11:36 am...(what time zone?)
Posted on 12/20/2012 5:16:50 PM PST by kristinn
Capitol Hill reporters on Twitter writing Speaker Boehner has dropped Plan B fiscal cliff vote tongiht after revolt from House Republican caucus. House will recess until after Christmas.
After raucus closed dooor House GOP meeting, Boehner says House has already passed bills to cut spending and taxes to avert fiscal cliff and the ball is the court of the Senate and President Obama.
Plans C, D, E and F
Posted by Jennifer Rubin on December 21, 2012 at 9:00 am
The House Republicans have joined the White House and Senate Democrats in the “don’t know how to govern” department, none of them coming up with a plan that can pass either body, let alone both. GOP aides on Capitol Hill seem genuinely baffled as to what comes next. Here are some possible scenarios.
Plan C: The White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) cook up a putrid bill (from conservatives’ standpoint), including tax hikes (in excess of Clinton-era rate hikes for the rich) and phony cuts. Reid jams it through the Senate. House Democrats announce they will support it unanimously, and the House Republicans are forced to swallow it or allow everyone’s taxes to go up.
Plan D: Reid and Obama can’t come up with anything to pass the Senate. They agree to extend the tax rates and hold off on the sequestration for 90 days, continuing to torture the entire country.
Plan E: Obama and House Speaker John Boehner reach a deal that a minority of House and Senate Republicans could support but that will command near unanimity among House and Senate Democrats. By definition it is worse than anything a majority of Republicans could agree upon.
Plan F: Boehner and the president return to the bargaining table. But now Boehner is in a worse bargaining position since he can’t provide enough votes to pass the House. They therefore jointly craft a bill that is less acceptable to the Republicans than prior offers but can gain the support of Republicans. (The notion that the president after last night’s fiasco will be compelled to move closer to Boehner is, well, fanciful. He has his foot on Republicans’ necks and he is not about to let up.)
There are probably some other scenarios, but, truth be told, there are no good ones. And if this is bad, imagine how horrendous the debt-ceiling talks will be.
Sure would suck if they had to stop funding terrorists to pay for all the undeserved welfare cheats.
Instead, they will cut SS without any plan to fix/replace it, raise taxes and spend MORE on Foreign aid to everyone but Israel.
And some on the right will call it conservative.
What good are conservatives with power if they have no principles?
If it means compromising basic principles, then there should be no deal. We need to get away from this mindset that we must make a deal to postpone the next crisis or to gain a partisan advantage and start dealing with the macro issues that are sending this country into a cosmic economic wormhole.
Obama intentionally creates this crisis atmosphere that forces Reps to accept these last minute deals without any real discussion of the long term effects. He did it with Obamacare --you have to pass the bill before you can find out what is in it--, raising the debt limit coupled with sequestration, and now we have the fiscal cliff crisis that has an artificial Dec 31 deadline. The Reps will again be stampeded into "getting the best deal possible." But this will not address our spending problems and entitlement reform, the real drivers of debt and deficit. Now is the time to dig in our heels and force a national conversation on where this nation stands on our fiscal problems. The increased taxes on everyone, the plunge in the stock market, and a return to a recession (which may have happened anyway) should get everyone's attention and lend some urgency and focus to the discussions.
Getting the best deal possible will divide the GOP not unite it. Again, the only reason that Obama is pushing this narrative that the rich must pay their fair share is to destroy the GOP. It raises very little revenue in the grand scheme of things. And the "rich" (those earning over $250K) will already see large tax increases due to Obamacare. And Obama has already positioned himself as the defender of the entitlement programs with the GOP being the mean-spirited grinch that wants to take away benefits for the old and poor children. Even if there were some small changes to entitlements in any proposed deal, the Dems and Obama would say they were forced into it by the Reps.
LOL, I learned that painful lesson long ago.
Had a power glitch. I thought the Myans had arrived ;)
I look at it as another opportunity to make more tyops...
Plans C, D, E and F
Pretty much sums it up. We can either try to triangulate the dems or get steamrolled. The reality is taxes are going up and spending will not be cut in a meaningful way. No daydream will change those facts on the ground.
It seems the Tea Party Caucas chose to jump under the bus. Speaker Pelosi won’t care why.
Boehner will lose the House for the republicans in 2014
The Punk has won re-election, and he now thinks of himself as a god. The fact is that taxes on the top .2% will make the economy WORSE, and no Republican with any sense would broach a “compromise” deal. The GOP is not called the “stupid party” for nothing. Bob
The Punk has won re-election, and he now thinks of himself as a god. The fact is that taxes on the top .2% will make the economy WORSE, and no Republican with any sense would broach a “compromise” deal. The GOP is not called the “stupid party” for nothing. Bob
Not necessarily, because not only would it have protected 99.8% (including the huge number of businesses from $250,000 - $1 M) it would have pressured Obama to implement more ENTITLEMENT CUTS which may have been the more beneficial catalyst for the economy.
Boehner was trying to play chess. The dissenters didn't get it.
Boehner can't even grasp the rules of hide-and-seek, what the heck are you talking about chess, ROTFLMAO.
Obamacare will raise our taxes and spending regardless.
Debt ceiling will be the real fight.
Doubt it. Once SS and Medicare payments can't be made, there will a huge outcry that no politician can ignore.
Thanks and Merry Christmas to you and yours too!!
Freezing here in Vegas as well, 22 this AM when I got up!
Hint: Try reading the context to see what I'm talking about.
I bet mojitoe job is lapping it up in the sun while we get this cold, LOL
Right. The tax on the 0.2% would do virtually nothing to th economy because people change their behavior. I am not saying to go ahead and raise taxes on anyone. But to say that the taxes in the Plan B wold seriously harm the economy is a joke. It’s also a joke to say its for defecit reduction. In the grand scheme of things it’s immaterial.
From Ramesh Ponnuru
The Myth of Fingerprints - By Ramesh Ponnuru - The Corner - National Review Online
One false claim making the rounds about the House Republicans who defeated John Boehner’s “Plan B” last night is that they don’t understand that higher taxes are inevitable. A lot of them understand that point perfectly well. Some of them have been privately advising the Republican leaders to pursue a strategy that they know would lead to higher taxes than Plan B contained.
The idea is that the House Republican leadership should permit a vote on the bill the Senate passed in July—one that extends middle-class tax rates and limits tax increases on capital while allowing the top two income-tax rates to rise. House Democrats and a few Republicans could then pass the Senate bill. The disadvantage of this plan, from the viewpoint of most Republicans, is that taxes would rise much more than they would have done under Plan B. People and businesses making between $250,00 and $1 million would be hit. The advantage that outweighs this disadvantage, according to the Republicans offering the advice, is that most Republicans would not have to have their fingerprints on a tax increase. Most Republicans would be able to vote against the bill and thus maintain the purity of their opposition to tax increases. At the same time, the bill would be enacted, so middle-class taxes would not rise, and Republicans would not be blamed for the rise.
Many of the Republicans on the other side—those who were behind Boehner’s Plan B, for example—see this stance as a matter of craven self-interest. In their view, the Republicans who are taking this line are perversely maintaining their anti-tax reputations at the price of letting taxes rise higher. Craven self-interest surely plays a role; we are after all talking about politicians. Some of them, however, also make an argument for their strategy, one based on maintaining the distinction in the public mind between the parties’ positions on taxes and holding the Democrats accountable for theirs.
On this view, the looming tax increase is the Democrats’ fault: They’re the ones blocking an extension of all the tax rates. If a bill that allows some tax increases to take effect passes with mostly Democratic votes, they will be held responsible for them—and for any ill effects they have. If it passes with a lot of Republican support, on the other hand, the party will have forfeited its anti-tax identity and the cause of cutting spending and taxes will be set back—and set back even more than it will by a larger tax increase. Indeed, a larger tax increase without much Republican support would sharpen the distinction between the parties in the public mind.
I’m receptive to arguments that presuppose that a lot of voters pay minimal attention to politics, and I’m not tied to the proposition that Plan B was the obviously right play. Still: Are there really a lot of voters who do not know that Republicans oppose tax increases on the rich? If Republicans vote for a bill that by its silence on upper-income tax rates allows them to rise, will voters really not know that they did only because Republicans were powerless to stop it? It seems hard to credit. If taxing job creators causes economic calamity, would Obama and the Democrats really be able to get a lot of mileage out of saying that Republicans supported it? I’m skeptical.
That some Republicans are willing to see higher taxes for the sake of anti-tax purity is topsy-turvy enough. Adding to the vertigo: The Republicans (inside and outside the House) who fret about blurring the party’s definition are the ones who are doing most to blur it. They are the ones who are, in most cases, accusing Republican leaders of seeking to raise taxes when they are actually trying to cut taxes as much as they think possible—cut them, that is, from the levels the law already has in place for 2013. They’re the ones who are accusing most House Republicans of “caving” to the Democrats, even as some of them prefer that the Democrats get their way entirely. That’s where the convoluted politics of this moment have led us.
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