USA-Fiscal cliff deal in peril as Senate negotiations enter standstill... Obama says he intends to strong-arm Congress into scaled- back measures if no deal can be reached by the end of SundayHopes of a last-minute deal to avert the fiscal cliff faded on Sunday when Senate leaders failed to meet a target for agreement and said they remained far apart on key issues.
Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, and Mitch McConnell, who heads the Senate's Republican minority, emerged from closed-door talks shortly before 3pm to inform colleagues in the chamber they remained deadlocked.
McConnell said no single issue remained an "impossible sticking point" and blamed Democrats for not responding to a Republican offer made on Saturday evening.
"It's now 2pm and we've yet to receive a response to our good-faith offer. I'm concerned at the lack of urgency here."
He said he called vice-president Joe Biden, with whom he has worked before, to try to "jump start" negotiations. "I'm still willing to get this done but I need a dance partner."
Reid said the Republicans had a made a good-faith proposal but that both sides remained apart on "pretty big issues" and that Democrats could not respond.
We've been negotiating now for 36 hours or thereabouts. We've been trying … but at this stage we're not able to make a counter-offer."
As such, the 3pm target for them to present a framework agreement to colleagues passed with no hint of a deal forthcoming.Here's the problem in terms even liberals can understand:
* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000
Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts so far: $38.50
Make sense now?
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The newly designated government of Romania, formed of the Social Liberal Union (USL) alliance and led by Victor Ponta, eyes an average annual economic growth of 3% for 2013-2016 and maintaining an ESA-system budget deficit of under 3% until 2016, according to the USL governing program, published by the government on Thursday. On fiscal policies, the government says it plans to provide transparency for public funds, to simplify the tax system, to return to a 19% VAT and introduce progressive taxation
America's long-running fiscal cliff crisis was finally resolved on Tuesday night when Congress voted in favour of a White House compromise that will impose tax rises on the wealthiest and spare the working-class and middle-class.
Barack Obama, in a statement to reporters at the White House, hailed it as a fulfilment of his election campaign promise.
"The central premise of my campaign for president was to change the tax code that was too skewed towards the wealthy at the expense of working, middle-class Americans. Tonight we have done that," he said.
Obama, who broke off his holiday with his family in Hawaii to return to Washington to see the crisis resolved, left minutes later to fly back to Honolulu.
Before leaving, he issued a warning that he was tired of these repeated showdowns with Congress and would be looking for alternative ways of doing business in Washington.
Already the Republicans are gearing up for fresh confrontations as early as next month over spending cuts and the debt ceiling.
Obama called instead for a more bipartisan approach on issues such as spending cuts. "The one thing I think hopefully in the new year we will focus on is seeing if whether we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinkmanship, not scare the heck out of folks quite as much," the president said.
The end of the fiscal cliff drama came when a large bloc of House Republicans, who had stubbornly opposed the bill, caved in and reluctantly joined Democrats to pass it comfortably by 257 to 167.
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