Who wants us to drive over the fiscal cliff?

[Star]

The way I see it, Obama has the best cards and the wingnuts are drawing to an inside straight. Obama is already out there explaining why the inflexible congress will hurt middleclass and poor families if they don't negotiate in good faith. The GOP will take the hit for that. Obama will also have the final say on what agencies have to cut to make the numbers work. Since Defense is our most bloated department, that could be interesting. Let's scale back on some of those Red State shipyards, like in Mississippi, where the military says they don't need new carriers. Scale back Fort Hood.

As for raising taxes, that hurt the most wealthy, all Obama has to do is nothing. He offered to negotiate in good faith, but the right wing scumbags want to stick with Grover Norquest.

No bacon for you, wingnuts.

Fort Hood - where the muslum terror attack occured. Too bad Obama doesn't have the balls to call it what it was.
Would you like to articulate precisely where Obama made a good faith attempt to make any meaningful cuts?
The way I look at it is the republicans have put tax hikes on the most successful ( job creators ) on the table but the Obama socialist will not compromise!
When we go off the cliff, your sacred intitlements will be cut, and you libs will flip out, because it will be your fault, and too fucking late!

"intitlements" will be cut? How so?
"The White House is out with its report detailing how it plans to implement the sequester cuts. You can read all 394-pages here.", or you can check out the simple graph - below.



The sequester cuts in one graph

Sarah Kliff on September 14, 2012

<snip>


The big ticket takeaway, however, is that there is huge variation in how the sequester effects different parts of government. Some programs will see their budgets cut by 10 percent, others by just 2 percent. All of these cuts, by the way, do not apply to any program that was specifically exempted from the sequester. Here’s the breakdown.

​

A quick reminder of what each of these categories encompasses:​

• Non-exempt defense discretionary funding sees a 9.4 percent spending reduction. This covers things, such as keeping military bases open, paying salaries and research and development.
• Non-exempt mandatory defense spending sees the biggest cut of 10 percent.
• Non-exempt, non-defense discretionary funding gets cut by 8.2 percent. This includes anything that Congress has to authorize each year, so programs like Head Start and AIDS assistance.
• Non-exempt, non-defense mandatory programs see a 7.6 percent reduction. There’s not, however, much left to cut in this category because the large mandatory programs were largely shielded from the cuts. More on that right below.
• Medicare is, well, Medicare – the health insurance program for America’s seniors. The sequester specifically limited Medicare cuts to 2 percent of the program’s budget.

Keep in mind, certain programs are exempt from the sequester completely. Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Social Security, for example, do not get touched at all. And within the programs listed above, there are specific, smaller programs that get carved out as untouchable too.
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[akelch]

The Republicans will cave and raise the rates of the rich, their will be some token cuts...but they will not amount to anything...plus spending will increase once Obamacare kicks in.

The only thing that will change is the debt will continue to get bigger and our economy will slow down.

 

[Newby]

Yes we want the top tier tax cuts to expire.


Its the republicans who have fought for the wealthy like they owed them their lives

No, no... . the 'Bush tax cuts for the rich' were only for the rich, that's what the left claimed for years, so there should be no action needed, all tax cuts expire. All of them.

Approximately 90% went to the top 10%.

Then there's no further action needed, let them expire. What are you people bitching about?

 

[Mr. Shaman]

Who wants or doesn't want it and why?

It's time to end the bleeding/red-ink that Republicans KNEW would result!!!!​

#1 Bush Fuck-Up​

"The answer is that President Bush and a complicit Congress didn’t want to show the magnitude of the deficits that would result from their tax cuts. To hide those deficits as they were pushing them through they used a variety of accounting tricks. One of those tricks was attaching expiration dates so that, on paper, there wouldn’t be any long-term costs. This made the long-term deficit picture look fairly rosy on paper even as it doomed Bush’s successor and the current Congress to cleaning up the mess.

In fairness, Bush and his supply-side crowd believe with a zealot’s fervor that tax cuts spur such economic growth that future deficits never happen. Over history there are trillion$ of dollar$ of debt that prove them wrong."

The "cliff" was INEVITABLE, and BU$HCO KNEW IT!!!

We NEED to bite-the-bullet & JUMP!!!!!​

 

[Mr. Shaman]

The Rs should give Obama what he wants, raise taxes on the top 2%. That will surely put a big old dent in the debt. I mean Obama has certainly implied as much and he knows best, his economic smarts are far better than most plus he's our president!

.....AND, he's got a REFERENCE-POINT!!!!​

1993 Deficit Reduction​

"Not only was the entire national deficit eliminated after raising taxes on the wealthy in 1993, but the economy grew so fast for the remainder of the decade that many conservative economists thought that the Fed should raise the prime interest rate in order to slow it down."

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[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trPn8sNOvYA]He's Got it Right - Obama for America TV Ad - YouTube[/ame]​