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The all-too-brief, conciliatory effort to find some middle-ground over the "fiscal cliff" issue...
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Wednesday, November 21, 2012, 6:34 PM ETThe all-too-brief, conciliatory effort to find some middle-ground over the "fiscal cliff" issue may be disappearing in Washington already. Stalemate appears to be re-emerging over a big obstacle. Team Obama wants a gargantuan $1.6T tax hike and to eliminate a number of tax deductions over the next ten years in an effort to boost revenue and finance a bigger government. Spending cuts don't even appear on the radar at this juncture, which could well be a deal-breaker.
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The Fed Gov cannot raise taxes enough to deal with the amount of debt and promises that have been made over the next 20 to 30 years. We are in deep.
If Romney would have won a "basically 50/50" election the victors would have claimed a mandate for his agenda.
The election does suggest the American people want a compromise, but Obama's victory is more suggestive that they want the Republicans (mostly the Tea Party) to compromise. I think you've got it backwards.
The people who voted for Obama know the GOP does not care about them. The GOP are more beholding to big pharma and Grover Norquist and not the people they represent. There is something seriously wrong with the picture. Get your facts straight before you complain.
the middle tax class cuts Obama is trying to protect will still add hundreds of billions to the deficit
This should not be surprising when one realizes the waterfall of entitlement spending from expanded Medicaid, Obamacare health insurance subsidies for virtually the entire lower and middle classes, and the public provider option on the exchanges.
http://huff.to/SbvWi2
The fact is , all these suggestions about how much it will cost are bogus. The Republicans are concealing their real problem with Obamacare and that is the 3.8% tax on capital gains for incomes over $250k.
If Obama got rid of this tax, you'd see how fast the Republicans start to embrace the program.
Lets talk numbers, for once, not politics.
Our system is broken. Neither one of these so called political "parties" has any interest of the American people at heart. The political parties are one in the same, just different talking points to keep the American public entertained and completely dumbed down.
If you haven't been preparing for what is coming and what has projected to be coming even 10 years ago, you are behind the curve.
Democrats, Republican, it doesn't matter. They are one in the same.
All congressional millionaires who want to stay in power. Forget middle class, poor or even the some what rich. Every single person in the country will suffer because of the corruption in our country by all in Washington.
The poor, down on their luck, and unemployed have been seduced by free handouts, 5000 weeks of unemployment, reality TV shows, etc. They are now slaves to their government and though they do not know it yet will now have to obey their government without question or face the music.
The middle class (or what's left of it) will keep falling down the ladder into poverty (slavery). It is a carefully planned course by the powers in Washington to reduce the size of the middle class and add more people who must do the government's bidding or face hunger, forced military service. etc. Oh yes folks. Think it's not possible? Think again. You will do what your told when your family relies on government for everything.
We are finally past the 5th inning of a very sad game that Americans have let happen. We are heading straight for the ninth inning while Americans are glued to their mindless TV shows, fascinated by cable news TV who's opinions are designed only to keep you entertained and not really informed, and keep your eyes fixed to your latest gadgets while giving you the sense of wealth, yet having no real wealth of their own.
160 million American work in this country. 107 million Americans earn $45K per year or less before taxes. Only 7 million Americans in this country earn $100K or more regardless of all the so called wealth portrayed in the media.
It is a planned course. It is a sad course yet Americans in general really seem to have no interest in their future other than looking to someone else to make their future for them.
It's going to take money out of everyone's pockets to get solvent as a nation.
By everyone I mean the rich, the political class, the public sector, the poor, the unmotivated, the unlucky, the old, the young and certainly the middle class being there are so many of us.
I don't hold out much hope of anything useful happening. Going into the election Congress had an approval rating under 20%, yet most of them were re-elected. This killed any faith I had in the American people having common sense. I have no faith in any politician applying common sense to this spending issue.
As for all you Obama fans doing the "rah, rah, rah, we won",... enjoy the next 4 years...you're going to spend the rest of your life paying for it. Literally.
Weasel. Ryan and Romney never quite spelled out the debt, the deficit in Ross Perot fashion and here we are.
70% have no clue on any of this. Nor do they care. Obama wants his $66 bil from $250k earner tax hikes for symbolism...trillion $ deficits every year and if we can"t grow this $15 trillion economy soon, we'll be slow growth zombified soon enough for decades.
Things are so bad I'd say "Geronimo!" To the fiscal cliff.
If the author's claim pans out, then Obama wants to keep spending as is and only "finance a bigger government ". I find that highly unlikely. If we are negotiating, then Obama puts his taxes up and the other side fights for spending cuts later. The author is a "bullshitter".
Are we talking about 'reducing the debt' to safeguard the fiscal future of the US?
Are we talking about 'no tax increases' to keep the economy growing?
The fact is that it is very likely impossible to do both. Economic expansion has always been accompanied expansion of debt.
Obama needs to decide if he wants to be the President who presided over policies intended to reduce the national debt and return the country to fiscal sanity, and take the hit for the resulting contraction in GDP and the tax increases that will necessarily accompany such a policy, and go down in history as the guy who tried to fix the country's fiscal house,
or if he wants to prolong the current series of debt-increasing fiscal policies of huge government spending and Bush-era tax cuts, and go down in history as the guy who presided over the largest expansion in government debt in the history of the nation.
Either way he'll be doing both a good and bad thing in tandem. I wonder which way he will go.
I have no idea which way Obama will go as he tacks with the wind but his rhetoric is very populist which moves emotions but is usually the language of a Prez trying to deflect peoples anger during hard times. He and Chavez could use the same speech writer.
My sense is he wont fix much of anything because government spending has to come down. How many Prez's have done that?