He’ll probably blame Bush somewhere during the speech, too.
From the Wall Street Journal.
Congressional leaders and Barack Obama called Friday for a return to negotiations to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, a day after talks cratered in a very public fashion when Republicans abandoned House Speaker John Boehner’s backup plan.
In truth, talks to secure a big deficit-reduction deal had already broken down Monday afternoon in the office of Mr. Boehner (R., Ohio), a Wall Street Journal reconstruction shows. Mr. Boehner had been negotiating a deal with the White House to let tax rates rise for upper-income people.
Mr. Boehner, irritated with the White House, was finding it hard to keep his troops in line as details of his negotiations with Mr. Obama leaked out. In the speaker’s office just off the Capitol’s majestic rotunda that afternoon, he told his top lieutenants that he was already thinking about a pared-down backup plan. “In the absence of an agreement, ‘Plan B’ is the plan,” he told his deputies, according to a script he read them that afternoon.
One by one, they came out in favor of Plan B and against the broader deal.
House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) said the new tax revenue the broader plan called for was too high. Then Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), whom Mr. Boehner had spent weeks wooing, said he couldn’t sign on because it didn’t make structural changes in entitlements.
The speaker went ahead with Plan B, which collapsed Thursday night before he could even bring it to a vote, leaving talks at a perilous standstill just days before the year-end fiscal-cliff deadline. Even if an agreement can be reached by then, both sides expect it to be a small package doing little to tackle the long-term budget woes and deferring the battle until next year.
A review of the negotiations, based on interviews with a dozen aides and lawmakers, suggests the problems lay in Mr. Boehner’s inability to coax his rank-and-file to support a deal that raises taxes on higher-income Americans. Another factor was what Republicans saw as Obama’s unwillingness to bend when a deal was in sight, jamming the speaker with a deal his party couldn’t swallow.
The negotiations offer little evidence November’s election brought the president and House Republicans closer together. If anything, the talks poisoned an already distrustful relationship.
Mr. Boehner could soon face a decision whether to call for a vote on some sort of plan that could avert the cliff’s spending cuts and tax increases but might imperil his position if he had to rely on Democrats to pass it.
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.
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.”
He gets a lot of shit for “free”. Like the constant media-friendly propaganda and the taxpayer-funded vaycay he’s taking in Hawaii right now, as the country sinks into a fiscal abyss.
……Obama insisted on raising tax rates for those with household income above $250,000. The House GOP wanted significant spending cuts and fundamental changes to Medicare and other entitlement programs in exchange for new tax revenue.
The president repeatedly reminded Mr. Boehner of the election results: “You’re asking me to accept Mitt Romney’s tax plan. Why would I do that?” At another point, the speaker noted his GOP majority would also return next year.
The White House’s first formal offer, presented Nov. 29 left Mr. Boehner incredulous. It included a request for $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenue over 10 years, a permanent increase in the debt ceiling and money for road projects and other year-end priorities. In return it offered spending cuts of $400 billion—25 cents for each dollar in new revenue.
Obama still wants to gouge America for a $1.6 trillion tax increase so he can spend beyond the $16+ trillion debt into infinity; an idea which idiot Timothy Geithner thinks is a nifty idea.
For those who are unsure, the “Fiscal Cliff” involves:
A combination of expiring tax cuts and across-the-board government spending cuts scheduled to become effective Dec. 31, 2012. The idea behind the fiscal cliff was that if the federal government allowed these two events to proceed as planned, they would have a detrimental effect on an already shaky economy, perhaps sending it back into an official recession as it cut household incomes, increased unemployment rates and undermined consumer and investor confidence. At the same time, it was predicted that going over the fiscal cliff would significantly reduce the federal budget deficit.
……middle-income families will pay an average of $2,000 more in taxes in 2013. Many itemized deductions will be subject to phase-out, and popular tax credits like the earned income credit, child tax credit, and American opportunity credits will be reduced. 401(k) and other retirement accounts will be subject to higher taxes.
Your marginal tax rate is the tax you pay on each additional dollar of income you earn. As your income rises, your marginal tax rate (better known as your tax bracket) rises. For 2012, the tax brackets are 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33% and 35%. If Washington does not act, those rates will go up respectively to 15%, 28%, 31%, 36% and 39.6%.
In addition, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 3.4 million or more people will lose their jobs. The October 2012 unemployment rate of 7.9% represents significant improvement over the October 2009 rate of 10%. The Congressional Budget Office believes that up to 3.4 million jobs would be lost, post fiscal cliff, due to a slowing economy with layoffs stemming from cuts in the defense budget and other things. This could result in an increasing unemployment rate up to 9.1% or more.
The truth is Obama doesn’t give a damn how far he drives this country into economic despair. His ultimate goal is to cripple the capitalist free market system he despises so much.
If he has to destroy our culture, our prosperity and our national pride to accomplish the ‘fundamental transformation’, that’s what he will do.
If we let him.