Elections have consequences, said Greg Sargent in The Washington Post,even if the Republicans refuse to admit it. On Jan. 1, the Bush-era tax cuts are due to automatically expire, at the same moment that massive spending cuts that both parties agreed to during the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff kick in. All told, $503 billion could be siphoned out of the economy by a plunge off this “fiscal cliff,” which could throw the still-weak U.S. economy back into recession. But as President Obama and the GOP-controlled House of Representatives battled this week over terms of a compromise deal, it’s clear that Obama “is in a far stronger position politically.” He just decisively won an election framed by his insistence that deficit reduction must involve higher taxes on the wealthy, rather than massive cuts in social programs, as Mitt Romney proposed. So weakened is the GOP, said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times, that House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans say they’ll abandon the famous Grover Norquist pledge never to raise taxes, and are “open to new revenue.”
Listen more carefully, said Ruth Marcus in WashingtonPost.com. Despite their “soothing words about compromise,” Republicans are clinging to their refusal to end the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent. They’re offering to bring in new revenue solely by capping an individual taxpayer’s deductions at some arbitrary number—say, $25,000 or $50,000—rather than raising the top tax rate beyond its current 35 percent. Meanwhile, they’re demanding major cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. “Even as an opening bid, this offering is dishearteningly insincere.” Obama has already rejected it, since a cap on deductions wouldn’t meet his goal of $1.6 trillion in new revenue over 10 years.
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