The President’s Offer: We Get Everything We Want, and You’ll Like it

November 30th, 2012

While the president campaigns, the White House made their “offer” to Republicans to avert the fiscal cliff:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal on Thursday to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, $50 billion in immediate stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, met strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced the goal of finding $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

Also part of the offer: cuts in farmer subsidies.

The White House’s offer is $1.6 trillion of tax increases, $50 billion more in spending, and a promise to negotiate entitlement spending cuts next year. Oh, and they want to give the executive branch the power to raise the debt ceiling without any Congressional involvement, too; Congress can only override it with a two-thirds majority. No wonder McConnell laughed off Geithner’s “offer.”

In other words, the president’s offer to Republicans is for Democrats to get everything they want and Republicans to get absolutely nothing, the nation’s fiscal mess be damned. Because apparently in Obama’s mind, getting everything he wants is “balanced.”

This isn’t an offer. If he wanted to start negotiating from a strong position and come to some middle ground on entitlement reform—if he wanted to fulfill his role as president and be a leader—he would have offered some (too small) amount of actual entitlement spending cuts to start from. That isn’t what he did.

The Republicans started negotiations by acknowledging that tax revenue must go up, and that they would support doing so by limiting deductions. That’s a more-than-fair place to start in good-faith negotiations, because from there they could agree to some mix of limiting deductions and raising rates in exchange for entitlement spending cuts.

Obama took that olive branch, snapped it in two and tossed it in their face.