FXstreet.com (Barcelona) - President Obama and Vice President
Joe Biden will meet congressional leaders from both parties at the
White House today Friday at 3 p.m. EST (20:00 GMT) to try to revive
negotiations to avoid tax hikes and spending cuts - all together
valued at $600 billion - that will begin to take at the beginning
of the New Year.
As can be expected with cuts of this magnitude, members were
staunchly divided on the odds of success, with a few expressing
hope, some talking as if they had abandoned it and a small but
growing number suggesting Congress might try to stretch the
deadline into the first two days of January. In order to be ready
to legislate if an agreement takes shape, the Republican-dominated
House of Representatives convened a session for Sunday. House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor advised members to be prepared to meet
through January 2, the final day before the swearing-in of the new
Congress elected on November 6.
It "doesn't feel like anything that's very constructive is going to
happen" as a result of the meeting with Obama, said Tennessee
Republican Sen. Bob Corker. "It feels more like optics than
anything that's real. The two political parties remained far apart,
particularly over plans to increase taxes on the wealthiest
Americans to help close the U.S. budget deficit. However, one
veteran Republican, Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, held out the
prospect that if Obama came through with significant spending cuts,
Republicans in the House might compromise on taxes.
The coming days are likely to see either intense bargaining over
numbers, or political theater as each side attempts to avoid blame
if a deal looks unlikely. "Hopefully, there is still time for an
agreement of some kind that saves the taxpayers from a wholly,
wholly preventable economic crisis," Mitch McConnell, the top
Republican in the Democratic-controlled Senate, said on the Senate
floor. Though the rhetoric was still harsh on Thursday after months
of debate and little progress - much of it along ideological lines
-over whether to raise taxes and by how much, as well as how to cut
back on government spending. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the
top Democrat in Congress, accused Republican House Speaker John
Boehner of running a "dictatorship" by refusing to allow bills he
did not like onto the floor of the chamber.
Reid urged Republicans in the House to prevent the worst of the
fiscal shock by getting behind a Senate bill to extend existing tax
cuts for all except those households earning more than $250,000 a
year. Both Reid and Boehner, as well as McConnell and House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, are to meet Obama on Friday.