The nation’s political establishment has ridiculed the fiscal cliff deal for its failure to make the tough decisions. But what tough decisions are possible when one party to a negotiation doesn’t think they need to be made? Speaker Boehner has repeatedly cited the President Obama’s refusal to countenance spending cuts as the reason talks on a “grand bargain” kept breaking down. The President offers token programmatic changes that would do nothing to alter the long run debt trajectory in exchange for tax increases on the most volatile, least reliable segment of the income base. The President wants both to spend too much and then collect far too little in taxes to pay for it.
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