one is talking about tripling the national debt or passing a “second stimulus.” Congress is about to cut spending by about $2 trillion and put us on a trajectory to balance the budget within a decade. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid complained Saturday evening that Congress has raised the debt limit 74 times since 1962 without conditions. He is right. This is happening for the first time in history, thanks to the Tea Party.

Consider that less than a week ago, President Obama addressed the nation, demanding that Congress include higher taxes in any debt-limit deal. According to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the proposed deal has no tax increases. The Tea Party took tax hikes off the table and held the line — another major victory.

The Tea Party is also winning the battle of ideas. Last week, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod crowed that the debt-limit battle was shaping up as a “definitional fight” in which voters would see Obama as defending the reasonable center against Republicans who are “pandering to the extremes.” Well, if Axelrod is so confident that Obama is winning this “definitional fight,” why was the White House so adamant about ducking a second round next year? The president said that “the only bottom line that I have is that we extend this debt ceiling through the next election.” If he were winning the argument, he would have been eager to have this fight again just before the next election.

Instead of winning over independents with his calls for a “balanced” approach, the president’s support among independents has collapsed. A Pew poll released last week found that a majority of independents now disapprove of Obama’s job performance for the first time in his presidency. Two months ago, Obama held an 11-point lead over a generic Republican. Today, that lead has vanished. Whatever the president’s strategy was, it failed.

Now comes that hard part: accepting an incomplete victory. Some Tea Party Republicans will be unhappy with the deal because it does not include a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The fight for a balanced budget amendment must go on. But Tea Partyers should recognize just how much Obama and the Democrats caved: $2 trillion in spending cuts. No tax increases. A new precedent that debt-limit hikes must be accompanied by equal or greater cuts in spending. And the potential for a balanced budget in 10 years. That the Tea Party accomplished all this in just six months — at a time when the GOP controls one-half of one-third of the federal government — is remarkable.

The “hobbits” won.


Sources: C-Span, Washington Post, Youtube

Tea Party Movement's Extreme Radical, Racist Agenda Exposed! (Videos)

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Sources: Youtube, Google Maps

Tea Party Congress Creates More Poverty By Cutting Food Stamps & Medicaid (Decision 2012)

Boehner Debt Ceiling Plan Drops A 26-Year-Old Exemption That Protects The Poor From Budget Cuts

As the Republicans haggle over whether to support their own plan for raising the nation’s debt ceiling, an “unprecedented” coalition of religious leaders are urging President Obama and Congress not to sacrifice the needs of the poor in the name of debt reduction. Even the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops joined the effort, singling out House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) plan for its “disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons.”

In scrutinizing the debt deals, some religious leaders praised the plans for at least exempting low-income “means-tested” programs from across-the-board cuts. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes today, however, that Boehner’s plan does not actually exempt programs like Medicaid and food stamps from such cuts. Instead, it does the opposite.

Breaking a 26-year policy of exempting basic low-income entitlement programs from across-the-board cuts, both of the House Republican plans — “Cut, Cap, and Balance” Act and Boehner’s debt-ceiling proposal — “drop all of the low-income exemptions that have been part of every previous across-the-board cut mechanism since 1985″:

For 26 years, all budget legislation that would trigger across-the-board cuts if Congress fails to meet a fiscal target has exempted the basic low-income (or “means-tested”) entitlement programs from those cuts. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings laws of 1985 and 1990, the deficit reduction agreement of 1990, and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 — all bipartisan pieces of legislation — included that exemption.

So did last year’s “pay-as-you-go” law, which requires Congress to offset the cost of new tax cuts or increases in entitlement programs so they don’t increase the deficit. Congress has never enacted a law with an across-the-board cut mechanism that subjects core assistance for the poor to these cuts.

But in the last few weeks, House Republicans have advanced two major pieces of legislation that would do just that. Both the “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act,” which the House passed last week, and the new Boehner debt-ceiling proposal drop all of the low-income exemptions that have been part of every previous across-the-board cut mechanism since 1985.

“In an exercise in political cynicism,” CBPP notes that both bills include an exemption for payments to Medicare providers that was not part of previous laws. This allows Republicans to avoid another hit from the senior community “even as they subject those living below the poverty line to the risk of automatic cuts that would push them even deeper into poverty.” Earlier this week, CBPP put out an analysis showing that Boehner’s debt ceiling plan “could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history.”

The Republican move to cut a long-standing bipartisan protection for the poor really brings into question exactly which Americans Republicans say they’re fighting for. Religious leaders should take note. If asked “What Would Jesus Cut,” it seems Republicans are determined to provide the wrong answer.

Sources: Blogger Interrupted, Off The Charts Blog, Think Progress, Washington Post, Youtube

GOP Never Required Balanced Budget Amendment Under Bush Or Reagan (Hypocrisy!)

Republicans Never Voted On A Balanced Budget Amendment When They Controlled Congress Under Bush

House Republicans last week insisted on passing their radical “cut, cap, and balance” plan, which would allow the federal debt ceiling to be raised only if a balanced budget amendment (complete with a federal spending cap and a super majority requirement for tax increases) is approved by Congress and sent to the states. The Senate tabled the bill by a vote of 51-46.

Despite their plan failing to receive even a majority in the Senate — far less than the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment — Republicans have continued to demand, as they have for months, that a balanced budget amendment be a part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling. And the GOP is framing its BBA push as some kind of favor for the next generation. For instance, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who chairs the House Republican Conference, said today that the balanced budget amendment is “not about the next election. It’s about the next generation.”

However, when the Republicans held both chambers of Congress from 2003 to 2006, and had a Republican in the White House, they not only didn’t approve a balanced budget amendment, they never even held a vote on it. In fact, the last vote on a BBA was in 1997, when Bill Clinton was president; the Senate defeated it by a single vote.

As we’ve extensively discussed, a balanced budget amendment is one of the worst ideas in Washington. It would force the government to make economic downturns worse by actively slashing spending in the face of falling revenue. Republicans are now claiming, in the name of the next generation of Americans, that enacting a balanced budget amendment is the price of averting economic catastrophe, but their utter indifference to the idea when they actually had the power to advance it shows that it’s nothing more than a political ploy.

Sources: Fox News, MSNBC, Think Progress, Youtube

Obama's Debt Ceiling Deal Announced! Devil Is In The Details: Cuts & Taxes

So Pres. Obama Has Announced Another Debt Ceiling Deal.

Isn't This Like The 10th Deal Since He First Requested An Increase 5 Months Ago?

I Won't Hold My Breath On This One, Nor Will I Celebrate Yet.

As Nancy Pelosi Says: "The Devil Is In The Details".

I Want To Know What's In This Compromise/ Deal!

NOT Bits & Pieces!

EVERYTHING!!!!

Did Pres. Obama Throw BLACK Middle Class Voters, Veterans, Senior Citizens, College Students & Low Income Citizens Under The Bus Again?

Or Will He Finally End The Bush Tax Cuts?

Stay Tuned!




Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal

President Obama and Congressional leaders of both parties said late Sunday that they had agreed to a framework for a budget deal that would cut trillions of dollars in federal spending over the next decade and clear the way for an increase in the government’s borrowing limit.

With the health of the fragile economy hanging in the balance and financial markets watching closely, the leaders said they would present the compromise to their caucuses on Monday morning in hopes of enacting it before a Tuesday deadline to avert default.

Even as the president was speaking from the White House on Sunday night, Speaker John A. Boehner was on a conference call with House Republicans, trying to sell them on the proposal he had signed off on only minutes before.

Since he is likely to lose the most conservative elements of the caucus, Mr. Boehner faces the task of framing the pact as friendly enough to Republican principles to win over a significant group of his rank-and-file without alienating Democrats he will need to push it over the top.

President Obama, in a hastily called appearance with reporters that ended a day of uncertainty, said that the compromise would “allow us to avoid default and end the crisis that Washington imposed on the rest of America.”

“It ensures also that we will not face this same kind of crisis again in six months, or eight months, or 12 months,” he said. “And it will begin to lift the cloud of debt and the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over our economy.”

Just before Mr. Obama spoke on television, the two Senate leaders, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, took the floor to endorse the pact as well.

“I am relieved to say that leaders from both parties have come together for the sake of our economy to reach a historic, bipartisan compromise that ends this dangerous standoff,” said Mr. Reid, the majority leader.

The tentative agreement calls for at least $2.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, a new Congressional committee to recommend a deficit-reduction proposal by Thanksgiving, and a two-step increase in the debt ceiling.

The announcement concluded a tumultuous 24 hours that saw hopes rise Saturday night over the prospects of a deal that might have concluded the budget stalemate. By Sunday, worry set in again as lawmakers and White House officials struggled to hammer out the fine points of an agreement that must clear a Senate controlled by Democrats as well as by the Republican House.

If the deal clears Congress, with its new special joint committee to explore deficit reduction, it will ensure that the size and scope of the federal government and the tension between spending and taxes will remain front and center in the Washington debate headed into the 2012 election.

Markets reacted favorably to the announcement. Asian markets jumped on news of the deal. The Nikkei was up 1.7 percent in early trading; the dollar rose about 1.4 percent against the Japanese yen.

The agreement came after a day of wrangling over Pentagon cuts, and it still must win majority support in the Senate and the House, with the House providing a particular challenge.

On the conference call, Mr. Boehner sought to portray the new agreement as one heavily tilted toward the Republican call for no new revenue, and he said it met the goal of instituting cuts greater than the amount of the debt limit increase. In a presentation, he said the pact would prevent a “job-killing default” — a warning to lawmakers that failure to raise the limit could add to the bleak employment picture.

“Our framework is now on the table that will end this crisis in a manner that meets our principles of smaller government,” said Mr. Boehner, who said he hoped to get the legislation onto the House floor as quickly as possible.

As conversations flowed between the White House and Capitol Hill, Mr. Reid earlier Sunday publicly embraced the compromise that would tie deep spending cuts to a debt ceiling increase, though his plan to bring it to a vote as early as Sunday was put off, as was a tentative meeting of Senate Democrats to review it.

According to Congressional and administration officials, the delay was attributable to efforts by Mr. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, to limit immediate reductions in the Pentagon budget and better protect it from future cuts in order to cement votes from defense hawks. He needs those votes to win approval of the plan in the House.

The tense, last-minute negotiations were taking place against a backdrop of uncertainty, with a looming threat of a costly downgrade of the nation’s credit rating and with investors worried about the global economic impact of a possible default. The political stakes were unusually high as well, with leaders in both parties staking out positions that may well be central to their re-election chances in 2012.

If the compromise were to be nailed down, attention would immediately turn to selling it to the rank-and-file. The leadership was anticipating objections from Republicans that the plan did not go far enough while Democrats were wary that Medicare spending would take a hit.

Despite the remaining political and procedural hurdles, the predominant mood on Capitol Hill was one of cautious relief that the gears were turning to produce legislation that would eliminate the threat of a potential government default after Tuesday.

Referring to the tortuous negotiations, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said: “Sausage making is not pretty. But the sausage we have, I think, is a very different sausage from when we started.”

She noted that the proposed caps on federal spending, combined with creation of a new evenly divided panel to cut the deficit further, could fundamentally change federal finances.

But not everyone was pleased. “It may be the best we can do,” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Budget Committee. “But I do not think it’s enough.”

With the talks appearing to make progress, the Senate blocked a Democratic proposal for a debt limit increase on a vote 50-49, falling 10 votes short of the 60 required to limit debate. But all attention was on the negotiations.



White House aides were in a flurry of meetings as they prepared for the prospect of announcing a deal. After weeks of political theatrics and Congressional votes that appeared to go nowhere, the mood at the White House on Sunday afternoon was one of cautious optimism.

But Obama administration officials are also aware of the precarious risk the president was running if he strikes a deal that Congressional Democrats find hard to swallow. Mr. Obama’s top political aides, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the senior White House adviser David Plouffe, were on the phone Sunday afternoon with Democratic leaders, who gathered in the Capitol Sunday afternoon to explore the outlook for the measure.

A major question mark remained the House of Representatives, where a vote on the agreement could occur Monday and where Mr. Boehner has found it difficult to corral the most conservative wing of the rank-and-file. While the bipartisan deal would be expected to attract significant Democratic support, Mr. Boehner must still persuade many of his members to get behind it and would be pushing for at least half of the House Republicans to back it.

In an e-mail to Republican House members, Mr. Boehner noted that “discussions are under way on legislation that will cut government spending more than it increases the debt limit, and advance the cause of the balanced budget amendment, without job-killing tax hikes.”

“Those talks are moving in the right direction, but serious issues remain,” the speaker wrote.

Under the plan as described by officials briefed on its outline, the debt limit would be increased by $900 billion in the first installment, subject to a Congressional vote of disapproval that Mr. Obama would be able to veto. To prevent a default, $400 billion would be added immediately.

A second increase of $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion would be available subject to a second vote of disapproval by Congress. At the same time, a new joint Congressional committee would be created to find a like amount of cuts.

If the evenly divided committee failed to agree on a plan, Congress would either have to approve a balanced budget agreement or accept an across-the-board cut in spending in line with the committee’s goal, with 50 percent of the savings coming from the Pentagon beginning in 2013. Medicare would also sustain cuts, though the reductions would be capped.

The rationale for picking such favored programs as the Pentagon for Republicans and Medicare for Democrats was to provide a strong incentive for the new committee to avoid a deadlock and deliver a deficit reduction plan that could clear Congress.

According to Democratic officials close to the talks, among the final sticking points that were worked out were efforts to exempt the Medicaid program from reductions under the automatic spending reductions and make certain that the Medicare cuts hit health care providers, not beneficiaries.

Negotiators did agree that any deal would not include language that could lead to a new formula for the annual cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security beneficiaries that could save more than $100 billion in the first 10 years. While many economists have long said the existing formula overstates inflation, many Democrats oppose any change that would reduce benefits from current law.

Dropping the proposal from the White House-Congressional talks reflected in part the influence of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader, whose negotiating hand has been strengthened since she will have to deliver a significant number of Democratic votes for House passage of any solution given the likelihood that Mr. Boehner will face significant loss of Republican votes.

Senators said they expected that the plan as it was being portrayed would attract a bipartisan vote even though both Democrats and Republicans would have reservations.

Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, said that from the terms of the deal described to him, “I think I will be satisfied and supportive.” After years of work, he noted, Congress has become “serious about cuts in spending.”


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Sources: CNN, NY Times, Google Maps