President To Push Congress To Revisit Ambitious Effort To Cut The Deficit
And, House and Senate negotiators will hold a rare public meeting Tuesday about the payroll tax cut and the Medicare reimbursement rate for physicians.
The Associated Press/The Washington Post: Obama To Press Congress to Revisit Last Year's Failed Attempt At $1.2T Deficit Cut
The proposal runs counter to the common wisdom in Washington that any major deficit reduction effort is unlikely in a presidential election year. … But also looming are sweeping across-the-board spending cuts required next year because of the supercommittee deadlock. … The threat of the across-the-board cuts was supposed to prod the panel, but it never got on track and collapsed just before Thanksgiving over intractable differences on tax increases and cuts to popular programs like Medicare (Taylor, 1/20).
Politico: Hill Negotiators To Meet On Tax-Break Extension, Benefits
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus announced that the panel will hold a Tuesday afternoon public meeting over extending the tax break and unemployment benefits and fixing the reimbursement rate for physicians who service Medicare. The president is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress for his State of the Union address that night, where he is almost certainly expected to call for an extension of the payroll tax break (Raju, 1/19).