Obama, Boehner locked in stalemate

WASHINGTON — One month before the deadline, negotiations between President Barack Obama and Republicans to save the economy from a plunge over the fiscal cliff are still in the throatclearing stage. Serious bargaining is on hold while the two sides vie for political leverage.

Deal or no deal, nothing is likely to become clear until far closer to the year-end deadline, when the lure of getting away for the holidays will sharpen the focus of negotiators.

“There’s a stalemate. Let’s not kid ourselves,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Friday. “Right now, we’re almost nowhere.”

At an appearance in Pennsylvania, Obama said Republicans’ failure to pass an extension of middle-class tax cuts would amount to a Christmas “lump of coal” for millions. “That’s a Scrooge Christmas,” said the re-elected president, who claims a voters’ mandate to extend existing tax cuts for all but upper incomes.

Boehner, too, claimed a mandate after voters renewed the House Republican majority on Nov. 6. But the speaker also has said the GOP would put revenues on the bargaining table and several Republicans have let it be known that they could support the president’s tax plan under the right circumstances.

“Rate increase, if the package includes significant entitlement reform that gets you to $4 trillion to $6 trillion (in deficit savings) over 10 years, I would vote for that,” a retiring Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, said Friday.

Rep. Charles Bass made similar comments. “If it gets us past the fiscal cliff and the president is willing to consider meaningful savings in entitlements, it’s a legitimate solution,” said the New Hampshire lawmaker, who was defeated for reelection this fall.

In the talks to date, Democrats have declined to identify a single spending cut they are willing to support, while Republicans avoid specifics on revenue increases they would swallow.

Once each side moves beyond opening gambits, Republicans will have to decide whether they are willing to raise income tax rates on upper incomes, as Obama wants, or hold fast to closing loopholes as a means of producing increased tax revenue.

For their part, Democrats will decide how much savings to pull from benefit programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and possibly Social Security without cutting guaranteed benefits, a line they vowed not to cross in earlier budget negotiations.

Obama’s opening proposal, delivered to Boehner and other Republicans by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Thursday, calls for $1.6 trillion in higher taxes over a decade, hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending, a possible extension of the temporary Social Security payroll tax cut and enhancing the president’s power to raise the national debt limit.