(Spirit Lake)—A member of Iowa’s Congressional delegation says there’s no sign of any progress in talks on the fiscal cliff issue.
As the clock continues to tick toward the deadline at the end of the year, Republican Congressman Steve King says as of right now there’s no sign of either side budging…(click here for comment.) “It looks to me like things have moved away from agreement in the last couple of weeks rather than towards an agreement. There was a whole week there when the President and Speaker Boehner didn’t talk. But the offers that have been made, the President’s offer has moved away from his original offer and John Boehner’s offer seems to not to have kept in it any significant spending cuts. We need to cut spending. We need to, it’s not enough to slow the growth of government, we’ve to to reduce the size of government or we will be one huge Greece. And so the direction these negotiations are going don’t give me as much optimism as I had two weeks ago. We got the notice yesterday (Thurs.) that the week we were going to take off from Washington to spend at home for Christmas up to Christmas has now been canceled and now we will be in Washington during that week. That’s alright, that should bring pressure on everyone: stay in Washington until you get a deal done. And that’s what the message is.”
Meanwhile, King is concerned some people are being forced to make critical decisions based on the uncertainty…(click here for comment.) “More and more people are starting to say if spending cuts are not part of this solution, than why not just go over the cliff if that’s the only way you’re going to get spending cuts. I get really uneasy about that because we have a death tax increase that jumps up at midnight December 31st that goes from a million dollar exemption and 35 percent of the balance, or excuse me, to a five million dollar exemption and 35 percent of the balance to a million dollar exemption and a 55 percent balance. There are families that have hired attorneys that are now working on how they want to give away some of their assets in order to avoid that increase in the death tax that comes later. I’m very troubled by that, that people would be making life and death decisions over an impending tax increase. If the Bush tax brackets would all expire at midnight December 31st, that increases taxes on the lowest income payers from 10 percent to 15 percent. That’s a 50 percent increase. Meanwhile the President’s holding out to raise taxes on those making $200,000 a year and more. It gets about eight and a half days of funding for the federal government out of that. But to him it’s the principal that he thinks some people out there makes too much money he wants to tax them more. All of us think that the rich should pay their fair share. We just have a debate on who’s rich and what is the fair share.”
King made his comments today (Fri.) during a stop at the KUOO studios.
