WASHINGTON — Back to square one.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner blasted the Obama administration’s plan to avert the fiscal cliff yesterday, saying he was “flabbergasted” by it and calling it “silliness.”
“Right now, I would say we’re nowhere, period,” Boehner said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“I was just flabbergasted,” he said when asked about Wednesday’s proposal from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
“I looked at him, and I said, ‘You can’t be serious.’ It — I — I’ve just never seen anything like it. You know, we’ve got several weeks between Election Day and the end of the year. And three of those weeks have been wasted with this nonsense.”
The administration’s proposal also included a request that Congress give up its power to block a rise in the national debt ceiling.
“Silliness,” Boehner scoffed. “Congress is never going to give up this power.”
His comments reflected how far lawmakers still have to go to avert the fiscal cliff — a $600 billion combination of tax-rate hikes and spending cuts that analysts say will cause a recession if they take effect at the end of the month.
“I think we’re going over the cliff,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The president’s plan when it comes to entitlement reform is just, quite frankly, a joke, so I don’t think they’re serious about finding a deal.”
Geithner stood by his proposal, saying that Republicans must counter the offer and that tax hikes on the wealthy must be part of the equation.
“The only thing that stands in the way of an agreement that’s good for the American economy is if a group of Republicans decide they’re going to block any increase in tax rates on the wealthiest Americans,” Geithner said on “Face the Nation.”
“I think it’s very unlikely they choose to do that, of course, because there’s so much at stake.”
On Thursday, Geithner offered Republicans a package of $1.6 trillion in tax increases, $50 billion in new stimulus spending, a permanent raising of the debt ceiling, a one-year deferral on the spending cuts, and $400 billion in future cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
“We can’t sit here and try to figure out what works for them,” Geithner said of Republicans. “They have to tell us what works for them.”
But even Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) — who stirred controversy within his own party last week when he said he was willing to allow the Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthy to temporarily expire — laughed yesterday at Obama’s plan.
“They must think John Boehner is Santa Claus, because that’s a Christmas wish list; that’s not a proposal,” Cole said on ABC’s “This Week.”