WASHINGTON – At a stalemate in their talks to avoid a self-imposed fiscal crisis at the end of this month, the lead negotiators for the White House and Congressional Republicans used the Sunday television news shows to defend their respective positions and blame the other side for the impasse.
“Right now I would say we’re nowhere, period. We’re nowhere,” House Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We’ve put a serious offer on the table by putting revenues out there to try to get this question resolved. But the White House has responded with virtually nothing.”
For the administration, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner countered on Fox and four other programs by outlining President Obama’s proposals for long-term deficit reduction and insisting that Republicans were blocking compromise by their opposition to letting the Bush-era tax rates on high incomes expire as scheduled by law on Dec. 31. Mr. Obama and Democratic lawmakers want to extend the tax cuts on household income below $ 250,000 a year but not for income above that level, as the president vowed in his campaign.
“There’s just no reason why 98 percent of Americans have to see their taxes go up because some members of Congress on the Republican side want to block tax rate increases for 2 percent of the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. Geithner said. “Remember, those tax rates, those tax cuts, cost a trillion dollars over 10 years.”
“Those rates are going to have to go up,” he added. “That’s an essential part of a deal.”
The televised jousting reflected the political posturing that is typical in the early stages of Washington budget negotiations, with leaders of each party seeking to persuade the public of the rightness of its position and to bring pressure on the other side to compromise. Mr. Geithner gave interviews to all five major Sunday shows, and Mr. Boehner in turn requested time on Fox late last week, prompting the network to dump the two senators it had booked to appear.
But the White House and Congress do not have much time for the usual negotiating games as the year-end deadline looms and the holidays approach. Scheduled in January, absent a deal offering an alternative, are across-the-board cuts in domestic and military programs and immediate tax increases for all Americans – the result of the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts. Together the automatic spending cuts and tax increases would cut the deficit for fiscal year 2013 by more than $ 500 billion, an amount so sudden and large that economists say it would cause a recession. They have called the event the “fiscal cliff.”
“I don’t want any part of going over the cliff,” Mr. Boehner said on Fox.
Mr. Geithner, also on Fox, said that whether the nation does so is “a decision that lies in the hands of Republicans who are now opposing an increase in the tax rates.”
The goal of Mr. Obama and Congress is a package of alternative spending cuts and revenue increases. Yet even as Republicans, led by Mr. Boehner, have offered to accept higher revenue since the president’s re-election, they have refused to support a partial extension of the Bush tax cuts that would let the top income tax rates rise to 39.6 percent, the level from the Clinton administration, from the current 35 percent.
The separate television appearances of the two men came after their private meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday, when Mr. Geithner met with Mr. Boehner and the second-ranking House Republican leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, and outlined the president’s positions for about $ 4 trillion in deficit reduction over the first 10 years.
The specifics were the same as those proposed by Mr. Obama in his budget earlier this year, without any additional concessions. They included $ 1.6 trillion in new revenue from upper-income taxpayers, $ 600 billion in reduced spending for Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies and other programs, $ 1 trillion in other spending cuts that he and Congress committed to last year for the coming decade and $ 800 billion from projected war spending reflecting the winding down of American combat operations overseas.
As he had late last week, Mr. Boehner, in his Fox appearance, dismissed the administration’s offer as “a non-serious proposal” for including too little in spending cuts and too much in additional stimulus measures, and for letting the top income-tax rates rise, which Mr. Boehner said would hurt some small businesses. On television, he recounted his reaction to Mr. Geithner.
“I was flabbergasted. I looked at him and said, ‘You can’t be serious,’ ” Mr. Boehner said. “I’ve just never seen anything like it. You know we’ve got seven weeks between Election Day and the end of the year and three of those weeks have been wasted with this nonsense.”
The speaker said Republicans had proposed “a dozen different ways” to raise additional tax revenue without raising rates. But he did not say what those were, and so far the Boehner office has not provided details. Administration officials said Republicans have made no specific proposals.
Generally Republicans, much like Mitt Romney in his presidential campaign, have proposed without specifics that additional revenue could be raised over 10 years by limiting tax deductions for the wealthy, rather than raising their rates. But the White House and nonpartisan policy organizations have done analyses showing that revenue cannot be raised on that scale without ending popular deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions and state and local taxes, even for some middle-income taxpayers.
Mr. Geithner, on the ABC program “This Week,” said the ball is “absolutely” in Republicans’ court to put down specific alternatives.
“They understand that,” he said of Republican leaders. “And when they come back to us and say, ‘We would like you to consider this and we’d like you to consider that,’ we’ll take a look at that.”
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