Congress lost a mad, New Year’s Eve dash to beat the fiscal cliff deadline, cinching a deal with President Barack Obama to raise taxes on the wealthy and temporarily freeze deep spending cuts but failing to get it through both chambers before midnight.
So over the cliff the country went — though perhaps for only a day or two and, assuming no snags, without incurring the double whammy of another recession and higher unemployment.
The $620 billion agreement was a major breakthrough in a partisan standoff that has dragged on for months, spooking Wall Street and threatening to hobble the economic recovery. It turned back the GOP’s two-decade-long refusal to raise tax rates, delivering a major win for the president.
But as big a deal as it was, it did little to address the nation’s long-term deficit problem — there’s nothing in it to pare back entitlement spending — or to defuse a potential crisis over raising the debt ceiling that could come as early as February.
keep in mind of all the waste in medicare, defense and witch hunts on would think the humane thing to do is start there, not at the dinner tables of the poor and middle class, but we are not being obstructed by those with no sense of empathy for their fellow Americans the only one's they seem to care about are dead and on our money.
now does congress live up to it's name of "do nothing", dose their base finally wake up and see that it was all a horrible hoax on them too, do we eliminate that wall of obstruction 2014?
we'll find out Nov. 3rd 2014.
