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Obama to meet with top congressional Democrats and Republicans in bid to avert ‘fiscal cliff’
An aide to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said he “is eager to hear from the president.”
A spokesman for Boehner issued a statement that said the speaker would attend and “continue to stress that the House has already passed legislation to avert the entire fiscal cliff and now the Senate must act.”
While there was no guarantee of a compromise, Republicans and Democrats said privately that elements of any agreement would likely include an extension of middle class tax cuts with increased rates at upper incomes as well as cancellation of the scheduled spending cuts. An extension of expiring unemployment benefits, a reprieve for doctors who face a cut in payments from the federal Medicare program and possibly a short-term measure to prevent dairy prices from soaring could also become part of a year-end bill, they said.
That would postpone politically contentious disputes over spending cuts for 2013.
The issue has been Obama’s first test of muscle after his re-election in November. At stake are Bush-era tax cuts that expire on December 31 and revert to the higher rates in place during the administration of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Nearly all Americans and branches of the federal government, including the military, would be affected.
The parties are also arguing about cutting entitlement programs like Social Security pensions. The changes are part of a long-delayed need for the government to address its chronic deficit spending.
Obama ran on a theme of having the wealthy pay a greater share toward deficit reduction with a focus on raising upper tax rates for individuals earning US$200,000 or more and couples making more than US$250,000. In negotiations with Boehner toward a deficit reduction plan, he offered to increase that threshold to US$400,000, but those negotiations collapsed.
