Source:Global Times Published: 2012-12-13 22:30:10
Sharp differences remained on Wednesday between congressional Republicans and the White House in talks to avert the "fiscal cliff" of steep tax hikes and budget cuts, and negotiators warned the showdown could drag on past Christmas.
A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released late on Wednesday, however, held the potential to shake up the stalemate. Three-quarters of those surveyed, including 61 percent of Republicans, said they would accept raising taxes on the wealthy to avoid the so-called cliff, as Democratic President Barack Obama is demanding.
With Republicans in Congress already divided, that rejection by their own supporters of the core demand of Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner could further weaken his position.
Both sides refused to give any ground in public, one day after what Boehner described as a "frank" conversation with President Barack Obama about the remaining hurdles to a deal.
Boehner said Obama's latest proposal for $1.4 trillion in new tax revenues did not fulfill his promise for a balanced approach to taming the federal deficit and could not pass Congress.
"I remain the most optimistic person in this town, but we've got some serious differences," Boehner told reporters after a meeting with House Republicans where he warned members the negotiations could run through the holidays and up to the end-of-year deadline.
If a deal is not reached, taxes will go up for almost all working Americans at the start of the New Year and steep government spending cuts will kick in.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama would not relent on his demand that Republicans drop their opposition to raising new revenue by increasing the tax rates for the wealthiest 2 percent of all Americans.
"There is no way to do this without rates going up on the top earners," Carney said. The Republican stance that sufficient revenue could be gained by closing tax loopholes and limiting deductions was "just not plausible economic policy," he said.
In what has now become a daily battle of sound bites and political stagecraft, a group of Republican congressmen posed in the cold outside the Capitol with a few dozen small children to illustrate their argument that Obama's budget proposals would bury the next generation in unsustainable debt.
"We are going to leave them with higher tax rates. This is unacceptable,"Republican Representative Sean said.
Obama and Boehner each have proposed cutting deficits by more than $4 trillion in the next 10 years as part of a deal to avert the cliff, but they differ on how to get there. Economists have warned that failure to strike a deal could send the economy back into recession.
On Tuesday, Boehner rejected a White House proposal to shrink the amount of deficit reduction that comes from revenue to $1.4 trillion from $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Boehner has called for $800 billion in revenue through tax reform.