About Those Fiscal Cliff Negotiations…

Friday’s Wall Street Journal posted some of the details of the negotiations between President Obama and House Speaker Boehner.

The article reports:

Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn’t reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

Blaming may work politically up to a point, but I honestly don’t see it as a way to move the discussion forward.

The article cites some of the actual negotiations:

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?”

“You get nothing,” the president said. “I get that for free.”

Good grief!

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article on Friday about the negotiations on the fiscal cliff. In the article he quoted Senator Jeff Sessions:

President Obama today gave yet another speech about the fiscal cliff. No plan, nothing that can be scored or analyzed, just another speech. If President Obama wishes to avoid the fiscal cliff then he, with all the power and influence he holds as the leader of this nation, must submit to Congress – in legislative form – a plan that he believes can pass both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support. No more secret meetings and pointless press conferences. Certainly this is not too much to ask. So we await his action: will he move from an unscorable speech to scorable legislation? If he is unwilling to submit such a plan then we may be left with only one persuasive conclusion: that he has used two years of secret meetings with Republican leaders not as an opportunity to achieve fiscal reform, but as a political exercise to defeat his opposition and preserve the expansion of federal spending.

There are a number of ideas as to what President Obama is doing. Two of them are very interesting. Rush Limbaugh believes that this exercise is an attempt to divide and destroy the Republican Party by getting them to admit that tax hikes on the rich are necessary. Dick Morris believes that the current negotiations are an effort to change to discussion from excessive spending to the idea that we need more revenue. Each is plausible. Meanwhile, the American economy sits in limbo waiting to see what happens next. We need some grown-ups in Washington. Let’s elect some in 2014.

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