our Senators http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
and our Representative http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
and tell them the "chained CPI" plan must be rejected and in no way be a part of the fiscal cliff budget negotiations. Don't know what to say? Use talking points from the vets letter to Congress. Or you can check out the letter I emailed at the bottom of this post. REMEMBER, Congress is counting on NOT hearing from YOU!
HERE is an update from the Washington Post......
By Paul Kane and Lori Montgomery
President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner moved close to agreement Monday on a plan to avert the year-end “fiscal cliff,” but they had yet to clear several critical hurdles, including winning the support of wary House Republicans.Obama and Boehner (R-Ohio) huddled at the White House for 45 minutes Monday morning for their third conversation in the past five days. Later, Boehner met for an hour at the Capitol with his leadership team in advance of a briefing Tuesday morning for the entire House GOP that could be a crucial test of Boehner’s ability to sell the deal.
Administration officials and aides to Boehner declined to comment publicly on the talks, but people in both parties said they continued to make progress. Obama laid out a counteroffer that reduces the amount of new taxes he is demanding to $1.2 trillion over the next decade and concedes a key Republican demand — applying a less-generous measure of inflation to several government programs, including Social Security.
That change would save about $225 billion over the next decade, about two-thirds of it through smaller cost-of-living increases for Social Security beneficiaries. Obama tentatively embraced the change in budget negotiations with Boehner in the summer of 2011. Since then, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and many other Democrats have rejected the proposal, insisting that the solvency of Social Security be addressed separately from the year-end negotiations.
Still, senior Democratic aides said they could probably muster the votes for the change if it was not applied to disability payments, known as SSI, and if very old seniors were protected through a bump-up in benefits at age 85.
Obama has also dropped his demand for the extension of a payroll tax holiday that has benefited virtually every worker for the past two years. But he is also seeking higher taxes on a larger swath of wealthy taxpayers than Boehner has accepted, $50 billion in new spending on infrastructure, an extension of emergency unemployment benefits, and a hike in the federal debt limit sufficient to delay any fight over the issue for two years.
In his latest proposal, Boehner offered a one-year debt-limit increase. And Republicans have opposed more infrastructure spending and additional unemployment benefits.
Negotiations ramp up
Talks over the fiscal cliff have accelerated since Boehner made an offer Friday to increase tax rates on income over $1 million and to delay a fight over the government’s borrowing limit for another year in exchange for significant cuts to health and retirement programs. Boehner’s proposal called for $2 trillion in savings over the next decade, half from higher taxes and half from cuts to the fast-growing health and retirement programs that are the federal government’s largest expense.
People in both parties said the next few days could prove critical: Wither Obama and Boehner would reach a consensus and sell it to their respective parties, or talks would collapse, leaving congressional leaders scrambling for a fall-back plan to mitigate the economic damage from more than $500 billion in automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to begin immediately after Dec. 31.
Both sides cautioned that rank-and-file lawmakers had yet to digest — or even see — a proposal that would require them to breach party orthodoxy. Democrats could be asked to relent on reductions in Social Security benefits, while Republicans would have to agree to tax hikes on the wealthy.
The talks have made “substantial progress,” but “they have a long way to go,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, who is acting as a liaison between the White House and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Of particular concern to negotiators is the conservative wing of Boehner’s caucus, which has been boisterous in its opposition to tax increases of any kind. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said he found initial reports of Boehner’s tax offer upsetting.
“I don’t like it,” Chaffetz said. But echoing a number of other conservatives, Chaffetz said he was willing to “give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and hear him out before I pass judgment.”
Liberal Democrats, too, were on edge. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), who organized 57 House Democrats to sign a letter last week urging Obama and congressional leaders to protect Social Security, said adopting the new measure of inflation known as the chained consumer price index (CPI ) would result “in serious benefit cuts for recipients, particularly for our seniors and the disabled.”
“You can’t tell me it’s balanced when the principal payees are seniors and the disabled,” Edwards said.
In addition to political stumbling blocks, there are substantive differences between the two sides. Boehner’s concession on raising tax rates on income above $1 million breathed new life into the stalled talks. But Obama wants to push that threshold down to $400,000, a significant adjustment to his campaign pledge to raise taxes on income over $250,000, or about 3 million households.
Meanwhile, Obama’s demand for $1.2 trillion in new taxes is $200 billion more than the speaker’s current offer. The GOP may in turn demand an additional concession on health care — raising the eligibility age for Medicare beneficiaries from 65 to 67.
While Obama tentatively agreed to raise the Medicare eligibility age during talks with Boehner in 2011, it has emerged in the current negotiations as a line the White House is unwilling to cross.
Democrats encouraged
Still, Democrats in particular seemed buoyed by the status of negotiations after a weekend of horse-trading by Boehner’s senior policy adviser and Obama’s chief liaison to Congress. Those negotiations played out in the shadow of the massacre of 20 elementary school students in Connecticut on Friday and the death Monday of Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), who had served 50 years in the Senate.
If a deal is reached, people in both parties say, it is likely to include postponement of roughly $100 billion in automatic spending cuts to the budgets of the Pentagon and other agencies next year.
However, $1 trillion in future cuts to agency budgets adopted during the 2011 budget battle would remain in place. Counting around $800 billion in savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the overall package would come close to reducing deficits by a total of $4 trillion over the next decade — a target that economists say would stabilize the soaring federal debt.
As talks continued, Reid made tentative plans to advance fiscal-cliff legislation in the Senate, warning lawmakers that they probably do not have time to finish before Christmas. Instead, Reid said the Senate would probably have to return to Washington next week to take a final vote.
Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-boehner-meet-as-debt-talks-intensify/2012/12/17/6b43c24a-4868-11e2-b6f0-e851e741d196_print.html
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