Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Obama surrounded himself with taxpayers on Wednesday to pitch his plan to preserve current rates for the middle class and raise them for the wealthy. A day before, he met with small-business owners for the same purpose. On Friday, he plans to fly to Pennsylvania to tour a factory to make the same point.
A bipartisan budget deal from 1990 could provide lessons for today’s talks, and more coverage of the so-called fiscal cliff from the Debt Reckoning.
As the president and Congress hurtle toward a reckoning on the highest federal budget
deficit in generations, Mr. Obama says he wants a “balanced” approach
to restoring the nation’s fiscal order. But the high-profile public
campaign he has been waging in recent days has focused almost entirely
on the tax side of the equation, with scant talk about his priorities
when it comes to curbing spending.
Mr. Obama has embraced specific cuts to the federal budget in the past
and has committed to an agreement with Congress that will include deep
reductions in spending. But it would be easy for those who listen to his
public pronouncements lately to miss it. In public statements since his
re-election, he has barely discussed how he would pare back federal
spending, focusing instead on the aspect of his plan that plays to his
liberal base and involves all gain and no pain for 98 percent of
taxpayers.
Republicans and even some Democrats have expressed frustration that Mr.
Obama has avoided a serious public discussion on spending with barely a
month until deep automatic budget cuts and tax increases are scheduled
to take effect. While the president’s aides said it was important to
engage the public on taxes, others say he has not prepared the country
for the sacrifice that would come with lower spending.
“The problem is real,” said Erskine B. Bowles, who was co-chairman of
Mr. Obama’s deficit reduction commission. “The solutions are painful,
and there’s not going to be an easy way out of this.”
After meeting with White House officials this week, Mr. Bowles said he
believed “they were serious about reducing spending” but added that “we
need to talk more about the spending side of the equation.”
Republican leaders were more scathing, saying the president was more
interested in campaigning than sitting down to resolve difficult issues.
They said they were willing to raise tax revenue by closing loopholes
and limiting deductions, but Mr. Obama has not reciprocated with more
restraint of entitlement programs.
“We have not seen any good-faith effort on the part of this
administration to talk about the real problem that we’re trying to fix,”
said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader.
“This has to be a part of this agreement or else we just continue to
dig the hole deeper, asking folks to allow us to kick the can down the
road further. And that we don’t want to do.”
Although Mr. Obama has not scheduled a new meeting with Congressional
leaders, he will dispatch top advisers to Capitol Hill for talks on
Thursday. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Rob Nabors, the
White House legislative director, will pay separate visits to Senators
Harry Reid of Nevada and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Democratic and
Republican leaders, and Representatives John A. Boehner of Ohio and
Nancy Pelosi of California, the Republican speaker and Democratic
minority leader.
Mr. Obama met privately on Wednesday with the chief executives of 14
major corporations like Goldman Sachs, Home Depot, Marriott, Coca-Cola,
Pfizer and Yahoo to discuss the fiscal situation.
“He seemed flexible, but he said taxes should go up on the top 2
percent,” said one executive who did not want to be named. Most of the
executives said they were not opposed to tax increases as part of a deal
but stressed that a quick resolution could help the economy.
White House officials rejected Republican suggestions that Mr. Obama has
not been serious enough about tackling the growth of entitlement
spending. “He is committed, every time he talks about this, to a
balanced approach that includes both, you know, revenues, spending cuts
and savings through entitlement reforms,” said Jay Carney, the White
House press secretary.
White House officials pointed to $340 billion in health care entitlement
program savings and $272 billion in reductions to other mandatory
programs over 10 years in a previous presidential budget proposal. “Even
though that budget proposal’s been out there for a long time, a lot of
people aren’t aware of that,” Mr. Carney said. “ He called it “another
piece of evidence that the president has been willing to make tough
choices.”
One reason a lot of people may not be aware of the cuts Mr. Obama has
proposed is that he does not talk about them often. In his first
postelection news conference, he focused on tax increases on the wealthy
and used the term “spending cuts” just once without elaborating.
By focusing on taxes, Mr. Obama has put Republicans on the defensive. At Wednesday’s event, he challenged them to extend Bush-era tax cuts
for family income under $250,000 since both sides agree those should
continue. Doing so would effectively mean tax cuts on income over
$250,000 would expire at the end of the year since Mr. Obama would not
sign a separate bill extending them.
The president’s public lobbying seemed to crack through the solid
Republican opposition this week when a prominent conservative,
Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, urged his party to seek such a
quick deal with Mr. Obama extending middle-class tax cuts. Mr. Boehner
pushed back against Mr. Cole on Wednesday, saying that would hurt small
businesses and the economy.
At the same time, Mr. Obama evidently sees no percentage in talking in
detail about spending cuts, acutely aware that his liberal base is
unenthusiastic about paring back entitlement programs. Senator Richard
J. Durbin, a longtime Illinois ally and the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said
this week that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should not be part of current budget talks.
As the two sides continued to shadowbox, Mr. Bowles was skeptical,
putting the chances of a deal by the end of the year at one in three. “I
believe the probability is that we are going over the cliff,” he said,
“and I think that will be horrible.”
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