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21 Nov 2011 20:10

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Politics: Obama offers tough words on debt supercommittee failure

  • They’ve still got a year to figure it out. They can still come together around a balanced plan. I believe Democrats are prepared to do so. My expect is that there are some Republicans who are interested in preventing the automatic cuts from taking place.
  • President Barack Obama • Discussing the failure of the supercommittee to make a deal on cuts, as required by the debt ceiling deal he made in August. The president’s tone was tough — “I will veto any effort to get rid of those spending cuts,” he said — but did offer some wiggle room for Congress to get their act together. The cuts — half defense, half domestic — offer a lot of pain for both sides of the aisle, so who knows? Maybe we’ll see a deal — perhaps the elusive “balanced” one the president is pitching. source

27 Oct 2011 15:24

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Politics: Wide gap between Democrats, Republicans on deficit cuts

  • $2.2 trillion in cuts offered by super committee GOP source
  • » Cut spending, or do a little of everything? The above figure is, in fact, about $800 billion less than the deficit reduction the Democratic plan would have achieved, which relied on a nearly even mixture of spending cuts and tax increases (including some politically tough cuts to Medicare). The GOP plan, conversely, offers no such tax increases, instead relying on heavier spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and low-income welfare programs such as food stamps, along with lowering tax rates which they’re claiming will stoke hundreds of billions of extra economic activity. So, basically, the same argument is playing out exactly like it does every time, though now there’s only twelve people instead of a full Congress.