We are going to need a bigger bucket.
Here is yet another leak to add to the Cantor blow-up and dressing down. Or the leak about Obama not really wanting a clean debt ceiling bill. Or the President's GE&H capitulation.
Now we have a new leak about the cuts that President Obama allegedly wants to make.
Two Democratic and two Republican officials with direct knowledge of the continuing negotiations offered these details on the condition they not be identified speaking about private meetings:
In Obama's $2 trillion plan, tax increases would come from a 35% limit on itemized deductions and the elimination of special-interest tax breaks for oil and gas companies, corporate jet owners and producers of ethanol. If tax rates on upper-income people returned to 36% and 39.6% in 2013, as Obama wants, the limit on deductions would save about $120 billion.
Obama also is seeking to extend a payroll tax cut enacted last December for another year and possibly extend it to small businesses. For that reason, Republicans could claim that the package is revenue-neutral rather than representing a tax increase — but at the meeting, Republicans still refused to go along.
The remainder of the package would be spending cuts and savings on interest, but not the major reductions in Medicare or Social Security that Obama had been willing to accept as part of a $4 trillion deal.
http://www.usatoday.com/...