When Barack Obama walked out of last week's meeting with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and started talking about developing a "productive" working relationship with Republican Congressional leaders who have sworn the political equivalent of a blood oath to destroy his presidency, it was clear that the president planned to abandon his many years of advocacy for ending Bush-era tax breaks for millionaires.
Now, with the lame-duck session of a Congress still entirely controlled by Democrats races toward a earlier-than-expected conclusion, the deal is being cut.
Obama's representatives -- Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House budget director Jack Lew -- have reportedly entered the final stages of a negotiation with the Republican team of Arizona Senator Jon Kyl and Michigan Congressman Dave Camp to extend all Bush tax cuts for for at least two years.
In return, federal unemployment benefits will be extended for up to one year.
The only remaining sticking point has to do with the question of whether to offer a small tax credit for working Americans -- the "Make Work Pay" provision -- and a tax credit for students, both of which were developed as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package. Remarkably, Republican negotiators who are going to the mat to defend $140 billion in tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans are objecting to maintaining $70 million in tax credits for the other 98 percent.
This negotiation is not headed toward a compromise. It is headed toward a complete capitulation.
The argument will be made that Obama and the Democrats had to fold in order to secure an extension of unemployment benefits.
But the political, fiscal and logical calculus does not add up.
Let's begin with the politics:
As draconian as the new Republican leadership may be, the fact is that a substantial portions of the current Republican caucuses in the House and Senate -- and even larger portions of the incoming Republican caucuses in both chambers -- represent states where unemployment is rising. For decades, Democrats have known how to pressure Republicans from New England states such as Maine, Masschusetts and New Hampshire, as well as GOP representatives and senators from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and other Great Lakes states, to back extensions of unemployment benefits. Nothing has changed, except that the unemployment rate is now higher than at any point in decades -- and that the hurt has extended to states such as Nevada, where more Republican votes should be available for the picking.
In other words, there is no political argument for compromise in order to extend unemployment benefits. Democrats could win this fight, in the current Congress and in the next one. To think otherwise is to presume that Republicans are not politicians who, when everything else is said and done, will cast the necessary votes to secure their re-election.
Now to the fiscal calculus:
Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, the new co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is right when he says that it is "dumb" to imagine that the federal government can maintain tax breaks for millionaires and achieve deficit reduction. Giving away $700 billion in tax revenues from the wealthiest Americans over the next decade while at the same time talking about deficit reduction is the fiscal equivalent of imagining that it is possible to keep "eating chocolate layer cake everyday while losing 40 pounds."
That won't happen.
rest at http://www.alternet.org/economy/149109/obama%27s_not_just_compromising,_he%27s_capitulating_to_republicans_on_tax_breaks/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet_economy
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