The weather’s getting nice. Maybe this time we could do it outdoors.

“Let’s start now!” the House speaker said during a “fiscal summit” in Washington on Tuesday. This is an annual event in which honchos from all political persuasions get together and agree that the national debt is too big.

We are getting into election season, people. We are going to be hearing a lot about the national debt. (Which is very big. Really, at that fiscal summit meeting they were totally in agreement on the bigness.)

The partisan division — and the key to this entire election — is whether you believe that taxes are a critical tool for putting the budget in balance. If not, then we have nothing to talk about. Meet you in November. Once we see who wins, we’ll deal with the debt.

Fortunately, Congress does not actually have to raise the debt limit again until after the elections. But Boehner insisted in a CNN interview that “there’s no reason to wait” because it’s just a matter of “both parties getting together.”

Maybe we could have a special bipartisan committee come up with a plan. I really liked the supercommittee. And remember all the fun we had with Bowles-Simpson?

The names could definitely be better, though. Let’s call the next one Skippy.

“Everyone knows what the menu is. It’s just about having the guts to choose … what you’re going to have for dinner,” said Boehner, whose only personal preference is for meals entirely devoid of the dreaded Revenue vegetable.

In other debt-developments, Boehner met with President Obama on Wednesday to discuss what will happen when the debt does hit its next limit. This may happen around Christmastime, and I, for one, am really looking forward to all the lump-of-coal-in-the-stocking jokes. During the get-together, the president reportedly suggested that for once Congress just raise the ceiling like a normal legislature. The speaker’s confidantes reported that he was brave and strong and mildly profane about going for drama and cheap thrills.

In still other debt-related news, the Senate failed to agree on a budget plan despite multiple proposals the Republicans helpfully came up with to slash spending, curb entitlements and lower taxes. During a six-hour debate, the minority denounced the debt (which is very, very big), while the majority party members sat around sullenly. The high point may have come when Senator Mike Lee of Utah announced that “this is the greatest civilization the world has ever known.” Nobody disagreed with him, although that was probably not the best time to make the argument.

The Democrats have not passed their own long-term budget plan for several years. This is either a terrible sign of the poisonous partisan state of things in Washington or an indication that when it comes to things that you really, really need in this world, a Congressional budget ranks somewhere between a hurricane and another debt-limit debate.

To be fair, Congress did pass the Budget Control Act, which, absent any other debt-reduction agreement, will go into effect early next year and automatically slash the defense budget and domestic spending while eliminating the Bush-era tax cuts and that temporary payroll tax cut. This plan is affectionately known as “falling off the cliff.”

There is quite a bit of disagreement about how bad a thing it would be to fall off the cliff. In a Bloomberg News interview, Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, seemed to feel as if it might be sort of like bungee jumping. (“It is quite possible that we go over the cliff but only for a very short period …”) Others, like Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, have a more negative attitude. (“It makes no sense to get even close to that cliff.”)

Meanwhile, and even more national-debt-related news, Mitt Romney made a major speech in which he laced into President Obama for adding “almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.” This is a much-repeated factoid whose shock value is matched only by its extreme inaccuracy. As The Associated Press noted afterward, the public debt has gone up about 50 percent since the president took office while “under Ronald Reagan it tripled.”

It was a pretty dramatic speech, which compared the debt to a raging prairie fire. Romney said he would extinguish the blaze with his spending and tax-cutting plan, which the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated would, at the very best, do nothing whatsoever.

Only 25 more weeks to go.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/opinion/collins-fun-plans-for-summer-vacation.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Speaker John A. Boehner appears to be girding for another fight over raising the nation’s debt ceiling – possibly just before the November elections.

In a speech Tuesday to a fiscal summit meeting in Washington sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Mr. Boehner planned to double down on what has become known as the Boehner Rule: Any increase in the statutory borrowing limit must be accompanied by spending cuts of equal value.

“This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance,” Mr. Boehner will say, according to prepared remarks. “If that means we have to do a series of stop-gap measures, so be it.”

That position led to the country nearly defaulting on its debts last summer for the first time, as Republicans in the House dug in against raising the debt ceiling, which up to then had been considered routine. That fight led to a historic downgrade of United States treasury securities.

But the firm Republican stand also led to legislation in July to cap discretionary spending, as well as across-the-board cuts next year in defense and nondefense spending unless a bipartisan deficit reduction deal was reached.

House Republicans are trying to undo those defense cuts with legislation that would instead cut domestic programs like food stamps, Medicaid and President Obama’s Wall Street regulatory apparatus. But even before those cuts are enacted, Mr. Boehner is looking toward the next fight. Last July’s agreement to increase the debt ceiling was supposed to push the next fight past Election Day, but the Treasury Department has warned that the debt ceiling could be reached in October.

“We shouldn’t dread the debt limit,” Mr. Boehner planned to say Tuesday. “We should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction.”

Article source: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/boehner-to-double-down-on-debt-rule/?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

His combative comments came on the same day the Republicans’ presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, hit President Obama hard on his fiscal stewardship in a speech in Des Moines, suggesting that Mr. Romney and Congressional Republicans see an opening to attack the president on the mounting federal debt and the size of the government.

Mr. Boehner’s stance threatened to throw Congress back into the debt-limit stalemate that consumed Washington in 2011, but this time at the height of a campaign that Republicans are trying to make a referendum on Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy.

“A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” Mr. Romney said, “and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

The Boehner comments, made at a fiscal summit meeting in Washington, were the first public shot in what promises to be the most consequential budget fight in a generation. On Jan. 1, nearly $8 trillion in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts are scheduled to take effect.

Mr. Boehner said he would not allow Congress to duck tough decisions with another round of short-term measures. He also said the House would pass an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts before the November elections, and he urged lawmakers in both parties to reach a long-term deal on spending and tax changes — but no additional taxes — to head off a fiscal calamity.

“To get on the path to prosperity, we have to avoid the fiscal cliff, but we need to start today,” he said.

Democrats immediately accused Mr. Boehner of once again holding the nation’s full faith and credit hostage to his conservative political agenda, even as Republicans cut corners on the deal struck last summer to end the last debt-ceiling crisis.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, speaking at the same meeting sponsored by the financier Peter G. Peterson, said the government could bump into its borrowing limit before the end of the year, but, he said, the Treasury has enough “tools” to keep the government afloat into early next year. That should push a debt-ceiling showdown well past the November election.

Mr. Geithner appealed to lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling “this time without the drama and the pain and damage that it caused the country last July.” And he said an orderly solution could be reached.

“Our objective should be to replace that very large set of expiring tax provisions and broad-based, automatic, pretty crude spending cuts with a more responsible, balanced glide path to fiscal sustainability,” he said.

Next year’s fiscal crisis has been brewing since early last decade, when successive Republican Congresses used budget rules to pass large but temporary tax cuts that could not be filibustered. The tax cuts expire en masse at the end of this year after Mr. Obama and Republican leaders agreed on a two-year extension. But the president has vowed not to extend the tax cuts for upper-income families again. Regardless of the election results, he will still be in the White House on Jan. 1.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: “The American people are tired of kicking things down the road. We’ve got to get this done and done the right way.”

Top aides to Mr. Romney declined to say whether the campaign planned his speech to coincide with Mr. Boehner’s. But as Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign merges its operations more fully with the Republican establishment in Washington, the messages are becoming more similar. Republicans also have indicated they were eager to shift the discussion from social topics like same-sex marriage back to economic issues, which they believe play more to their advantage.

“The Obama campaign wants everybody to be distracted by shiny objects,” said Rich Beeson, Mr. Romney’s political director. “He promised he would cut the debt, and he has not done that.”

The exchange on fiscal policy came on the eve of a Senate budget showdown engineered by Republicans using an obscure procedural provision that says any senator can bring forward a budget if the Budget Committee fails to produce one by April 1.

The main objective of the Republicans is to embarrass the president by forcing the Senate to vote on his budget, which may not get a single vote. That is not because no one supports his plan, but because a presidential budget — which finances the government line by line, agency by agency — is much more detailed than a Congressional budget, which creates a broad outline for spending and taxes to be filled in later by the committees of jurisdiction. Accepting a presidential budget in its totality would be tantamount to ceding Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.

But Republicans have not been able to unify around an alternative. Instead, they will bring forward four different budgets for the 2013 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1 — with a budget passed by House Republicans viewed as the most liberal of the lot. One by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky would eliminate the Departments of Education, Commerce and Energy; cut the National Park Service by 30 percent and NASA by a quarter; and end Medicare in 2014. Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposes a budget that would raise the retirement age to 68, cut the size of government in half over 25 years, and end the payroll tax as well as all taxes on savings and investment and replace them with a 25 percent flat tax.

“These are not serious in nature,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “These are all just for show.” Senate Democrats have not moved forward on a budget in large part because Democratic leaders did not want to highlight internal divisions over spending and taxes or subject senators facing tough re-elections to the difficult votes Republicans would force on a budget.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/us/politics/gop-pledges-new-standoff-on-debt-limit.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss