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A Grand Bargain is an Unattainable Distraction
Posted at 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 8, 2012
President Obama and the Republican-controlled House have already proven that a grand bargain on spending and tax reform is elusive, if not unattainable. James Hamilton thinks it would be more worthwhile to “break the problem into smaller pieces.”
“Can we at least identify a few very limited measures that we could all agree on? Let’s start with the fiscal cliff. (Please!) How about submitting legislation tomorrow for a one-year extension of the current patch for the Alternative Minimum Tax, and vote the AMT patch up or down as a stand-alone proposition? Next maybe try a one-year extension of the existing payroll tax levels, again yes-no all by itself. If we could just agree on those two items, it would take $300 B out of the $720 B shock referred to as January’s fiscal cliff.”
“The same principle could be applied to one-year extensions of the Bush tax cuts– break them down into their individual elements and vote on them one-by-one… Now, Republicans might naturally see this strategy as divide and conquer, because the outcome would obviously be that taxes on the richest Americans would go up as the outcome of this process. There also is the more difficult issue of how to reach an agreement with Republicans on the debt ceiling. My answer to this is, how about trying the same strategy on the spending side? For example, before going into extending any of the Bush tax cuts, decide on the defense budget, again as a stand-alone measure.”
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Wynstone
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Azphil
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