>From SLATE: >Dems Pitch $3T Deficit Deal to Supercommittee But the plan’s reliance on new taxes makes is unlikely to win over Republicans.
By Josh Voorhees | Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011, at 3:27 PM ET Democrats want the congressional supercommittee tasked with cutting the federal deficit to go big, $3-trillion-over-the-next-decade big. The Washington Post reports that Sen. Max Baucus laid out the plan at a private meeting Tuesday, calling for the bipartisan panel to pick up where President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner had left off this summer when the latter walked away from negotiations on a so-called “grand bargain.” The proposal is said to include significant cuts to federal health programs, including Medicare, and as much as $1.3 trillion in new taxes. [Kill that New Deal stuff!! why do rich people need it?] It’s that last part that will make the proposal particularly unpopular with the GOP, who have made it more than clear they have no interest in raising taxes. As the Post explains, Baucus "faced immediate push-back from Republicans on the panel, who have consistently refused to consider raising revenue through any means other than economic growth." Reuters, which reports that the total proposed cuts are between $2.5 trillion and $3 trillion, notes that the proposal was the first formal offering by either Democrats or Republicans on the 12-person panel, which has until Nov. 23 to come up with a plan that would cut at least $1.2 trillion from the deficit over the next 10 years. If lawmakers miss that deadline – and it is looking increasingly likely that they will – it would trigger spending cuts of an equal amount beginning in January of 2013. Congressional aides told Reuters that the Democrats’ plan includes a roughly equal mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers, and between $200 billion and $300 billion in new economic stimulus spending that would be paid for with the lower interest payments that result from a smaller deficit. As for the Medicare savings, the proposal calls for roughly $200 billion in cuts to benefits and roughly the same amount in cuts to health care providers. -- Jim Devine / "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
