US News

Debt charge defused

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WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner has made a big concession in talks with President Obama about the fiscal cliff — agreeing to put off a fight over raising the national debt ceiling for another year, according to a report.

The offer came Friday as part of the latest negotiations with Obama in trying to avoid $600 billion in new tax hikes and spending cuts set to occur automatically Jan. 1, according to The Washington Post.

In the same talks, Boehner also offered to raise tax rates on those making more than $1 million a year, several news outlets reported.

Boehner has previously taken the stance of not allowing the debt ceiling — now at $16.4 trillion — to increase without matching cuts in government spending.

The debt ceiling will need to rise sometime after the new year, the administration has said, a demand that has been a sticking point in the talks.

The Boehner concession signals that he is expecting huge spending cuts in return, the newspaper said, citing anonymous sources.

But not all Republicans are on board with Boehner’s proposal.

One of the top House Republicans said yesterday that she opposes raising taxes on the wealthy at all.

In a taped interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, who chairs the House Republican Conference, said tax increases are “really a straw man.”

“It doesn’t solve the problem,” she said. “We could raise the top rates to 100 percent and it would fund the government for 91 days. It’s a false promise.”

Democrats are wary of Boehner’s tax proposal because they say it reduces the level of income Obama seeks, would hit Medicare and Social Security recipients and fail to extend unemployment-insurance benefits., the reports said

If Congress and the president can’t agree on a plan to avoid the ominous financial combination that economic analysts say will wreck the economy and cause a recession, middle-class families could face a $4,000 tax increase when they file their 2012 returns in the spring because of more than 70 tax breaks that expired at the end of 2011, according to the H&R Block tax-preparation company.With