Ezra Klein has done the country a great service. In what he calls an exclusive, we are now provided a brief glimpse into the details of what is being discussed in the room.
A source passed along the slides from the presentation that Cantor is using to sell the deal to his caucus. The slides provide more detail than we’ve yet seen on the specific cuts that Cantor, at least, believes were agreed to in the Biden talks. It calls those cuts “Obama’s version: the Biden framework,” which Cantor says was revenue neutral, and then compares them with “Reid’s deal,” a trillion-dollar package that avoids entitlement cuts altogether, and “Obama’s version: The Big Deal,” which is the $4 trillion deal that fell apart last weekend.
The final slide lists the GOP’s “Agreement Principles”: No tax increases, which rules out “the big deal”; a dollar-for-dollar match between the increase in the debt ceiling and the spending cuts, which rules out “Reid’s deal,” unless the White House agrees to a short-term increase in the debt ceiling; and spending controls and caps, which aren’t included in any of the deals. Here are the slides:
Eric Cantor July Slides
For those of you unable to use scribd...here are three slides Cantor says represent the main deals.
(Remember, Democrats discount the Biden deal as not agreed to, but actually none of them are agreed to)
And here is the GOP's assumed bottom line, or items that any agreement must include as of now.
Regardless of the potential for some nuance and spin, I can't express how happy I am that someone found it appropriate to leak this information. We are far past the point where in the interest of transparency the public should be informed of the basic principles of the deals on the table. Of course, these are Cantor's slides and there could be spin inherently embedded within. As Klein reports...
Democrats reject the idea that the “Biden framework” actually exists. The talks, they say, have operated under the rule that “nothing is agreed to unless everything is agreed to,” and since the talks broke up before there was agreement on revenues or fiscal controls, the spending cuts were not, in fact, agreed to. There is no Biden framework.
So we should take the info with a grain of salt. That being said, I think based on prior reports and the hope that Ezra at a minimum confirmed with a Democrat before publishing, I don't think there is a substantial reason to not review these details.
At a minimum, we should now be able to discuss the pros and cons of the individual deals without material arguments over sources and lack of details.
Feel free to discuss below.