Boehner’s Plan B is Designed to Draw a Veto or Threat of One
This is a masterful artifice by Boehner - by setting the tax ceiling so high and proposing little else to reduce the deficit he can make it look like he’s acceding to the the President’s plan when he’s not. Any cap above 250k offers too little revenue and Boehner knows it. This is especially true when that’s offered up with zero cuts. This is a game where the GOP won’t do anything that doesn’t cut medicare and social security, but they want it to look like it’s the president’s idea.
It’s really a gross dereliction of duties, since it is specifically the House of Representative’s duty to create and pass the budgets year to year.
‘There’s been a lot of posturing up on Capitol Hill instead of going ahead and getting stuff done, and we’ve been wasting a lot of time,” Obama said. “If you just pull back from the immediate political battles, if you kind of peel off the partisan war paint, then we should be able to get something done.”
But it was beginning to look a lot like postponement for Obama’s annual Christmas break in Hawaii, so he could continue working to prevent a looming political and financial crisis.
The House was poised to vote today on a measure that Boehner devised on his own — what the speaker is calling “Plan B” — to give tax breaks to everyone except millionaires. Obama Wednesday threatened to veto the bill and Democrats have dismissed that plan as a “political ploy” intended to give Boehner and Republicans political cover if the fiscal cliff talks end in failure.
Boehner showed no signs of backing down and appeared determined to maximize political leverage and use the measure to strengthen his hand in negotiations. In a very brief appearance at the Capitol, Boehner said that the House would take up his bill on Thursday. He declared that his “Plan B” measure will give Obama two options: `He can call on Senate Democrats to pass that bill, or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history.”
Polls show that most Americans would blame Republicans if the fiscal-cliff is reached without a solution, a situation that would risk a recession with $500 in combined tax hikes and government spending reductions. How much Boehner’s “Plan B” bill with its $1 million threshold for tax increases would mitigate fallout for the GOP is difficult to predict.
Democrats attempted to paint it as an inadequate solution to the problems at hand, in terms of increasing revenues and reducing spending. The White House said Boehner’s Plan B would only cut $300 billion from the deficit, through increased revenues from millionaires.
“The deficit reduction is minimal, and perversely, given its authors, solely through tax increases with no spending cuts,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said in a written statement. “This approach does not meet the test of balance, and the President would veto the legislation in the unlikely event of its passage.”
