Good Morning America! Here's some Monday opinion.
NY Times:
Congressional Republicans and administration officials said they were close to a deal to keep the Bush-era tax cuts temporarily.
WaPo:
The Senate Republican leadership telegraphed on the Sunday- morning talk shows that a compromise to extend unemployment compensation and the George W. Bush-era tax cuts is in the offing.
Nate Silver reviews "the votes aren't there" for anything else.
Paul Krugman says play hardball.
Democrats have tried to push a compromise: let tax cuts for the wealthy expire, but extend tax cuts for the middle class. Republicans, however, are having none of it. They have been filibustering Democratic attempts to separate tax cuts that mainly benefit a tiny group of wealthy Americans from those that mainly help the middle class. It’s all or nothing, they say: all the Bush tax cuts must be extended. What should Democrats do?
The answer is that they should just say no. If G.O.P. intransigence means that taxes rise at the end of this month, so be it.
EJ Dionne:
From Ohio, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy describes "the worry, the anguish and sometimes despair" among her constituents and urges President Obama to spend more time with people who don't make "six-figure incomes."
From Pennsylvania, Rep. Joe Sestak says Americans are angry at a government that failed to guard them against economic catastrophe.
And from Virginia, Rep. Tom Perriello suggests that voters are less interested in "bipartisanship" than "postpartisanship." He explains: "What they're looking for is someone who solves the problem, not for a solution that happens to be halfway between the two parties."
The Hill:
Retiring Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) said that Democrats wisely passed the 2008 financial rescue bill, but it cost them politically.
Addressing the economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Baird told The Hill, "Had we wanted to, we could have let the president, President Bush... stew in his own juices."
Baird insisted Democrats did the right thing passing TARP, which was signed by President Bush in the fall of 2008. Most Democrats in Congress backed it while it faced more resistance from the GOP.
"We could have said, 'The economy is going to collapse. The world is going to go into a depression. You’re going to get the blame and your party is going to get the blame because you’re in power and we are going to ride this into the majority for the next 40 years.' That is what the Democrats could have done."
Democrats "got punished" for supporting this legislation, Baird said.
"There are a lot of American families and working families who would get clobbered if didn't pass TARP," he said.
Alistair Darling:
When I look at events in Europe today, with Ireland getting bailed out and talk of crises brewing elsewhere on the continent, I am reminded of the weeks leading up to the banking crisis in 2008. As the credit crunch began and banks found it increasingly difficult to get access to funding, policy makers faced a choice: deal with the problem in a piecemeal way, or address the root causes immediately.
For too long many policy makers opted to fudge their approach; they dealt with the problem bank by bank and refused to recognize the system’s fundamental flaws.
As a result, we saw Lehman Brothers go bankrupt, Bear Stearns bought up in a fire sale and a major British bank come within hours of collapse...
Alistair Darling, a member of the British Parliament, was the chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007 to 2010.