The meeting broke up after about an hour with no immediate sign from either side that there had been a breakthrough.
Earlier Thursday, Mr. Boehner dug in on demands that Mr. Obama lay out more concrete cuts to Medicare and other entitlements as the price for tax increases on the rich.
The speaker’s tone — and a hostile White House response — raised the level of pessimism that a wide-ranging agreement could be reached quickly to head off hundreds of billions of dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts beginning next month. Adding to the growing sense that the two sides might not come together, rank-and-file Republicans said the leadership had not begun laying the groundwork for a major concession on taxes.
But Mr. Boehner pointedly did not rule out a vote on legislation before the end of the year to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class — and in so doing allow tax cuts on incomes over $250,000 to expire.
“The law of the land today is that everyone’s income taxes are going to go up Jan. 1,” Mr. Boehner said. “I’ve made it clear that I think that’s unacceptable, but until we get this issue resolved, that risk remains.”
Little more than two weeks are left before the nation heads over the so-called fiscal cliff, and neither Mr. Boehner nor Mr. Obama has budged from his core demands.
The president continues to insist on an immediate increase in the top two income tax rates as a condition for further negotiations on spending and entitlement changes. If the speaker insists on further spending cuts, White House officials say, he must lay out his specific demands, something Mr. Boehner has so far declined to do.
Mr. Boehner has offered to raise his opening bid of $800 billion in increased tax revenue over 10 years, but only if the president makes a significant commitment to overhaul entitlements and slow their growth. The White House’s opening bid committed to pressing changes next year to federal health care programs that would save $400 billion over 10 years. The speaker wants a far larger pledge and a firm commitment that the president will put his political weight behind substantive changes to Medicare and the tax code.
The president, Mr. Boehner said, appears intent on squandering “a golden opportunity to make 2013 the year that we enact fundamental tax reform and entitlement reform to begin to solve our country’s debt problem and, frankly, revenue problem.”
Washington now faces three potential outcomes to the fiscal impasse, lawmakers from both parties say. A broad deal could be reached in which some taxes go up immediately and some cuts are secured to stop the broader tax increases and halt the across-the-board tax cuts — and to lock in targets for entitlement savings and revenue produced by changes in tax policy to be worked out next year.
If no deal is reached, Republicans are increasingly talking about a more hostile outcome in which the House passes legislation that extends tax cuts for the middle class, sets relatively low tax rates on dividends, capital gains and inherited estates, and cancels the across-the-board defense cuts, but leaves in place across-the-board domestic cuts. Then House Republicans would engage in what Mr. Boehner, in a private meeting with them last week, called “trench warfare,” a running battle with the president on spending, first as the government approaches its statutory borrowing limit early next year, then in late March, when a stopgap government spending bill runs out.
Finally, many Republicans say it is now possible that the government will plunge into the fiscal unknown. Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, said Mr. Boehner had given Republicans no indication “that he’s going to budge.”
“He’s not going to raise rates in any way, shape or form,” he said. “That has not changed.”
Republicans who have advocated giving in on rate increases now say their party appears to be preparing for the worst. Representative Charles Bass, a New Hampshire Republican who was defeated for re-election last month, said the pain for Republicans would not be immediate because the tax increases would not be apparent to most Americans that quickly. But “by the third or fourth week of January, their life will be so miserable,” he said, “their life will be so unbearable, they’ll just want to get done with it.”
Even as Mr. Boehner intensified his public campaign to pressure Mr. Obama to specify reductions in spending for Medicare and other entitlement benefit programs, the Republicans continued to be mute on what reductions they favor.
They are not proposing the sort of program overhauls — making Medicare a voucherlike system, and turning Medicaid into a lower-cost block grant to the states — that have been part of their House budgets for the past two years, sponsored by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman and Mitt Romney’s running mate in the presidential race. In any case, the Ryan budgets delayed the changes so they would not save much in the next 10 years.
And as many Democrats now recall, Republicans attacked Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats throughout the recent campaign for having approved Medicare reductions of $716 billion over a decade as part of the 2010 health care law.
The only alternative proposals called for by Republicans would slowly raise the eligibility age for Medicare, and mandate a new formula for cost-of-living adjustments that would have the effect of reducing Social Security payments. Mr. Obama indicated reluctant, tentative support for both ideas in his private, failed debt-reduction talks last year with Mr. Boehner if Republicans accepted higher taxes on wealthy taxpayers. But in the face of building opposition from labor and liberal groups, he has backed off that stance, especially the higher Medicare age.
Mr. Obama has proposed specific ideas for cutting Medicare spending, but Republicans do not like most of them, in particular one that would force drugmakers to pay higher rebates for Medicare beneficiaries’ drug purchases, just as they long have for Medicaid. Also, Republicans say Mr. Obama’s roughly $400 billion, 10-year total for savings is about $200 billion too little.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/us/politics/obama-and-boehner-to-meet-again-on-fiscal-talks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss